
Last Friday, our flight out of Yangon to Bangkok was at 10 AM.
It wasn’t too early, but I would have preferred to get more sleep and perhaps a last relaxing breakfast in the garden of our lovely hotel, the Governor’s Residence, operated by the Orient-Express.
So in a country with not too much tourist infrastructure like Myanmar, it’s a very much welcome feature.

She called it “holding your hand like a baby” but I was really happy she did it.
She took us all the way to the security check, got a porter for our luggages and slipped her Yangon mobile number into my pocket in case we had any troubles or questions before flying out of Myanmar.
Or perhaps if we just wanted to say hello.
Then, a question popped into my head. I asked her: “Do you get many Filipinos as Orient-Express clients?”
It’s clean, bright and pretty nicely designed, with a big and colorful mural on the way up to the departure lounge.

I’d already appropriated some of my companion’s luggage allowance, but I was still 5 kilos overweight.
Fortunately the check-in lady didn’t seem to mind. That put me in the mood for more shopping, even if it was for kitschy stuff.
Anything made in Yangon would be hard to get in Manila anyway.

I’d already bought a pretty red parasol in Bagan and had somehow succeeded in packing this into my suitcase.
And now here were a dozen parasols for sale and all at reasonable prices.
Well, in two of Yangon’s fanciest restaurants, which we’d eaten in, we’d had dinner in the garden and both gardens had been so splendidly lit up with these types of parasols.
I was so inspired by the gardens of the restaurant of the Governor’s Residence and of Le Planteur, that I decided to get not only the parasols, but also the very large garden.
But more on that in a later post.

We soon came down to prices we both could live with and I went back to the departure lounge to deposit my bundle of parasols with my hard-working companion, sitting amidst all our carry-on luggage.
My companion, who had been furiously at work on his Blackberry, preparing everything for “SEND” as soon as our plane touched down in Bangkok and we got re-connected to the real world, looked up and said, dead-pan: “I’m not even going to ask what those are for.“
And, now, in Manila, I’m hoping it rains again soon as I have a lot of parasols to use. A different one for every day of the week, in fact, in our never-ending, and never-endingly eventful Travelife.
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