New Digs

Long-term Yangon residents say, when I describe the building in which I began sharing an apartment last month, “Oh, you mean where the great tea shop used to be.” Clearly the new seven-story condominium was not a welcome change for many people in the neighborhood.

I don’t take it personally. The whole city is gentrifying. High demand will mean lots more disruptions of this kind. Nearly every block has two or three projects under construction. Former tea shops, old full-of-character pharmacies, and wooden houses on stilts are everywhere giving way to car dealerships, restaurants, and glitzy towers.

From our balcony I look out on a fascinating mix of modern and traditional. About 15 meters away is a slightly older building. Measured by the amount of mold on the outside walls, I’d say it was built about five years ago. Its open windows reveal kids reading out loud from their textbooks at lightning speed, moms singing, and dads spitting betel.

Between us and them is a filthy creek full of way too much wash- and waste-water from way too many of the neighborhood’s residents. Behind homes is a maze of tangled electrical wiring and blue plastic pipes, many no longer leading anywhere. A street market, looking like markets have always looked in this country, sends up scents and sounds from a few hundred meters away. If I walk just beyond the market’s boundaries, I encounter a department store. These are slowly popping up around Yangon and Myanmar’s bigger cities, the first to appear in the country since colonial-era Burma.

I’m starting to understand the neighborhood’s rhythms: bustling early and late, nearly empty in the middle of the day. Most mornings I wake up to ululations of various kinds that I cannot trace. Sometimes I think they’re coming from the floor above, but when I walk up there for a better listen, the chanting sounds ventriloquize across the creek.

The source of cooking aromas, on the other hand, is easy to determine. The kitchen in the apartment next door is separated from ours by a weird three-foot gap that’s probably designed to give fumes somewhere to escape. We both look out onto this dark space through windows that are coated with something that makes them two-way mirrors. Whenever I walk in there without turning on the lights, I’m startled by what appears to be a stranger cooking Burmese curries in our kitchen.

In fact my flat-mate is an American guy. At work the office contains lots of Burmese, a few Norwegians, a Cambodian, and an Irish. Last night I celebrated Thanksgiving with people born in Austria, Bangladesh, Colombia, France, Germany, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Little wonder that the city is changing to meet the tastes of outsiders.

Strolling the Streets

Pedicab bells chime throughout the small alleys where most Yangon residents live. There’s not enough room for four-wheeled traffic, so these three-wheel “sidecars” (aka bicycle taxis) provide the transportation for anyone with heavy packages or worn-out legs. The riders swerve but don’t stop. You have to keep your ears open to avoid being run over.

Usually a few sidecars look for passengers at the street market. They wait next to the spot on the corner where all the vendors agree to pile up their fruit peelings and crumpled packaging throughout the day. You pass dozens of such spots in the evenings. By morning they’ve all disappeared.

Minstrel salespeople also pack the lanes, shouting or singing to advertise their wares. The law prevents electric amplification of sales pitches. Slowly you become able to match what’s on offer to individual sounds: the cry of the recycling man, the gong that goes with the pickled plum cart, and the tune of the lady who carries something long and fried in a ceramic bowl atop her head.

Customers call down to the street from an upper floor window or balcony when they want the attention of one of these vendors. The transaction then happens via a long cord with a clip attached to the bottom end. Why climb the stairs? These personal ropes can hoist nearly anything— breakfast, a newspaper, payment for last month’s electricity, younameit. Some buildings have half a dozen such “mailboxes” hanging out front, the longest stretching 6 or 7 stories high.

Myanmar’s not a convenience store country. If you want a snack, you have to buy your apples from a street market and slice them yourself. In spots where Thailand would likely have a mini-mart, here you’re more likely to find a temple. Sometimes the neighborhood holy place is just an altar or a tree whose trunk has been painted gold. Shrines are everywhere, outnumbered lately only by shops selling mobile phones or perhaps by corner newsstands.

Carrying around store-bought food, with its bright packaging, makes you feel a little self-conscious. Most people put home-made lunches of rice and chilies in a steel tiffin. Men carry these tiffins by the handle. Women seem to prefer placing them in a pastel plastic tote basket, a second handbag. It’s part of a uniform look that’s unlike what women wear in other lands.

You feel scruffy by comparison. They’re just about always dressed up. At bottom is their traditional skirt, which they combine fearlessly with countless top types, sometimes contradictory, often flattering, always appropriate. You suspect that they discuss new color combinations and designs during long evenings at home or at the beauty “saloon” (who’s to say that the American spelling of “salon” is the right one?). It doesn’t matter how they come up with so many ways to be attractive. As long as they keep doing it, strolling the streets will remain a pleasure.

Turning Off the Tap

Nearly every week here in Myanmar, a new expo or summit or forum happens, highlighting some until-recently-dominated-by-domestic-firms business sector. Last month you could have attended the Myanmar Agribusiness Forum, or the Into Myanmar Telecoms and IT Summit, or BuildCon Myanmar. The idea, I presume, is to stimulate foreign investment now that the government has declared such a thing both possible and desirable. 

This past week featured Myanfood, the first-ever international food, drinks, and hospitality exhibition. Among the many sponsors of the event was a high-end wine importer whose Canadian manager sometimes joins the same group of Friday-night bicyclists that I do.

When he showed up last Friday, he was enraged. “I told my wife that I needed to get out of the house… I gotta try and forget this day!” It seems his exhibit at the expo had been closed and cordoned off by the government. Same with his warehouses on the edge of town.

“I’m standing there under a huge banner, looking up at my company’s name as a lead sponsor of the event, and some goon is basically telling me that I don’t exist. No notice. Just ‘go home, seeya later, your stuff belongs to us now.’ For two years I work 14-hour days to build this business, and as of today I am finished. I really need this bike ride!”

None of us listening to his rant had a clue what to say. We could tell that he wasn’t looking for solutions anyway. Best for us to just keep nodding. It emerged that much of the problem revolved around inconsistent enforcement of an import law that restricts foreign alcohol sales to hotels. Evidently this guy brings in his wine on behalf of hotels, but also sells some of it through his own channels… just as most supermarkets and other liquor stores here do.

The old-timers in the group began whispering. “Obviously he’s gotten too big, and somebody in the government wants a piece of his action.” They muttered to themselves that his major mistake was not hiring staff who have friends in high places. “With the right people on board, issues can be avoided,” they said.

As it turns out, the old-timers may be in for a surprise. Already newspapers are reporting that many bigger wine importers, even those locally owned, are saying they will stop all sales voluntarily until the government clarifies the rules. Nobody else wants to get shut down without warning because of an arbitrary or even vindictive decision by a bureaucrat. Historically, who-you-know has trumped what-the-rules-say in this country. Will this episode be a small victory for transparency?

Pavement Problems

In Myanmar, and probably in lots of similar places, a sidewalk has a couple of purposes. It’s simultaneously something to walk on top of, and a lid for sewage drains that run below it. Where I come from these two concepts are pretty much unrelated. One’s above ground, the other’s underground, and never the twain shall meet, or at least not till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.

Here, the whole concept of not stepping on the cracks, which occupied perhaps the majority of my waking hours in childhood, has taken on an entirely new meaning. Before, I was just practicing the kiddy equivalent of what in adulthood I have come to call “mindfulness.” I knew pretty certainly that no true permanent harm would ever come to me if I ever messed up and put my foot on one of those little buffer zones between pavement panels.

But now, walking around the biggest city of a state that seemingly hasn’t devoted much attention to infrastructure maintenance since about the time Churchill was prime minister, I really have to watch my step. One false stride and I’m in the soup, as it were. In lots of spots around Yangon, the holes in the sidewalk are large enough to swallow a dog.

This town’s many ancient, gorgeous trees further complicate the situation. Do I look up or down?

Back Briefly in Thailand

Thailand looks different now. I’m back briefly to renew the Myanmar visa.

It’s stunning to see the elevated highways here. They go on for miles and miles. Probably they cost millions and millions. Somehow I can’t imagine the Myanmar government ever providing such infrastructure. Currently Myanmar people must be self-reliant in so many ways. Often they pay directly for generators to offset power cuts, for improvements in the roads that pass in front of their homes, for education, and even for defense if they are not the majority race, Bamar, or the majority religion, Buddhist.

Like lots of Westerners, Thais seem to have their heads buried in their devices. That day will probably come soon for Myanmar, but at the moment you can still look into people’s eyes and see a smile rather than the reflection of a screen. And speaking of Westerners, they’re everywhere in Thailand. After a month next door I’d gotten used to being a rare species.

Thailand feels constant. Having lived here a total of more than ten years, I usually know how to navigate and negotiate. It will take a while to get used to the Burmese, who tend to be more direct, and less likely to say what the outsider wants to hear. I’m also slightly less on my guard in Thailand. While the days of being very cautious about what you say in public places and in email messages are on their way out in Myanmar, there’s still a bit of unease in the air, especially since some weird recent reports of explosions. Nobody has claimed responsibility—were they trying to unsettle the government on the eve of its 2013 showcase event, the SE Asian Games? Sending a message about Myanmar taking over the chairmanship of the Association of SE Asian Nations? Or an ornery loner?