The past two days have been busy exploring Yangon (fka Rangoon and once the capital of Myanmar). Yesterday, I asked all over the city with Stephanie, someone I met on the plane from San Francisco. We both had a free day so it worked out well. It also helped keep me awake and battle jet lag. Today, we had an organized tour in a car.
It's mainly been a slice of life exploration with some pagodas tossed in. Burmese people are very friendly. You can tell that Western tourism has just started to take off. People did double takes when they saw how tall I was -- I'm about a foot taller than most people. And when we were at one pagoda, we had about ten pictures taken of us with locals. It's very safe here, although the condition of the sidewalks isn't great. You have to be careful bit to twist your ankle.
You don't see a lot of foreign companies -- the only American place I saw was Tony Roma's. No Starbucks or McDonald's.
The markets were interesting. Of course almost every street had fruit, cell phones, and random things like saws for sale right on the sidewalk. Traffic isn't terrible -- not as bad as Bangkok but it's getting worse.
The pagodas were okay. Nothing exceptional even if they are two thousand years old. We saw a forty year old reclining Buddha that was about fifty meters in length.
We also took a train around town. It was a very old train, reminiscent of an Indian train. Unfortunately you also saw a lot of garbage strewn around the tracks along the way. You don't see abject poverty but there were some shanty towns. People seemed happy with their lives.
Tomorrow we leave for Mandalay. Tonight we have a visit to another pagoda.
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