Friday, May 10, 2013

Crab Rangoon

On Good Friday, we flew Air Asia from Hong Kong via Kuala Lumpur (with a night stay) to Yangon. The unexpected brief bonus trip to KL was fun, an odd second world acclimatization to what would follow. Soon enough we found ourselves on a 6am flight from KL's Lower Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT), definitely the worst airport I've ever been to, to the mysterious land.  With a time zone set an hour and a half behind Hong Kong, we arrived in Yangon still in the early morning. Our initial impression was that this airport was actually pretty decent - Jackie and I exchanged glances wondering if we were in the right place. A crush of excited Burmese people, faced pressed up against the window, awaited us on our exit from the restricted area as we tried to navigate our way to the Air Mandalay offices. Priority #1 was to pick up our flight tickets within the country.

This might be a good time to explain that Myanmar is still not very well connected with the world. One bank has recently begun accepting foreign ATM cards, allowing tourists to withdraw money. Other than that, we have to bring our own US cash, and they have to be pristine.  I was warned multiple times about the authorities rejecting bills with slight marks and visible folds.  Myanmar has done its own thing for so long, closing itself off from foreign investment and intervention, and while the forces of globalization are interminable and making its impact felt, there are still some realities in Burma that present unique challenges to travelers. Domestic airlines in Myanmar have joined the worldwide web, but haven't quite gotten the e-commerce part setup yet. "Online booking" is little more than an internet promise that you will pickup your tickets and pay in cash in Yangon. Policy was to pick up tickets 3 days in advance, but since we had a flight the day after arriving in Burma, I had to make special arrangements to pay everything there. The offices were in the domestic terminal, and so we had to walk out of the international terminal, down a street about 500 yards and into a much dumpier looking building.  Success - they took our cash and gave us our tickets.  Stepping out for a taxi, we were bombarded by offers for rides. It was going to be one of these trips, where an imbalance between the economic wealth of tourists and the local tourism industry created large desperate frenzies of hustlers trying to sell you something. We found a nice taxi driver who spoke decent English. He asked if this was our first trip to Myanmar, told us that his mother was Indian and his father Bamar (the Burmese-speaking majority) and asked us if we wanted to see Aung San Suu Kyi's house. We told him that we greatly admired her but we could see her house another time. Suddenly he stopped on the side of the road. This is her house, he explained pointing to a large gate with a picture of her father, the assassinated General Aung San.

Dirt road near our hotel
We settled in our hotel, way on the east end of Yangon. Despite the intense sun, we decided to set out on foot and see what was in our neighborhood.  Though this area was definitely still part of the capital city, only 40 blocks from downtown, the roads were already unpaved dirt. It took me 10 minutes to realize I needed to get over pointing out visible poverty whenever I saw it. We walked by grease-stained mechanics laboring over truck-sized tires, road sized restaurants with dirty umbrellas and cheap plastic stools and a storefront filled with young women packaging bundles of paper. Like Manhattan, downtown Yangon has numbered streets streets, increasing from east to west (our hotel was on 63rd). Unlike Manhattan, there are few street signs, so we had a difficult time figuring out whether we'd reached the low 50s, where we were told we could find mohinga, the fish soup noodles that defines the region's cuisine. Jackie and I had agreed that we would not eat street food in Burma, because really, our trip was too short to spend it all on a toilet (or squat hole). Yet minutes later after sorting out our various options, we found ourselves basically eating at a Burmese Dai Pai Dong, or open air street restaurant. An hour later at Bogyoke Market, we sampled some glutinous buns which really could have been cooked everywhere. I clenched my stomach, stayed vigilant for any ominous internal bubbling, and hoped for the best.  The boy waiter who served us the mohinga might have been 13, and it took us about 5 tries to understand him asking "egg?" The soup that came was flavorful, but the noodles quite thin and the whole dish generally featured less ingredients than we were used to.

Thus began a slow hypothesis that we'd confirm throughout the week - Burmese food isn't very good.  If you know Southeast Asia even slightly, this should come as a surprise. As I'll get more into later, Burma is a diverse region, variously meshing into India, China, Thailand and Malaysia, all countries of culinary renown. Multicultural hotspots like Malaysia and Singapore tend to be food heavens. If we were expecting Burma to be the same, we were a little forewarned by this passage from The Lonely Planet by local writer Ma Thanegi:
Myanmar cuisine does not use coconut, green chillies or sugar like in Thailand. It is neither as delicate as the steamed dishes of China nor as fiercely hot as Sichuan cuisine. It does not use as many aromatic spices as India.
That's a lot of "nots" associated with Myanmar cuisine. To be fair, I would enjoy the Shan noodles I'd find several times, and the simple salads were fresh and delectable.  But coming from a food-obsessed city like Hong Kong, where people vacation just to eat and you're expected to bring back goodies from trips, it was hard to not be disappointed with the options available.  Even the Indian and Chinese food I had, bland Biryani and almost American-style stir-fry, were unremarkable. When I thought about it more though, high quality food certainly has a lot of unnecessary and expensive garnishes that we shouldn't expect or complain about in Myanmar.

Walking around downtown Yangon, there were far less beautiful white colonial buildings than I had imagined. Wikipedia had told me Yangon had the most of those in Asia.  It took me a while to realize that the decaying, moldy and greying 4 storey apartments in front of me were the colonial buildings, and they had not gone well-maintained since independence. It saddened me to think that, while I'd love to criticize colonialism any chance I got, in at least this one way, Rangoon might have been nicer than modern day Yangon. The city also wasn't as crazy as I expected. Coming from the states, some of the stuff I've seen in China, like a kid throwing a baby bird in the air or women fighting over shopping carts, struck me as crazy. Yangon was pretty ordered - peddlers didn't overly pester us, monks walked around unnoticed and people just went about their ordinary lives. Perhaps the craziest thing I saw was a person with a beaver tail for a head of hair.

We walked all the way to Lucky Seven tea shop, a much ballyhooed part of our Lonely Planet guide. I examined the tiny squat bathroom and decided I was not risking tea, which in hindsight was unfortunate. Jackie had mohinga again and claimed it was better here.

Making our way to Shwedagon Pagoda, we hit up our first photogenic tourist site. Though the pagoda is huge and visible from several main streets, centered at a gigantic traffic circle, the site was so large that walking in, we weren't really able to see it. There are four large stair entrances at each cardinal direction, leading to a complex of temples and shrines centered around the enormous gilded pagoda. Standing there in the late afternoon sun, its glory and dominance did set in and I was awed by a heritage wonder as I'd only been a handful of times before. It was large, it was beautiful, it was ornately decorated, and simultaneously fit in perfectly and didn't fit in at all into this city. It fit in because essentially the city has grown around Shwedagon in the last 1000 years, looking up to and up with the pagoda. It didn't fit in because it was spotless and pure in a country with many scars and problems. We lounged around with other tourists, all of us barefoot, through sunset and into the night and thought about all the kings and queens who had knelt before or contributed gold.

We met up with Chris and Tara later, a married American couple in the Hong Kong ultimate scene who we had semi-coordinated this trip with (leaving them to presume incorrectly that we were also a couple).  We laughed at our mutual American humor as we wandered through the deserted dark streets towards the river. Yangon is not a city of nightlife and it seems most of the inhabitants have a 9 oclock bedtime or a Junta-imposed curfew. The riverfront was also surprisingly barren - I had never been to a major city with a river that hadn't taken advantage of the river. I mean there are cities in New Jersey that have nice river fronts. But here we had reached the river and all we found were some scary stray dogs, some industrial docks, and one restaurant that seemed semi-promising.  We got a few beers there and got kicked out at 11. It was ok, we had a 6am flight to Bagan the next morning anyway.