The open-air markets in Burma are an astonishingly colorful and wildly active environment. I tried to recreate the feeling with this panorama.(To see the full panorama, you will need to double-click the image, as it does not show in this on-page view.) I took nine photos, turning a few degrees to the right for each. The images were later stitched together in Photoshop. It sort of gives a sense of the surrounding, pulsing activity but, as they say, you had to be there.

This is where most Burmese people shop for food and anything else they might need, not at a grocery store or shopping mall.

Even firecrackers are available in the market (in the Chinatown areas, that is).

The food is totally fresh and tasty. They included many fruits and vegetables, some of which I had never seen before.

However, large grocery stores and malls are starting to open up for more wealthy families. They look remarkably like what we see in US stores – white shelving, fluorescent lighting, and plastic-wrapped often-tasteless food. It’s a whole different world at the market!

On the economic side of things, you might want to know that the name for the Burmese currency is “kyat”. At current exchange rates (early 2013) one American dollar equals 860 kyats. If you are going to buy something big (such as a car, which most Burmese people could never afford) you would need a HUGE pile of kyats!