Creating our new home

I recall that the first week in Yangon was not easy. It was dedicating to settling down and arranging our new life.

Since we had to buy quite some things for our household, we were discovering new shops and areas of town. We became experts on where to buy food, furniture, kitchen utensils, plastic things, rugs and so on.

Here are the list of shops we discovered and visited (might be useful for newcomers and tourists :)

• Food shopping

City Mart - supermarket chain which has shops all around the city. There you can buy different kind of package and fresh food; local and imported; not cheap but not that costly either.

Marketplace - an expensive supermarket with imported goods mostly; you can buy there diverse food and other goods which you kind find anywhere else. For example, cheese :). This shops is very expensive. 

K-Mart, ABC mart  - convenience stores where are all around the city. Cheap and handy. Basic packaged food and drinks are sold there. 

Street stalls - we discovered that most of the fruits and vegetables can be bought just outside of our apartment on the street. It can be very cheap if you know how to bargain. 

• Plastic 

All the plastic here is imported from China. Apparently Myanmar is a great market for them, coz here they use lots of plastic things. It is convenient and cheap, but of course ugly and doesn't last long.

• Department stores (also furniture) 

Ruby mart - there you can find any kind of things, from food till basic furniture. Quality is OK and the prices are OK too.

Super One is also a department store, a bit more expensive but not so much choice as for me. 

Yuzana Plaza - is the oldest department store in Myanmar. It reminded me those open air markets (bazaars) we have in Ukraine. Ground floor is full with fabrics sold there. You can get clothes, shoes and even furniture here. This is where we bought our amazing guest sofa :) 

So you can imagine that we've visited lots of shops. There is nothing you can buy online or check on the website at least. You have to visit every shop. Luckily our local friend could recommend us where to go, otherwise we would be completely lost. . 

Despite absence of some food i'm used too (e.g. cheese..) what is truly missing in Myanmar is a good and cheap furniture producer, something like IKEA. The furniture quality is poor and it's not that cheap either.

In general the country turned out to be not as cheap as we expected. Therefore the settling down cots were not so low. And if you want to have a good quality thing you need to really run around the city searching for something decent.

By the end of the week finally I felt that we have OUR flat. It had almost everything we needed. It was clean and much more welcoming. I could say that it became HOME for us.