Mandalay, Myanmar
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Quick summary
Currency ~ Kyat (pronounced check)
£1 = 1600k (or $1)
Population ~ 53 million (we don't see how though. 2 two main cities only have 5 million between them and there are just villages of 100 or so people sprinkled everywhere else. No other large concentrations of population
Capital City ~ Naypyidaw (Administrative Capital is Yangon)
Our Budget ~ rooms: about £20 a night
~ food: £4 each per day is plenty,
They drive on the right but 90% of their cars are right hand drive, making us think they have switched at some point
Buddhas everywhere
The country is not connected very well to the internet so you need to remember how you used to find information before the internet existed.What did you do? Yellow Pages of course.They have a very thick directory, which is both in English and Mandalarian. Here are some of the answers it provided to many questions we had while travelling around the country
Myanmar is pronounced mee-an-mar, not my-an-mar.
What is the yellow paste on people's faces?
This is thanaka, a paste that is made from grinding the bark of the Marraya or Livonia acidissima tree and used as a moisturiser and sunscreen.
Why are people’s teeth red and what are the red blotches everywhere?
This is from people chewing and spitting betal nut, a leaf that is filled with the nut, slake lime, tobacco and spices
Words we learned:
Mingalar - Hello
chay-zoo-par - thank you
their numbers are not the same as ours but we did learn how to say these
tik - number 1
thone - number 3
lay - number 4
We loved ~ Everything (except the red spitting habit mentioned above)
We didn't like ~ nothing (except the red spitting habit mentioned above)
The people ~
Just about the nicest people of anywhere we have been in the world - ever!
Food ~ Amazing. Vegetarian choices are to die for. Their food is curry based but it is nothing like any curry we have had anywhere else either. There is very little sauce so doesn't look like a curry we are used to from Indian/Nepal/Thailand/China. They use a lot of noodles, rice, vegetables, fish pork and chicken. Hardly any beef or weird Chinese ingredients although they have a lot of Chinese tourists.
Transport - very old and the trains are very dirty and shake badly. Cheap - not comfortable. They are easy to book though and run regularly. We didn't actually get on a bus.
Things which will remind us of Myanmar ~ blowing kisses to the waiters. (Yes they really do. Here you don't shout "waiter", you make the kissing noise to attract their attention.See - we told you they were lovely) velvet flip flops, gold leaf, shake rattle & roll trains, bad internet!
Would we recommend it? in a heartbeat - and soon before too many western influences come and spoil it
