“An experience you won’t soon forget” is how the yogurt was described on the menu of Yangon Bake House.
Today is the day Ace let me drag her around to some more food curiosities and somewhat touristy restaurants. We arrive here after first having an overpriced colonial style high tea at The Acacia Tea Salon, that was worth it to fulfill a small dream of mine to have Ace join me in a tea extravagance. (The tea was good but the accompanying small bites were nothing to write home about).
(Re the tea service, Ace adds) we wrapped in a napkin a couple small soufflé bites from the uneaten tea service food and planned to feed one of the many stray
dogs roaming the streets. Shortly we found a cute tan medium sized dog with a dark brown muzzle lying in the dusty dirt by the sidewalk. We rolled the round soufflé bite over to it. The dog looked at the bite, looked at us, looked at the bite, then started nosing dirt over the bite to completely cover it up. This could have been the dog’s way of "putting it in the fridge" for later, but I preferred to see it as the final rebuke of the lousy tea service food.
(Penny continues) The yogurt at the Yangon Bakehouse, however, was "worth a try", I thought, and I wasn’t disappointed. You could choose from a few flavors including ginger (ginger yogurt, wow!) I choose passion fruit. The homemade yogurt came in a small glass pot and could best be described as decadent. The Yangon Bake House is part of a training program that supports women who’ve fallen on hard times because of debt, family problems, or prostitution. “A model enterprise of its kind” it is also described as providing counseling, high wages, and valuable work skills. Ace (having not eaten much of the green colored pastries from Acacia ordered 1/2 a tuna sandwich on their house made bread and a salad niciose with pickled quail eggs (she reports as “the first real food I’d had in days”.
We travel from here to the Mahasi Meditation Center in time (we think) for their afternoon meditation, only to find out that they do not accept non-resident monks for the class. After a brief conversation where our greeter complains about the lying lonely plant guide book, she shows us to the book store and has us watch a 13 minute informational video (thankfully with English subtitles). We think its over but she leads us to a map and starts to give us a tour by pointing to squares on the map and telling us about their significance. The map was pretty cool though because we got to see numbers in symbol. Their #1 doesn’t look like 1, it’s more like a backwards c. We eventually escape and it’s Ace’s turn to show me around.
We head to the sailing club at Lake Inya and have a Myanmar beer. They are not big drinkers here as it is against the monk precepts and buddhist lifestyle. We watch the lake change as the sun sets and slowly begin to realize we’re hanging out with a bunch of ex-pats, almost everyone is white. We quickly leave and head toward Yangon’s Chinatown, which is packed and happening on Friday night.
We have a few tasty street bites and sit at a little table and chairs (best described as the plastic furniture that preschoolers would use). We’re having some decent food, much of which we couldn’t identify at first, but after pointing to the words for chicken, fish, beef and various vegetables in the guide book we’re fairly confident we have a mostly vegetarian meal.
There’s a tea pot, box of kleenex, and basket with whole garlic and chilis on every table. We wonder if the garlic and chilis are for the tea or perhaps those are condiments for the food. Not sure. There’s a lot we don’t know and I think we’ve resigned ourselves to figuring some things out and letting others go. The food is interesting and good, a peppery gourd broth, a red tomato curry, some corn and rice, an egg and cauliflower dish, and a few vegetables we can’t identify. We are about to finish our meal when Ace comments that we haven’t seen any cockroaches in Yangon, unlike Bangkok that is crawling with 2-3” bugs who don’t necessarily run away when you walk past them. I comment that "I saw 1 yesterday night by the lake but yeah, not as many bugs, how cool is that” (Can you see where this is heading?)
I look up at the end of the meal (remember its dark out) and notice that a small cockroach the size of a dime is waddling across Ace’s left shoulder and headed to her right. I say, “Don’t move”, and she freezes, knowing from the look on my face that something is terribly wrong. I get up and cup it with my hands, brushing it off them as quickly as I pick it up and point it out to her as it scurries away. Somehow we laugh. Its somewhat horrifying but certainly “an experience you won’t soon forget”.
