Back to Yangon, Again

 The monks on parade.

The alms giving.

 Interesting plant, which Young, who used to be a florist, told me is called the 'lipstick' plant.

 Rice paddies as we left Inle Lake for the airport.

 Construction road crew.

 The LinkAge Restaurant on the second floor with the yello awning.

 The view across the street.

Pu Pu buys us a beer.

Sunday, June 3^rd.

I woke up just before six and remembered that Mark had said that the monks do their morning parade at six, so I went out to watch the locals feeding them. This is called the alms giving procession. The monks leave their monastery at 6:00 and walk single file on a prescribed route. The local people rise earlier than that and prepare food for them. Then they wait quietly on the side of the road for the arrival of the monks. As the monks walk by they dish out a ladle full of rice into the bowl of each successive one. After I watched that I turned to walk back to the hotel and an old lady holding a pot of rice pointed down the street to another group of monks that were coming her way, so I waited and watched them too.

Then I headed back to the hotel for breakfast and to get ready to leave. Our taxi picked us up at eight and took us to the airport. It was a little ramshackle national airport with little security. While we were waiting I showed Pu Pu and Young the pdfs of two of the books I have made. Our flight was just over an hour, but the Australian from yesterday had said he took the bus here from Yangon and it took twelve hours, so it shows the state of the roads. We arrived back in Yangon by eleven and, after the taxi ride, back to the Grand United Hotel by noon. This is the hotel I stayed at at the beginning of the trip and again they upgraded me to a corner suite with a view of the Shwedagon Pagoda.

We met up again at 12:30 and had lunch in the hotel restaurant. I had the same meal I had when I was here before, tom yum soup with chicken and steamed fish with lemon, both of which were quite spicy. Young brought along a dragonfruit which she had bought. This is a really interesting looking pink fruit, with white flesh and little black seeds, but I find it pretty tasteless. We had a good talk about tipping and its inherent pitfalls.

The rest of the afternoon was free time. It rained off and on again and since there is nothing really interesting to do in Yangon for a couple of hours, I hung out in my room. We met up again at 5:30 for our last group dinner. We took a cab to the old downtown area and a little restaurant on the second floor of a very busy narrow street. This is another of the GAdventure sponsored local organizations that aim to help local people. This restaurant was called LinkAge Training Restaurant and trains young people to be waiters and kitchen aids. The food was which was a set menu of soup and four dishes was excellent. Pu Pu bought us a beer, as we had no Myanmar currency left as we had converted our money. I wanted to take a photo of the young trainees and the GAdventure sign, but for some reason they didn’t want to do that, so that is why Pu Pu is pouring our beers.

Then we headed back to the hotel, said our goodbyes and headed off to our rooms. Pu Pu will return to her home village around Inle Lake in the morning as she is not working for a little while because of the rainy season. Young leaves early in the morning for Vancouver, and I will catch a cab to the airport later. That’s all she wrote, on to the next adventure.