A wonderful weekend hanging out and traveling around Yangon

Since I only had two more weekends left, I decided to try and see many of the places I'd been wanting to explore since I got here - and it was great :)

The weekend started a little crazily - on Friday afternoon it rained incredibly hard for a really long time. I was supposed to meet my friend Sophie for dinner, but with the incredible amounts of flooding on the road, it took almost 2 hours to get uptown. So instead, we met up at the tailor-shop where we'd gotten fitted for clothes 5 weeks ago. My dress was definitely worth the wait; the tailor used beautiful traditional material to make a really pretty summer dress for me. Somehow she made it a little too small (seriously this is really difficult ... even in Burma), but she was able to fix it and I wore it out that night :)

The next morning, I woke up early and went to meet one of my Burmese friends, Sit Maw, at the zoo. I really liked it! Putting aside the sadness that I think exists at all zoos, it was really nice to hang out in a huge park right in the middle of the city. You could hardly hear the sound of the traffic around the zoo, and inside, it had been beautifully landscaped with a lot of palm trees. The zoo here is great because you can feed so many animals! I fed the elephants, hippos, and monkeys. The hippos were totally trained and when they saw someone approach they would scramble up to the fence and just stay there with their mouths open. 

I was a little scared.

We walked down to meet my friend Ben (who I missed while he was in Bangkok!) downtown where we had a really interesting conversation about the positive and negative impacts of foreigners in Burma. We decided that would be our topic for Conversation Club that afternoon. That evening I had dinner with two friends who are leaving Burma to start their graduate programs at Columbia and then went to the most incredible house I've ever seen where a friend of mine working for a Qatari organization is living. Qatar really needs better things to spend their money on. The drive home through the city and passed a number of famous pagodas - with no traffic too (see the picture below for average traffic in Yangon) was beautiful! 

Sunday a few of us decided we'd visit Dalla. Dalla is the region right across the Yangon river. It is only a 15 minute ferry ride to cross, but the difference between the two sides of the river are incredible. We were greeted on the other side by hundreds of taxis, motorcycles, bicycle transports, and children selling everything from postcards to gum to a weird gas you could sniff to prevent nausea. Ben bought some and had fun with it the rest of our time there. We took bicycle taxis further inland to see the rice fields. Along the way we entered immediately into really poor villages. Sit Maw explained that many of these people are in fact not farmers, but they pick up jobs in Yangon, and then live on this side because its so much cheaper. I can't understand how any of these homes withstand rainy season. Shocking is probably the best adjective to explain how I was feeling considering how developed Yangon is in comparison with its beautiful cement colonial buildings, paved roads, shopping centres, and grocery stores. 

Yangon side of the river

Dalla side of the river 

Dalla

How we travelled around Dalla

 

Rice paddies in Dalla 

Crossing back to Yangon

Back in Yangon, I looked through the cool side-walk bookstores and then met up with my friend Mo (who is trying to teach me Burmese everyday at lunch, but I'm being a pretty lazy student) for her birthday. So much fun :)

Sidewalk bookstores

Back at work today I finished writing a report I'd been working on related to access to justice and informal justice mechanisms in Burma. I can't believe I have less than 2 weeks left here! 

Miss you all and thanks for all your messages! 

- Sima