Infrastructure in Myanmar

....or lack thereof.  The roads are full of potholes (even though there is never any frost).  The main bridge is one lane each way -- and it takes 6 hours to clear if a car breaks down.  Buses are remaindered buses from all over Asia.  I literally saw one from Osaka Japan.  The buses have their original markings.  People wait and wait for buses at many corners; the buses come in all all sizes.  At these bus stops, ther are also various sizes of trucks with benches under a canvas covering that stop.  They fit more than 100 in a small bus, and probably close to that in and hanging off the back of a small truck.  We did not travel by local buses, but some students and life-long learners took overnight buses to some of the outlying areas.

There is electricity in town.  The spaghetti/birdnest tangle of wires that passes for an electricity delivery system is even more tangled than in Vietnam.  For pay phones, on the street a vender will have a couple of old phones sitting on a TV-tray sized table, and you can pay to make a call.

All the registered taxis have red license plates, making it easy to see if you are getting an "official" taxi.  Before getting in, you say where you are going and negotiate a price.  In the city (a city of a few million, with almost no high rises), $1 to $3 takes you most everywhere.  With our Servas day host, we took a ride of more than an hour to an outlying area, the driver waited for our visit, and then took us back, dropping us at the museum before taking her home.  Total cost was $12 (which I paid).

Water.  Don't even think about drinking it.  After washing my hands and drying them on my pants, I used hand sanitizer too.

Cooking -- a lot of the street cooking was charcoal.  Heating -- not really necessary.

Garbage pick-up.  It must not exist in the outlying areas.  Near an outlying market we saw a foundation being dug for a house -- the first 15 inches of excavation was through dirt mixed with trash.  In outlying areas, we saw people sweeping up the trash and lighting the piles of trash on fire.