Living Conditions

If you happen to ask too directly about the government, people immediately lower their voices and say, "We can't talk about that." We played the part of clueless tourists and asked a guide at a tourist site if there was democracy in the country. "Oh no," he replied with a wry smile, "we certainly don't have that here." It's only when you ask the "wrong" questions that you can really feel people's fear. The locals have access to TV with foreign news channels, radio, and the internet. Many websites are blocked, but everyone just hacks around it using a program called Free Gate. Sending an email can still be tricky, but we can definitely receive them. Rejsespor.dk isn't blocked by the government, so we can easily update it :) So, it's relatively easy for the population to search for and access information about other countries. However, regular households only have access to foreign sports channels and their own national propaganda news channel. Foreign news channels are only available in hotels. But everyone can access the internet. Because everyone has access to foreign sports channels, they are quite up-to-date, especially with football. They know about Danish teams and players. You can say a lot of negative things about the military dictatorship in Myanmar. Terrible things happen here. But women have the same rights as men. For example, they have the opportunity to get an education. They also have the right to divorce and claim half of the shared assets in marriage. That's more than women have in democratic countries like India and Turkey... It's a bit thought-provoking. Tourists are forbidden from venturing into the outskirts of Yangon. We would have liked to explore different neighborhoods, but that's not allowed. Tourists can rent a car with a driver and travel around the country, but there’s no free access to all areas. You need to apply for permission to move outside the designated zones. The sun is shining from a cloudless sky today. It's 32 degrees in the shade and 41 degrees in the sun. Even the locals are hopping from shade to shade in this heat. Taxi drivers have hung towels in their windows to shield themselves from the harsh sun. We exchanged more money on the black market today, but not at the same good rate as last time. The rate was 1270 kyats for 1 USD. Each bill has different letters on it. All the bills that start with H have a worse exchange rate. The rules are very strict. We've checked all the bills carefully every time we've exchanged money. Still, they managed to cheat us. Based on how many USD we've exchanged and how much we've spent, we're missing about 700 DKK. I guess it's just bad luck. Better to be cheated than robbed outright. We just need to be better at seeing through their tricks. We only dare to eat at slightly better restaurants due to hygiene concerns. We bought antibiotics in Thailand since a lot of the medicine here is either a poor copy or past its expiration date. There’s no way to see a qualified doctor, so we have to help ourselves. Today, we bought 5 watches. Suddenly, we stumbled upon a bunch of stalls selling replica watches. They cost around 10,000 kyats in total.