The first meal was at the President’s Tea House. At a tea house, you can sit down at a table and are served tea for free. You can sit there all day drinking free tea. I don’t know why but that is what we were told. The tea houses serve breakfast and lunch. The food is very much along the lines of what we might call ‘fast food’. By that I mean that they serve it very fast and it is rather cheap. But we enjoyed the food. We were told that some people use the tea houses like a business office and sit and work on their computer, drink tea and have breakfast and lunch. We were happy to have made it to Burma before McDonald’s and Starbucks. But as Vicky said, once they arrive, it might mean the end of the tea houses.

1. You can see Vicky and Pete in the President’s Tea House. There were no walls on two sides of the building. You can see some students or business people behind them in the restaurant.

2. You can see our tea house lunch in the second photo. I’ve untied the banana leaf which held sticky rice and pork. We also had chicken dumplings. The meal was very good and cost us about US $1.50. The tea was free.

For dinner one night, we walked from our hotel to a nearby noodle shop. This will be the next three photos.

3. I had fried rice with pork and Pete had fried noodles, though Pete’s looked like chow Mein to me. We also had some soup and some Myanmar beers.

4. Vicky ordered chicken noodle soup with quail eggs.

5. It was quite common to have a local “extra” join us for a meal and that was the case at this meal, as you can see in the last photo.