Soon she brought out a plethora of dishes on my table and thus began my Myanmar food journey with a traditional Myanmar meal. Purchasing that Burmese sim card at the airport was worth much more than just calling my partner back home. But just to lay my paranoia to peace, I confirmed the ingredients with her by showing her the pictures of eggs and chicken on my phone. Pasting my typical ear to ear smile on my tired face and asking every stall for fish, I landed at one lady’s place who understood fish and said no, no chicken.

I even spoke in Hindi once and realized I wasn’t in India anymore (these one-way Hindi conversations mark the beginning of every international trip for me). I requested the Burmese hawkers to enlighten me about their aromatic preparations but to my dismay, neither the locals spoke English nor they understood even the common dietary English words such as egg, chicken, meat, fish.

Most of the stalls sold barbecued red meat on skewers which only worsens my appetite now. While pacing up and down the street market like a hungry dog, I peeked deep into the sizzling woks and fiery pans to see which of the enticing Yangon street food I could eat. I would tell my story about arriving at the Bandoola park for my first dinner in Myanmar in a subsequent Yangon food guide, but for now, I will say that within fifteen minutes I found myself at the night market of the famous Maha Bandula park of Rangoon. On my way from the airport, I had had a glimpse of the Burmese roadside restaurants that mainly comprised of a covered kitchen and miniature plastic stools on the road. I threw my bags on the bed in the hotel room, scrubbed my face, and darted down the seven floors of my downtown Yangon hotel. When I landed in Yangon after a long connecting Bengaluru-Kolkata flight, I was severely famished.

While you can find fish noodle soups and tea leaf salads at every corner of Myanmar, you can also overeat potato samosas, suck into juicy dumplings, and cry out on spicy curries or run away from fried insects- all the later delicacies can be attributed to Myanmar’s neighbors whose people and flavors both have been generously accepted by Burma. When I visited Myanmar last year, I had high hopes from the Burmese food: a concoction of not only the culinary taste of the hundreds of ethnic groups within Myanmar but also steeped in flavors, ingredients, and recipes from the colorful neighbor China, Thailand, and India. Curry rich, Asian-influenced, salad-based, unhygienic - these are only some of the phrases that seem to describe Myanmar traditional food all over the internet.