Fine Circuit

Recently I ran the Yangon Half Marathon. The course passed in front of some stunning colonial architecture at an hour when I’m not usually downtown.

The beautiful facades at sunrise made me think about the city proposals under debate to establish historic districts, or at least to protect specific historic buildings.

I hadn’t expected this section of the route to stand out. The Yangon River lies across the road from the buildings I was admiring, but you can’t see it. A mile-long wall of stacked shipping containers blocks the view.

Now I began to imagine a waterfront without the port. Several schemes in recent years have suggested moving ship facilities further downstream, closer to some newly built industrial zones.

Then the race course turned north toward Shwedagon Pagoda. We ran slightly uphill toward the temple, at exactly the moment when the sun hit the top of its spire. Gorgeous!

Finally we ran alongside a large lake, originally designed by British city planners as a reservoir. Now the lake’s gardens offer one of the few places in town to be surrounded by nature.

Such a fine circuit, linking the historic, religious, and scenic parts of the city!

On Not Cooking in Yangon

A slip appeared, summoning me to the downtown international post office. I couldn’t read most of it, but I got the gist. Package arrived. Bring passport.

Many bureaucratic-gray counters greeted me, each with its own number and label. None of them fit what I thought I needed, though to be honest I wasn’t sure what I needed. Somebody saw my slip and waved me to Counter Two.

A clerk glanced at the passport, walked away, and returned a few minutes later carrying a long cardboard box that bore handwriting I recognized as my brother’s. In the large room sat several other officials. Business was slow. Everyone watched.

With a sharp knife the clerk slit the sides of the package, to reveal a slick new seven-inch fry pan. “The Original Green Pan,” said the sticker. Ceramic, non-stick, ergonomic, and dishwasher safe. Neither PFOA, lead, nor cadmium.

I smiled. I remembered that a few months earlier I had told my brother’s 11-year-old twin boys that I didn’t have much kitchen stuff here. (That was after explaining that I don’t much like to cook, but of course it’s common that people remember best the last thing they hear.)

I could picture my nephews getting excited when they saw this pan in the store, and my brother OK’ing their cute gesture, even as he surely knew the postage would cost more than the pan.  Besides, he may have thought, this pan was cool and green.

The clerk smiled too. He had already explained that regulations required opening foreign packages in front of customers to show that nothing was missing. I nodded then, and again when he mentioned the small “opening” and “storage” fees, payable at Counter Four. Now, with a wide grin, he said something I didn’t catch. Lots of the other officials laughed.

I asked him to repeat it but the meaning still went astray between his fair English and my poor Burmese. He called over a chuckling colleague, who asked, “Does the sender know frying pans are sold here in Myanmar?”

Traffic and Bicycling

For five days on either side of New Year’s, a small group of us from Yangon went biking up north. Now that we’re back in the big burg, traffic feels like it doubled while we were away.

According to the latest numbers, Myanmar owns 15 times fewer cars per 1,000 people than Thailand does. But most of this country’s cars must live in this city. Every day the bottlenecks here come closer to matching Bangkok’s.

I’m inclined to get around on two wheels no matter what in 2015. A bicycle nearly always beats a taxi. Another plus for us pedal pushers: Yangon law forbids motorcycles.

In this climate, cycling means carrying an extra shirt to change into at the destination. Sometimes it also means traveling further than a car would, to avoid risky major arteries. For me those drawbacks are worth it.

The other day I gave myself plenty of extra time. I was headed to an office in a part of town I hadn’t visited before, planning to ask a favor from some people I’d only met by phone. They had sent me a map, but somehow its streets didn’t match the real signs on the ground.

To not be late, I stopped at a garage for directions. The mechanics pointed me back the way I’d come. In turning around, somehow my tires passed through a puddle of oil and grease.  I tried to rinse it off with a water bottle I carry.

Soon I was back on my way. I smiled, now that I was on the right road, still with plenty of time to spare… until I saw that my off-white trousers were becoming hardly white. Damn! To show up looking like a leopard wasn’t going to work for this appointment.

I rescheduled. Do I now need to start carrying a spare pair of pants? Either that or…