Celebrating our birthdays in Myanmar

This blog post tells you a little bit, how we both celebrated our birthdays here in Myanmar.

On 22 June, Flo turned 30 years old! This was a rather busy week full of dinners, beers and weekend preparations.

His birthday was on a Wednesday and this is when we organised a little “happening” on a rooftop bar here in Yangon. We invited some of our friends from CDE work, guesthouse and leisure time. It was a nice evening, drinking some cocktails, beers, having crispy fried finger food and enjoying the very beautiful view of the Shwedagon pagoda.

On Friday, we invited our Myanmar friends from the other office, from EERi, to come to our place. We tried to cook Myanmar curries. But from the laughter of the Myanmar friends, we could tell that we failed tremendously! :-) Finally, Nwe Nwe, the great project assistant, took over the kitchen and saved some dishes from being tasteless. :-)

And then, it was finally Saturday morning, when we left our house at 6:15 a.m., took a taxi to the bus terminal and drove all the way down to Hpa-An. Lara organised a surprise-weekend for Flo: first rock climbing experience in Myanmar!

Over facebook, we found some very active climbers in Yangon, who started to bolt routes for climbing in Hpa-An and Mandalay. Happy as little children before Christmas, we hence drove to Hpa-An to join the climbers for a weekend. Without any gear, we arrived there but could fortunately borrow all necessary equipment from them so that Flo could make some tries on climbing the new routes.

Because we are now in rainy season, we had to stop climbing every now and then. But this was also not too bad, because there were also hot springs only a few meters away… :-)

 Oh man! It was freezing cold in the bus!! And it even rained inside a little bit (over our heads).

 Flo watching and getting excited! :-)

 Every now and then, a rain passed by. With the rainy season, many parts of the land get flooded. But this is normal.

 And finally: It's Flo's first turn!

 Happy face :-)

 The second route... The rocks are sharp as knifes!

Enjoying the hot springs... Sitting in the rain in the hot water and discussing about the walls and routes over there.

On 2 July, it was then Lara’s birthday. Lucky as she was, it turned out to be a Saturday.

We got up very late, enjoyed a delicious breakfast in a coffee shop / bakery training center. For the first time in Myanmar, we had a very tasty and nice looking coffee. :-) 

We continued the day with some Myanmar business cloths shopping for Lara and ended up in an incredibly beautiful and chic restaurant “Le Planteur” at the Inya lake. There, we had a great time enjoying the garden, exploring the old house, eating delicious dinner, being full as hell, still receiving birthday-surprise-cake (fortunately we could take it home, we really couldn’t finish it anymore) and feeling the wonderful taste of cocktails and brandy.

All in all: it was not too bad! :-)

A special thanks to all, who made these days very special days! Either through joining our little gatherings, or through sending lovely messages or talking over skype.

And now, it is nearly time to finish up our duties here in Myanmar and come home to Switzerland for a nice gap. We are very much looking forward to seeing many of you again!! And don’t forget: Our next and bigger goodbye party volume II will be taking place from 30 September to 2 October in Switzerland.

See you soon!