Day Two In Myanmar



Last night, after we had recovered from lunch and our horrible early morning start, we went into town to see what there was to see. There’s an enormous pagoda with different Buddhas for every day of the week (complete with signs to tell you which is which) and there’s some slightly decrepit but picturesque colonial buildings like the post office. But after that we headed to a hipster bar, Blind Tiger, where we could eat garlic home fries and quesadillas (really making the most of the opportunity for local food) and drink copious amounts of booze. Perhaps that was the wrong way to prepare for the marathon on Saturday.

It was ladies’ night, apparently, but there were only four customers in the bar (slow Thursday?) and after we’d drunk a lot we figured it was time to check out the rest of the scene. The other bar in walking distance was Sarkies, which I misread as being on a rooftop overlooking the river, but was actually on the ground floor, with a huge TV screen playing a Victoria’s Secret catwalk show on repeat.

We had a lot more to drink, and met a chubby cheeky Scouser called Kevin, and a man who looked like a tramp who’d flown in from Louisiana. ‘Who dat?’ I asked him and talked about Huey Long’s bridge, demonstrating my familiarity with his home state, and then apparently I started speaking in a ridiculously over the top posh accent and demanding to be called Boris.

When you are telling people to call you Boris, it’s a sign you should have gone to bed a long time ago. Instead, we went to “the best club in town” which was a grim dump in the back of a car park. Outside there were some backpackers, who I offended when I pointed out they were ignorant of René Descartes, and I was incapable of explaining that there’s a difference between being ignorant of a French philosopher and being ignorant in general, but they were ignorant types and so I left them outside. Inside we were going heavy on a bottle of Grey Goose, and as a result of that I forgot that I can’t dance and went to throw some shapes.

If there’s one thing I can be proud of in my life, it’s that I can make people at a bar laugh. All I need is my two left feet and a supply of bemused ladies of negotiable virtue, who congregate around me while I appear to be having some sort of fit. The hellscapes of Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong, the Four Floors Of Whores in Singapore, and now Seven Joints in Yangon have all born witness to my inveterate timewasting. It takes a variable amount of time before they realise they’re not witnessing some expatriate mating dance and go looking for the next punter, but that’s irrelevant while I’m in the moment. Or perhaps I’m like Gladstone, providing some respite before the Kevins of the world pay to do revolting things to them.

At some time in the very early morning, we realised that we were middle-aged men with a marathon to run, and we weren’t meant to be in a reggae-themed knocking shop next door to a pirate themed bar with no customers, so obviously the thing to do was for me to stop channeling my inner Boris, and then for us to go back to Blind Tiger, which was of course closed, and only then get a taxi back to the hotel, where we passed out in short order, and then woke up this morning, hearts racing as our poor bodies tried to rid the booze from our bloodstreams.

This morning was a fresh hell of hungover misery; we tooled around the hotel for a bit, walked around the local park, then got a taxi to the airport. Our driver was quite the conversationalist, although that conversation was mostly listing shootings in different places, and the words “democracy” (good) and “Hitler” (bad) while we acquiesced. After we tumbled out of the taxi we couldn’t stop saying “gunshot” to each other. The things life leaves you with.

And now here we are, sat in the airport waiting for our plane to depart, marvelling at our handwritten boarding passes, and at so far our ability to completely ignore the culture of a country in favour of eating chips and drinking. All this shall pass.


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