Our overnight bus back to Yangon was not scheduled to leave until 2.30pm, so we had the morning to kill in Nyaung Shwe. We took a look around the covered market and wandered up to the official-looking gate to the town, and then got sucked into a veritable Curiosity Shop on the main drag, crammed full of an eclectic collection including tiger teeth and opium pipes, gas lamps and Padaung brass coils. But the owner's passion was gem-stones, and he excitedly brought out ring after ring for us to hold up to the sun, finding the 'star' in the rubies and admiring the color of the sapphires and amethysts. 'This one not for sale,' he said of the ring show-casing 9 different gem-stones including a giant ruby; I wonder who here could afford it!
Lello bought a none-too-perfect oblong pearl, and for the next hour a wizened and meticulous silversmith carefully drilled a hole through it so that Lello could add it to his bead necklace from Bagan. Then, discovering the additional bead made the necklace too tight, we returned to the market for some nylon cord and fortuitously found a scrap a merchant had in a box of odds and ends.
At the bus stop we bumped into Clay and Ginger, who'd spent the same night as us at the monastery, as well as a Burmese mother and daughter pair who lived in the US and kindly read our tickets for us and let us know whether the bus arriving was ours. I would have loved to talk with the daughter, who was born in Yangon and had just gotten her MA in Graphic Design from UCLA -- but their bus came too soon.
Our bus showed up an hour late and we had a flat tire en route, so we arrived in Yangon a little later than scheduled, but 'overnight' is 'overnight' and I'm not keen on arriving before sunrise anyway. When the bus broke down the polite young man from the seat behind me befriended us and told us he was on his way to see his family for five days, and then a rowdy trio of good-looking and slightly tipsy young men butted in and got him to translate that one worked for the Forestry Department and another was a Police Constable, and took pictures draped over us. Two stops further down the line they were sober again and kept to a table at the far end of the food hall from us.
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