Explaining

 

Muriel Rukeyser

"It is...hard to write about a city we just moved to; it's not yet in our body.  We don't know our new home, even if we can drive to the drugstore without getting lost."  
  "Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within," by Natalie Goldberg.

And this:

"Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.  I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough." 

-Hemingway

This may be why I don't write a lot about Yangon. How it feels here.  What it smells like.  The rhythm of the city.  It's because I can't possibly know it yet.  It takes time to absorb a new place, to sift through all the new senses.

What I can say, without writing very beautifully about it, is that Yangon is green. It is one of the most striking things about it.  It's one of the first things I noticed upon arrival in April.  Yesterday, on a flight from a weekend in Bangkok, the plane began to descend and a man sitting next to me commented on just how vibrant and green Yangon is. It's a stark comparison to Bangkok.

The monsoons have opened up her arms and released all her rain. Not rain like I've ever seen. Mini flash floods pop up all over the city.  You can smell it.  It arrives multiple times a day. Sometimes, it comes quietly and quickly.  Other times, it's so loud it almost hurts the ears. It can be rapturous.  Windy.  And I can tell you that bamboo is incredibly flexible and nimble. (Never seen anything sway like it.)  We've found dead tiny, tiny little silver fish under our porch/deck (there's no water there).  It's wet.

I can't write about it. I can't even describe it. But, I do love the rain here: it's beautiful and feels magical to me.