It all started 6 months ago. Our names are Storm and Chanri and this is our Myanmar story. To be honest, we knew very little to almost nothing about this country but it only added to the excitement of being here. We are from Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa. This is our first time traveling out of our country and we didn’t know what to expect, we are very grateful for the opportunity to live in and explore this extraordinary country. We came to Myanmar to teach English but little did we know that we would be a lot more than just English teachers in this country. Let’s take it back to May of 2018. Our first stop was Yangon. We stayed in Yangon for one week. In that week we had a few Burmese lessons, learning just enough to get by. We visited a lot of interesting places and before we knew it, our week was over and our next stop was Mandalay, which would be our new home for the next 6 months. We had a lot of fun in Yangon, but to our surprise Mandalay became our home away from home. Chanri and I settled in Mandalay with ease. Mandalay… where to begin…

We were not expected to work for the first week upon arriving in Mandalay which was great because it gave us time to explore our new home. We stayed in Hotel Apex for a few days. This hotel is brand new and only opened at the beginning of 2018. We are eager explorers so the first thing we did was set our bags down and hit the streets. We decided to start off with a walk. We walked down one of the busiest streets called 35th Street. We did not expect to see what we saw. Beauty! Pure beauty! Everything was beautiful in its own way. The first thing that drew our attention was the people, but not just anything about them, it was their facial expressions that caught our eyes. There were smiles and lit faces everywhere we looked. People were running from the other side of the street just to come and greet us in English, which lead to something else being noticed. The English! We didn’t realise that so many of the locals spoke English and so well. We assumed that only a small percentage of the people here could speak English. We were wrong. We can safely say that it is rather a large percentage that can speak English. The people are so determined and eager to practise their English that they run across the road when they see us.