- During the hot season in Burma (mid-February to mid-May), the sun gets so warm and air so thick with humidity that when the rare cool breeze sweeps in from the window, your whole body feels refreshed, your soul replenished. Whatever troubles you’re facing are temporarily forgotten.
- In the rainy season (mid-May to late October), the sky turns concrete gray, the sun struggles to part the clouds. The clouds hover above, steadfast and ready to dump buckets of rain on anyone — rich, poor, young, old, the powered, the powerless. Streets get flooded quickly with a swift downpour. Rain becomes this entity you love to hate and hate to love. I for one love the indiscriminate force of nature. Here, whether you’re the general or the beggar, you are at the mercy of rain. Monsoon season reminds us of how no one person is the ruler of anyone else.
- Whenever you go ,wherever you go, you see people on the streets — eating meals, drinking tea, chatting and laughing, singing songs, playing guitars on the corners of the streets. Cars grace the roads, bicycles and motorbikes zip by. Yangon is alive at every corner and her spirit cannot be suppressed.
4. Burmese Food: Mohinga for breakfast, Mee Shay for lunch, milk tea for snack, rice and curries for dinner, chased with hot tea and pickled tea leaves salad. No place on earth possesses such a mix of culinary heavenliness.
5. Pagodas. Point randomly in any direction, and it is highly likely that you would find a pagoda at that location in Burma. In Yangon, the favorite of course is Shwedagon.
6. This is my personal favorite. The smell of earth after the rain. The red soil of my mother’s garden. Frogs singing for more rain. Crows calling at dusk, Yangon sky-full of birds. Flowers soaking in the moisture and sun.
7. Flowers blooming in all seasons — roses, orchids, jasmine, padauk, thazin, ingyin, khayay, ngnu.
8. Mangoes. So good, it needs its own category. Nothing like Burmese mangoes.
9. My mother’s laugh.
10. In the cool season (late October to mid-February), my favorite time of the year in Myanmar, the weather is cool in the evening, sun friendly warm on your face. Rain hides and the earth stays dry. The best time to travel outside of Yangon — to the ancient city of Bagan to beautiful Shan State or pristine beaches in Rakhine state — whatever your heart desires to go for a short vacation.
This is the time of the year, I would usually make my trip back home and see my family and friends under the “normal” circumstances, where there was no pandemic or brutal oppression by the military regime that staged a coup sixteen days ago.
As I think of my hometown Yangon, I think of everything I love about the place. I think of her beauty, her tragedy, her people, her long struggle for freedom. Yangon in Burmese means “End of Strife/War”. I pray my Yangon will soon be the free, fair and open safe haven she is meant to be.
