Travels with Shelley and Muzzy: Market Day in Yangon

One of the joys we have traveling is visiting markets. Yangon is home to the Bogyoke Aung San, or "Scott's Market" as the English dubbed it, but we were determined to find the market where the locals shop. The Theingyi Zei is huge. It comprises a vast area between three major cross streets with numbered, alley-like streets on either side of a huge ornate market building. 26th Street is the morning produce, fish and meat market. As usual, these markets are noisy and crowded, bustling with energy as people bargain for fresh food. No plasric wrapped meat in trays here. No pre-cut and cleaned veggies. People call their wares in sing-song voices that rise above the din. Housewives stop to visit amidst streams of shoppers jostling one another. As we wandered from the vegetable section into the land of protein, the landscape changed from bucolic heads of cauliflower and broccoli, baskets of garlic, tiny potatoes, chilis, multi-colored eggplants, long beans and okra, to a bloody trail of headless chickens, rows of fish heads and live eels trying to escape their fates by diving over the sides of shallow pans to the muddy pavement, only to be scooped and returned to await their inevitable fate. I watched a woman clean a fish using a shell scraper and weigh out the purchase on a hand held brass scale. We were the only foreigners in the market this morning. Shoppers stopped to talk to us, vendors laughed when we asked to take a photograph and one woman offered me a taste from a basket of what I thought might be tamarind.

Chilis and watermelon

Fish heads

Sweetheart of the market

Muslim man

Inside the recently re-painted colonial market building proper, locked tall wooden cabinets lined narrow rows. The building itself has an arched ceiling that soared into the gloom while light streamed in through high windows and bounced off festoons of cobwebs. Vendors unfastened oversized brass locks and stacked cloth on top of four foot high enclosed platforms that jutted out from the cabinets behind. This is an odd arrangement for selling. The seller sits atop this platform surrounded by longyis in every color and pattern, roll printed sarongs in plastic bags exactly the right size, and folded bolts of cottons and synthetics. As you walk the rows, looking at wares, they lean down or stand up to bring out more merchandise from the cupboards behind them, then lean over and offer it to you. There are stools for the customer to sit on on ground level, and somtimes I've seen the buyer climb onto the platform to sit with the seller. The stalls stretch from one end of the bulding to the other and I wonder how all this merchandise will get sold? Who buys it? And this building is massive! The aisles are narrow and the amount of cloth is mind boggling! How do you choose just one or two pieces from this veritable barn?