After checking in, I was fiddling with my phone trying to get the internet to work (with no luck) when I started chatting with a girl from California and a guy from Canada. They invited me to join them to get some beers at a nearby cafe that had working internet, so we wandered a few blocks down the road and had a few beers. The Canadian guy was a self-absorbed "place-dropper" (like name-dropper, but brags about having been to exotic places....i.e. "oh that reminds me of this time I got hammered with some tribesmen in Ethiopia...blah blah blah."). The girl had gone to CU-Boulder so we talked about Colorado some, and then we both subtly rolled our eyes at each other as the Canadian yammered about his various travels where apparently the locals are more tolerant of total tools.
We decided to walk around the city some, and followed along one side of the massive moat that separates Mandalay from the "old city." The moat is a huge square, and while Chiang Mai's moat was around one mile per side, this one was probably two or three miles per side. We didn't get very far before we decided to go grab dinner at a Chinese restaurant that had gotten high ratings on Trip Advisor. Mandalay happens to have a huge Chinese population, so I was excited to try out some of the Chinese food in the city. We picked up another backpacker from our hostel, an Australian, and we hired two motorbikes to take us about twelve blocks south to the restaurant. The food was good, and the owner thanked us for visiting and asked us to give more positive reviews on Trip Advisor. Our motorbike taxis were still waiting for us, we squeezed back on (two of us + driver per motorbike) and blasted through the countless intersections with no traffic lights or stop signs of any kind.
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| Mandalay moat |
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