Myanmar: Nyuang Oo market scenes

An entire morning was spent at the Nyuang Oo market.  Our guide was pretty excited and said the market would be interesting.  I was initially sceptical.  A market is a market.  And how much difference can markets across south-east Asia be?  Freshly harvested vegetables, tropical fruits and spicy noodles.  I've seen these in other traditional markets in other south-east Asian countries.  How different can a market in Myanmar be?

 

Apparently, quite a bit.

 

Here in Nyuang Oo, and other markets in Mynmar, are many stalls selling tanaka.  This is indeed unique to Mynamar.  Another interesting point was that foreign-looking people are quite left alone.  There was none of the touting that I experienced in other traditional markets in other south-east Asian countries.  Often I find it amusing that the hawkers would think that I could do something useful with their wares.  I couldn't buy a live fish!

 

There were, as always, stalls selling food in the market, and these stalls were elevated with simple plastic furniture.  Most were selling a kind of noodle with sauce.  And everyone was nochalent about the curious tourist snapping away furiously, probably pittying the tourists who had never seen people cooking noodles before.

 

I was quite shocked to see skinned chickens displayed in open air with flies buzzing and resting on the chickens.  There is no electricity supply in the Nyuang Oo market, and no refrigerators.  There was a little churn in my stomach as I thought I could be eating these chickens at lunch and dinner!  But I suppose in the pre-refrigerator days, people tried to cope as best as they could.  And here I was obviously witness to the inequality in the world's development.  There are still places where fresh food is displayed not in chillers and behind glass displays.

Those mounds of green leaves are betal leaves.  Betal chewing is rather entrenched in Mynamar, especially outside Yangon.  I observed that many had stained teeth from betal chewing.

According to our guide, Mynamar is one of the top rice-producing countries in south-east Asia.  However, Mynamese rice is not exported due to the embargo.  Honestly, I think Mynamese rice could give the famous Thai Hom Mali rice a run for their money!  I had no complaints eating Mynmese rice during my stay there.  Still, it was quite an eye-opening experience to see rice being sold by weight and not prepacked like those in the supermarkets back home.  People could actually choose how much rice they wanted to buy, and the sellers do not turn buyers away simply because they only wanted to buy 200g of rice.

As our guide promised, the Nyuang Oo market was interesting, in an eye-opening, jaw-dropping sort of way.  Inspite of all the modern convenience that I've grown up with: everything prepacked in an air-conditioned supermarket, I've come to see that there are people who can continue to survive despite their circumstances, and they were not the worse for it.