Kristina, my daughter-in-law the osteologist, loves bones and graveyards. This makes souvenir hunting difficult, but today, on a street corner in Rangoon, she knows I was thinking of her..
We went on a fast swirl through three markets on our last day before on-ship time at 2 PM. The last stop was Chinatown, where we were told, “stay between the bus and the traffic light.”
I got to the corner with the traffic light, and looked around to see if it was worth going around the corner and down the main street. I had only about a buck left, and twenty minutes to get back.
If there is any municipal system of trash collection in Burma, it is not apparent. We did pass one place where our guide said the Indians recycle plastic bottles, but I don’t know how they get them. Trash accumulates in certain areas along the road, and I have no sense of how one area becomes an informal dump and another does not.
At the corner of the traffic light, there was a pile of rubble, mostly in earth tones. Jagged edges, curved edges, broken pieces. At first I thought some kind of construction project, until I started to pick out familiar shapes.
Teeth! All the curved edges are jaw shaped. Here and there, you can see clear impressions of teeth. In the compartmentalized world of Myanmar, this is the dental lab’s dump.
Kristina, I’m sure, can tell us more.
That's a lot of dental casts! So did you pick any up? I'll bet most of them have shovel-shaped incisors (a primarily Asian/Native American dental trait).
ReplyDelete