Epic Saturday: Part One

Saturday was a day of Epic Fitness and Exploration containing two parts: part one was the Andrew and Rayna bike tour around Yangon, part two was the Hash, a Saturday club for runners with a drinking problem or drinkers with a running problem. Let me explain further.
On Saturday, we woke up and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast of instant coffee, pb&j toast and pineapple and decided that we were going to do a bike tour around Yangon to find the fish market that had been eluding us. Last Sunday, we took a taxi to the Fish Market in the afternoon but it was already closed. So around 11am on Saturday, we set off on our bike adventure. Yangon is an interesting city to navigate as most streets, if they are even labeled, are in Burmese, which we can’t read. We have a couple of different city maps but they are only helpful if you can find landmarks off of which to base yourself. We have found that the only way to really explore the city is to get slightly lost, ask locals for help and then find your way back to the main roads that you know. Unbelievably, this has worked great.
We knew this day would be great as the sun was shining, a sight rarely seen in the rainy season, and the weather was pleasant, maybe 70s-low 80s with a breeze. So on Saturday we spent around 3 hours biking around the East side of the city weaving in and out of different neighbors but unable to find the fabled San Pyae Fish Market. The city consists of a wide variety of neighborhoods ranging from gated communities with gorgeous homes and barbed-fire topped fences to makeshift villages complete with mud roads and large pigs sleeping underneath thatch roof houses. We saw both extremities on this bike journey as well as a huge bridge that took us across the Yangon River (as big as the Mississippi) into a neighboring village. Once we got out of the city the air smelled country-sweet and we came across some water buffalo (see post about exotic animals of Myanmar). We then explored the area and found another large bridge to carry us across the river and back into the city. At this point it was two pm and we headed to a Thai place close by for a quick lunch before meeting other expats for the weekly Hash run. Lunch consisted of fried wide noodles with chicken, basil and peppers, fried fish cakes with a chili cucumber sauce and fish ball curry. After that, we hurried back to our apartment, got out of our sweat-soaked clothes and prepared for epic-fitness day part two: the Hash.