If Yangon (or, as we were wont to call it, Rangoon) were a fabric, it would be a fine quality one, satin with gold embroidery, a beautiful piece, but old, frayed and torn. But it would be repaired in a haphazard manner, perhaps by a person who didn’t know how to do it, or who didn’t have the needed matching threads and pieces to work with. And who, despite the fabric’s sad condition, is still using it, an old favorite.

Piranesi meets William Gibson in the ruins of the British Raj.

The main traffic circle downtown displays some of this quality: a pagoda tightly surrounded by shops in what, in Europe, would be a medieval manner. Surrounded in turn by several (four?) lanes of traffic.

But the thing that struck Dan and me the most in the downtown area of Yangon was the unusually fine heritage of British Raj-era buildings that were in an unusual–perhaps even dangerous–state of decay. And occupied anyway. This decay may have been exacerbated by the government’s removal of the capital and its accompanying administrative functions to Naypyidaw in 2005. According to at least one source, Yangon has (or had) the largest number of colonial-period buildings in southeast Asia.

Here’s one, one side of which has completely crumbled away, been overgrown by vegetation, and is still used for…something…

Here’s another.

Other buildings, whether Raj-era or not, display a similar surreal quality.

Out in the neighborhoods, the lack of infrastructure becomes apparent, but so does the vibrancy of community life.

Every apartment or condo has its own unique electric wire from the pole (rather than one larger wire to bring electricity into the building, then separating it there). This makes for interesting electrical vistas.

Not all the streets are paved. (The sidewalks are worse.)

But there are cafes…

…where friends enjoy getting together.