Place: Water Festival in the streets of Yangon

Thingyan (pronounced thin-jin) is the Water Festival, where they celebrate the Burmese New Year. The whole city shuts down for 3-4 days and basically becomes a huge water fight. People are all over the place with hoses, water guns, and buckets. There’s loud EDM music everywhere and people just dance and play in the water, it was an absolute spectacle.

With our large group we rented a truck one of the days and sat in the back of it with a giant bucket of water, doing drive by shootings (and getting shot plenty). At one point some dude on the street hooked us up with a large block of ice, which turned our water all the more lethal. In the city center, trucks like ours line up to get destroyed by a wall of people with hoses. There was also giant sprinklers pouring down on everyone, the area was literally completely flooded.

Update: My friend Jamie wrote a much more detailed and eloquent depiction of this experience here

Food: Mont Lone Yay Paw

Sticky rice balls with jaggery inside, topped with coconut flakes. Jaggery is a sugar extracted from palm tree, basically tastes like rock candy. It’s the common theme among all the foods that are special during Thingyan, though I don’t know why. I personally wasn’t a huge fan, it was a bit too hard to bite down on for me and tasted too intensely sweet.