Wonder.Food.Travel

Means Hello, Mandalay. The official language of Myanmar is Burmese. I didn't even know how to say the simple words of Hello and Thank You then, or how the language sounded until when i was in the country. Written, it looks circular and curvy. Bluish white or whitish blue? In a sea of mini pagodas. I liked Mandalay most. The bus journey along the highway from Bagan was smooth. Suddenly, the bus halted by the road nearing Mandalay city, at what appeared to be a bus station. Another JJ bus was already on stand by. An attendant came onto our bus and asked for our destination. He directed us to board it. Like a feeder bus to the city, it was packed with passengers when we got up. The attendant informed us of our stop and we got down. Instantly, we felt transported back to city life with plenty of vehicles on the road and taller concrete buildings. Mandalay city was well organized and structured in a grid with numbers as road or street names. We gingerly crossed the road and...

Is train lag a thing? Because i sort of had it. One, time in Myanmar is an hour and a half behind Malaysia. This was the first time i had to use thirty minutes or 0.5 hr in calculating back to Malaysian time. Strange but true. Lucky there was no need for watch adjustment between Bagan and Yangon. Two, the 20-hour overnight train ride messed up the day/date. Often when my friend and i talked about our earlier time of the day, we actually referred to the day before in Yangon and not the morning part of the train ride. Probably due to the lack of proper sleep. Day 1 in Bagan was Day 3 of this Myanmar journey. Three, sunrise was early, about 5.30 am. By six in the morning, the sky turned blue then amber, unlike Kuala Lumpur when it gets bright at seven. Sunset was about 6.30pm. As soon as the train halted at Bagan Railway Station , we were once again swarmed by locals offering taxi service to town. We read that there was Grab service in Bagan; unfortunately, when we fired up the a...