Our first day in Yangon started with a bland breakfast, then we met our tour guide (talking to me in front of the white car in the picture below). She was a very nice, very earnest woman whose husband had left her long ago, who's putting her daughter through medical school.



Yangon's only medium-sized for Asia, about four million people, but quite spread out, so you'll need a car. We started near the hotel, in Chinatown, which as usual is the main trading center where all the markets congregate. There's a very large indoor covered market with hundreds of stalls, but the whole area is one giant market, selling gold, clothes and electrical goods, none of which made compelling purchases. One weird thing we noticed is the outdoor dining areas, which you can see in the photo below. These are ubiquitious throughout Asia, but for some reason, the plastic stools that customers sat on as they ate their meals at roadside were tiny, only a few inches off the ground. It looked uncomfortable and made eating awkward, and I couldn't see any advantage to it.