Randoms follow-up

I know everyone is waiting with baited breath to hear about our solution to the mystery garbage issue and other random quirks of life in Yangon, so here you go!  Special shout out to Steve, our one and only commenter so far-thanks for giving us some love!  That copy of Misty of Chincoteague is on its way as a thank you.

Last week we finally got to interview a cleaner.  One of our questions was "do you know how to get rid of the rubbish?" and she answered yes so frankly, that was good enough for us.  She started on Tuesday and we are no longer suffocating under a mountain of garbage.  It turns out you have to pay a guy to come and take it away for you.  The price? £9 a month.  Sold.  The issue was not dealt with in time to spare me walking to school 2 days in a row last week hauling a garbage bag.  I did find a dumpster near the lake I run at in the morning, but it's too far to be practical for everyday use.  We used it on Sunday to get rid of all the Myanmar Beer cans I was too embarrassed to dump at school-the garbage bags are see-through.

Speaking of our cleaner, we ridiculously hired her to work for us every day as she is good with dogs and will stay in our house with Nell when we go away on vacation.  We don't really produce enough dirt to justify once a day cleaning, but Nell gets some company and a walk.  And it didn't take us long to say "hey, why do dishes? She needs something to do!"  The ultimate in being lazy.  I think my underwear got ironed today.

Sunday we went to brunch with a bunch of the new faculty.  I have never experienced anything like it.  It was in a big fancy hotel nearish to our house, started at 11:30am and cost $48.  We agreed to go before we knew how much it was, and I was pretty annoyed at first about the whole thing, but the prospect of bottomless champagne make me not so cranky.  I did tell Gav that for $48 that was our only meal of the day, so eat big.  It was quite the production.  There was so much food of such varying cuisines it was astounding.  Everything from oysters to Dim Sum to an English roast dinner, and the champagne did flow until they kicked us out at 3pm.  Not something that we will be doing every weekend, but we had a great time with the rest of the new crowd and I felt better about the value when people said in Doha they used to do the same thing, but it cost $150!  For brunch!

The humidity and rain are really creating some treacherous walking conditions.  I fell over twice last weekend, once running and once walking the dog.  It's like black ice, but slime.  When I was walking the dog I actually fell in a ditch and broke a bush in half.  Must happen a lot as a car was driving by at the time and didn't even slow down to see if I was ok.  Cars in general are pretty treacherous when traffic is heavy.  I was nearly impaled on a wing mirror coming home today due to a driver asserting his right of way.

We're looking forward to the weekend and getting to explore a bit more.  I would like it if we could find a dresser for the bedroom so I could stop putting all my clothes in one big pile, but you can't have everything!