Tea at the Strand

When I was a little girl, the Strand Hotel evoked the essence of the British colonies.  Indians in white jackets served tea to traders and their wives, sitting in wicker chairs as fans swirled overhead.  The Strand Hotel is across the street from the Yangon wharf (the "strand") and has housed the great British writers, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Somerset Maughm, as well as generations of travelers, diplomats, and even the Japanese Army, during WWII.  On March 8, 2012, Cho Cho picked us up from the airport, on our return from Inle Lake, and treated us to tea (actually, papaya juice) at the Strand.  I had a great sense of deja vu not just for my childhood, but for the British Empire.  The Strand is now under common ownership with the iconic Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where British officers and their ladies danced, the night before the Japanese invaded during WWII.  After WWII, the British colonies faded away.

Our sightseeing today was a combination of the exclusive and elegant, such as the Strand Hotel and L'Opera Restaurant on Inle Lake, and the haunts of commoners.  We rode the 5 p.m. commuters ferry across Yangon River with hundreds of civil servants and laborers, hot, tired, and anxious to be home.

We first waited in a people-watching terminal filled with a cross-section of Yangon workers.  We then charged onto the ferry and sailed past big and small ships, seagulls and loading docks, as Cho Cho chatted with the children selling candy and gum.  One little girl told us she quit school and started selling candy to help support her family when her father died.  When the British conquered Yangon in 1826, they brought with them soldiers, police, and civil servants from their neighboring colony, India.  At one time, Yangon was 40% Indian.  Then, in 1965, the military junta shipped hundreds of thousands of Indians back to India.  As we looked about our ferry, we could still see many Indian-looking faces.

We debarked from the ferry, and entered the Yangon market.  In any Asian or African city, the market is vibrant with color and energy.  We saw shops laden with tropical fruit, including the luscious watermelons we ate all across Myanmar.  We also saw such street food as those crispy fried shrimp shells.

Cho Cho dropped Dave and me off for dinner at L'Opera, the exclusive Italian restaurant with a garden fronting on Inle Lake.  We looked through palm trees and across the lake to fancy homes owned by Ang San Suu Kyi, the American Embassy, rich Chinese businessmen, and the families of government ministers (although the ministers, themselves, have been shipped off to the new capital city, Nay Pyi Taw).