We went to bed late yesterday; Wolf had been working hard, and I got carried away reading. We decided to skip breakfast and sleep in. Besides, there wasn’t anything tasty waiting for us there anyway…
We made ourselves a pretty decent breakfast out of instant coffee and cookies. Yes, we drink instant coffee, 3-in-1…
Wolf was completely under the weather; a couple of days ago he had started coughing a bit and gargling his throat. But apparently I infected him, and today it got even worse — a runny nose, a sore throat, coughing…. We decided not to drag it out and start taking antibiotics. There was no question of going anywhere.
We went to the pharmacy and showed the note where we had written “azithromycin” at home заранее — the girl nodded and went deeper into the pharmacy to look for it. It seems there’s a shortage of medicines here, and pharmacies too — there seem to be very few of them; it feels like people don’t buy medicines on their own. But Bangladeshi-made azithromycin was found. We bought 3 tablets of 500 mg each and headed home. I decided to wander around the city a bit more on my own, and Wolf went home.
It felt strange walking the streets alone. Without Wolf — like without clothes — it seemed the attention of the locals increased a hundredfold; everyone shouted hello and stared intently, inquisitively. But people here are all very kind, so I wasn’t scared at all, just very unaccustomed to so much attention.
Then I came to get Wolf, and we went to eat. At a café near the hotel, we ordered a chicken and potato pot and french fries.
While we waited, we looked around. We realized there’s a clear division of what people drink where. Across from our café was a beer place — everyone sat there drinking beer, mostly dark, like tar. And in our place everyone drank only tea.
It’s amazing that people even bought tea “to go” — they came in, ordered tea, and it was poured into transparent disposable bags. And they left. It seems so strange to me — how can you have a home and still buy ready-made tea in a café and take it home in a little bag.
Even we already figured out how they make it — they add condensed milk to black tea, simple as that. But the locals are apparently used to it differently — that it’s easier to buy tea than make it yourself. Or maybe there really is some clever secret to delicious tea that isn’t so easy to uncover.
And I also think they have a different understanding of home — for them, home is just a place where you can sleep. We’ve noticed many times how in the evenings they watch movies in cafés or just sit and drink beer. They don’t go home.
By the way, we’ve already been in Myanmar for so many days and still haven’t tried their beer — first I was taking antibiotics with a sore throat, and now Wolf has joined in…
Yes, our food took a long time to prepare.
