Myanmar

Myanmar caught me off guard in ways I hadn't expected. I'd read enough to know about the gold stupas and the incense and the market noise, but nothing really prepares you for the scale of it — standing in front of a pagoda complex with the whole courtyard gleaming under afternoon sun, the heat radiating off the marble paving stones underfoot, the air thick and still. The gold isn't subtle here. It's full commitment, every surface layered and detailed, and at a certain angle in the light it stops looking like a building and starts looking like something else entirely.

Inside the temples it felt cooler and more intimate. The Buddha shrines are dense with detail — lacquered wood, gilt canopies, offerings arranged just so. The ceiling patterns overhead are the kind of thing you spend twenty minutes staring at without meaning to. I kept having to remind myself to actually move through the space instead of standing in one spot.

The food was its own education. I ate durian for the first time at a street market — properly split open, creamy and strange, the whole stall laid out in that cheerful overlapping mess of tropical fruit and colour that you only really get in Southeast Asia. The restaurants in Yangon surprised me too, a little more refined than I'd expected, but the heat of the place and the particular quality of the light seeping through old timber windows made everything feel like it belonged to the same story.