Yangon

I didn't understand lunch at all. A man gestured 'food' at me, so I followed him. He led me to a table where I shared bowls of stuff (rice, soup, something made of chillis, something made of onions, green goo and animal bones) with a bunch of strangers. Turns out the whole thing was free. I think I may have gatecrashed the leftovers of a school dinner. Not certain.  Tasty though. Especially the green goo, once you had got over the fact that it looked like pond weed.

Anyway, I am in Yangon. A city where footpaths are impassable due to pop up restaurants, roads are virtually uncrossable, where rambutans and mangosteens are readily available, where chickens hang upside down from handcarts, where monks are musclebound, where there's no toilet paper and inconstant electricity. In short where the travelling smells of weird.

I like weird.

I have already hit the main site, the Shwedagon Paya, a 2500 year old gold plated temple. It was impressive with its surrounding plinth of pagodas, colours, monks and activity. The sulky monkey within thinks it would have been even more impressive if the gold hadn't been covered by matting. But that's just me wanting the moon on a stick.