Myanmar Essential Daily Food “Nga-pi”

By Naw May Lay

Ngapi translated means "pressed fish" and it is daily life accompaniment dish for people in Myanmar. It is equivalent to fish or shrimp paste. It is an everyday cooking ingredient used to flavour many dishes.  There are three types of Ngapi:  ‘nga-pi gaung’ which is made from whole fish which are pressed, dried and eaten baked; ‘nga-pi seinsa’ made from fermented shrimp which is stored in the earthen pots; and ‘nga-pi yecho’ which is made from small fish which are left whole in the sun for a couple of days after which they are salted, pounded and stored in clay pots. Nga-pi has a very salty and fishy taste which many western palates may initially find over-powering, however, it is an essential ingredient in Myanmar cooking. It has the added advantage of containing protein and vitamin D.  It can be substituted with any Asian Shrimp Paste.

Out of three, the one I like very much is ‘nga-pi yecho’ made from fish and came out from clay pots. It is main side dish for Myanmar daily foods particularly rice.I cann’t wait to share with you how to make it delicious to be eaten. It is an easy recipe.

Firstly, we need to boil few amount of fish for 5 minutes. While waiting for this, dried shrimp, green chili and garlic have to be pounded separately.  After boiling the fish, it has to be filtered to a small bowl to keep the bones out. Then just simply mix with altogether and ready to eat.  But it will not be perfect without some fresh vegetables such as cucumber, green mango, lady finger, lemon leaf and whatever you have or want to eat.

But it is needed to be familiar with the pungent smell of Nga-pi yecho and you can get this smell even from 100 meters. Anyway I love to have my lunch with Nga-pi yecho every day.

Korea singer who I like most (by Kyaw Ko Win)

Korea movies are popular among Myanmar people since one decade ago. Every evening, most people prefer spending their time in fornt of TV and watching Korea movies. So, we are familar with Korea actors, actresses and singers. Among them, my favorite is Rain.
Jung Ji-Hoon (born June 25, 1982), better know by his stage name Rain, is a South Korean singer, dancer, actor, model and designer.

ကိုရီးယားဇာတ္ကားမ်ားသည္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူမ်ားအတြင္း ဆယ္စုႏွစ္တစ္ခုၾကာ ေရပန္းစားခဲ့ၿပီျဖစ္သည္။ ညေနတိုင္း လူအမ်ားစုသည္တီဗြီေရွ႕ထိုင္ၿပီး ကိုရီးယားကားၾကည့္ရႈျခင္းကို ႏွစ္သက္ၾကပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ က်ေနာ္တို႔ဟာ ကိုရီးယားမင္းသား၊ မင္းသမီးႏွင့္ အဆိုေတာ္မ်ားႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးေနၿပီျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ထိုအထဲမွာ က်ေနာ္အၾကိဳက္ဆံုးက Rain ပါ။ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားအဆိုေတာ္၊အကပညာရွင္၊ေမာ္ဒယ္ႏွင့္ ဒီဇိုင္းပညာရွင္  ျဖစ္တဲ့ ဂ်န္ဂ်ီဟြန္းဟာ သူ႔ရဲ႕အႏုပညာနာမည္ Rainအျဖစ္ လူသိမ်ားၾကပါတယ္။

In 2002, Jung debuted with the album Bad Guy where he was introduced to the media through his stage name, Rain. The album's title was " Bad Guy" and was followed by "Handshake". After his first album, in 2003, he made his television debut in the KBS drama, Sang Doo! Let's Go To School. Following the success of his debut as a singer and actor, Rain released his second album, How to Avoid The Sun, and released the title song "Ways to Avoid the Sun".
၂၀၁၂မွာ ဂ်န္ဟာ ေဗြေဆာ္ဦးအျဖစ္ လူဆိုးေလးအေခြနဲ႔ မီဒီယာေတြကို အႏုပညာနာမည္ Rainအျဖစ္နဲ႔မိတ္ဆက္ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အေခြေခါင္းစဥ္က လူဆိုးေလးျဖစ္ၿပီး လက္ဆြဲႏႈတ္ဆက္ျခင္းအေခြကေတာ့ ေနာက္ထပ္ထြက္ရွိခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ပထမ အေခြထြက္ရွိၿပီး ၂၀၀၃မွာ KBS ဒရာမာတြင္ သူ႔ရဲ႕တီဗြီ ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမႈ အစီအစဥ္ "ဆန္းဒိုး! ေက်ာင္းသြားၾကမယ္"ကို ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီနာက္ပိုင္းေအာင္ျမင္လာ ခဲ့ၿပီး ဒုတိယအယ္ဘမ္ " How to Avoid The Sun"ကို ျဖန္႔ေ၀ခဲ့ၿပီး ေခါင္းစီးသီခ်င္းကေတာ့ "Ways to Avoid the Sun" ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Rain's foruth album, Rain's World, was released in Korea on October 14, 2006.
He is also a famous actor. He acted in his film, the Wachowski Brothers-directed Speed Racer, where he played Racer Taejo Togokahn. He made his starring role debut in Ninja Assassin (2009), as the main character Raizo. He won the Biggest Badass Award at the 2010 MTV Movies Awards because of his performance in Ninja Assassin. I like him so much in this film.

ေလးေခြေျမာက္အယ္ဘမ္ျဖစ္တဲ့ Rain's World ကိုေတာ့ 2006 ေအာက္တိုဘာမွာကိုရီးယားမွာ ထုတ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူဟာ ေက်ာ္ၾကားတဲ့ သရုပ္ေဆာင္လဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သူဟာ Racer Taejo Togokahnအျဖစ္ Speed Racer ဇာတ္ကားမွာ ပါ၀င္သရုပ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။  ၂၀၀၉ ခုႏွစ္မွာ "Ninja Assassin" ဇာတ္ကားမွာ အဓိကသရုပ္ေဆာင္ Raizo အျဖစ္သရုပ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီဇာတ္ကားက သူ႔သရုပ္ေပၚလြင္ခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ ၂၀၁၀ MTV Movies Awards ဆုကိုရရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီဇာတ္ကားမွာ က်ေနာ္သူ႔ကိုသိပ္ၾကိဳက္ပါတယ္။

In 2004, he starred in the popular drama called Full House with one of Korea's most popular actresses, Song Hye Kyo. It was broadcasted in various other countries including Myanmar. His performance in the drama won him the Best Actor Award at the KBS Acting Awards.


၂၀၀၄မွာ ကိုရီးယားနာမည္ၾကီးမင္းသမီးတလက္ျဖစ္တဲ့ Song Hye Kyo နဲ႔ "Full House" အမည္ရွိ နာမည္ၾကီး အလြမ္းဇာတ္ကားမွာ ပါ၀င္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီဇာတ္ကားဟာ ႏို္င္ငံမ်ားစြာမွာ ထုတ္လႊင့္ျပသခဲ့ၿပီး ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလဲ အပါအ၀င္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီဇာတ္ကားက သူ႔သရုပ္ေၾကာင့္ KBS Acting Awards မွာေပးတဲ့ အေကာင္းဆံုးအမ်ိဳးသား သရုပ္ေဆာင္ဆုကို ဆြတ္ခူးခဲ့ပါတယ္။

I like him also because of his humanitarian work. Rain donated money to have 50 drinking water wells built and playgrounds built in Cambodia. He began taking up causes related to children by participating in the Love Photography Exhibition to help find adoptive parents for children in government care, donating a percent of his 2006-2007 World Tour concert proceeds to children orphaned by AIDS and participating in the Green Ribbon Hope Walking Campaign to raise funds for prevention and to help find missing children. Due to his work, he was appointed World Vision HIV/AIDS Ambassador.

သူ႕ရဲ႕လူမွဳေရးလုပ္ရွားမႈေတြေၾကာင့္လဲ က်ေနာ္သူ႔ကို ၾကိဳက္ရျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ကန္ေဗာဒီးယားမွာ ေသာက္ေရတြင္း ၅၀အတြက္ေငြလွဴတန္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ "Love Photography Exhibition" မွာ ပါ၀င္ လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၿပီး အစိုးရအေစာင့္အေရွာက္ခံ ကေလးေတြကို ေမြးစားမဲ့ မိဘေတြရွာေဖြဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္ခဲ့တာပါ။ ၂၀၀၆-၂၀၀၇ World Tour concert ကရတဲ့ေငြက ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္းတစ္ခုကို AIDS ေၾကာင့္ မိဘမဲ့ျဖစ္သြားတဲ့ ကေလးေတြအတြက္ လွဴဒါန္းၿပီး Green Ribbon Hope Walking Campaign မွာပါ၀င္ကာ ကေလးေပ်ာက္ရွာေဖြေရးနဲ႔ ကေလးေစာက္ေရွာက္ေရး ရံပံုေငြတိုးျမွင့္ေရးအတြက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူ႔ရဲ႕လုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္ေတြေၾကာင့္လဲ သူ႔ကို World Vision HIV/AIDS Ambassador အျဖစ္ ခန္႔အပ္ျခင္း ခံခဲ့ရပါတယ္။

THE LADY

By Naw May Lay

“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”         Aung San Suu Kyi

This is very significant phrases highlighted in the recently released historical movies "THE LADY". This movie is the extraordinary story of Aung San Suu Kyi, the fearless daughter of General Aung San, the hero of Burma's (today commonly known as Myanmar) freedom struggle.

She is the Iron Lady of Burma.

In 1947, when Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old, her father led Burma to independence. But soon afterwards, on 19 July 1947, he along with a group of his colleagues was assassinated by a military death squad.

 

As an adult, she went to England, found a loving husband and had a happy family life. But in 1988, her mother's poor health forced her to return to Burma where her father, Aung San, is still widely remembered.

When she visited her mother in the hospital in 1988, she met many of her people were wounded during the military's crackdown in the 8888 Uprising (demonstration events in 8th August 1988). She realized that political change was needed in Burma. She accepted the role of icon in support of self-determination by the Burmese people and devoted herself to activities in support of goals of greater political freedoms.

Suu Kyi founded a political party (National League for Democracy-NLD) and clearly won the 1990 elections. However, the Burmese military refused to accept the result of the election and moved to bring Suu Kyi under control. She and her family became separated when her husband and children were banned from Burma and she was put under a house arrest for more than a decade.

Due to her family's efforts, she became the first woman in Asia to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet their separation continued because neither could Suu Kyi attend the ceremony nor could her husband Michael Aris see her one last time before his early death.

The reveals the true history of Aung San Suu Kyi and it was mainly pointed out the endure love of her and her husband rather than political points.

It is a French-English co-production directed by Luc Besson, starring Michelle Yeoh as Aung San Suu Kyi and David Thewlis as her late husband Michael Aris. Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest when the movie was created. But she has been released in November 2010. Her party won many seats during bi-election in April 2012 and now she, as one of parliament members, has being involved in reforming the Burma as democratic country.

Concerning with THE LADY, Aung San Suu Kyi said she would hesitate to watch the film because she wasn't too sure to be up to it already, although she asked for a copy while the movie director, Luc Besson, visited her house.

One of the delicious that I ate (by kyawkowin)

 

The delicious fruit that I like most is the fruit of Rambutan.

The Rambutan Tree is a medium-sized tropical tree that can grow to heights of up to 20 meters. While they are popular garden trees, Rambutan trees do best on organically rich, deep soils on hilly terrain as they need good drainage. Rambutan trees bear fruit twice a year, once in the late fall and again late spring. Grown from seed, Rambutan trees can take between 5 to 6 years to bear fruit, while budded trees may fruit after 2 to 3 years, with optimum production in 8 to 10 years.

ၾကက္ေမာက္ပင္သည္အလတ္စားအရြယ္အပူပိုင္းေဒသေပါက္ပင္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး ၂၀မီတာအထိ ျမင့္တက္ေပါက္ေရာက္ပါတယ္။ဒီအပင္ဟာ လူၾကိဳက္မ်ားတဲ့ ဥယ်ာဥ္သီးႏွံျဖစ္ၿပီး ေျမၾသဇာေကာင္းတဲ့ ေတာင္ေပၚေျမေနရာ ေရစီးေရလာ ေကာင္းတဲ့ေနရာမ်ိဳးမွာဆိုရင္အေကာင္းဆံုး ရွင္သန္ေပါက္ေရာက္ပါတယ္။

တစ္ႏွစ္ကို ေဆာင္းဦးပိုင္းနဲ႔ ေႏြေႏွာင္းပိုင္းေတြမွာ ႏွစ္ၾကိမ္သီးၿပီးအေစ့ကေနစိုက္ပ်ိဳးၾကပါတယ္။ အသီးစသီးဖို႔ ၾကက္ေမာက္ပင္တစ္ပင္ဟာ ၅ႏွစ္ကေန ၆ႏွစ္ေလာက္ အခ်ိန္ယူရၿပီး အထြက္အေကာင္းဆံုးအခ်ိန္ေတြကေတာ့ ၈ႏွစ္သားကေန ၁၀ႏွစ္သားကာလျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဖူးဖူးေနတဲ့ အပင္ေတြဆိုရင္ ၂ႏွစ္ကေန ၃ႏွစ္အတြင္း အသီးသီးႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

Although this tree is not native species of our country, most of Myanmar people like this fruit and grow a large range within the country. In April and Spetember, there will be street vendors selling the brunches of rambutan fruits along the streets. We call this fruit "Kyeit Mauk".

ၾကက္ေမာက္ပင္ဟာ က်ေနာ္တို႔တိုင္းျပည္ရဲ႕ မ်ိဳးရင္းေတာ့မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳးအမ်ားစုကေတာ့ ၾကက္ေမာက္သီးကို ၾကိဳက္ႏွစ္သက္ၾကၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံတြင္းမွာ က်ယ္ျပန္႔စြာ စိုက္ပ်ိဳးၾကပါတယ္။ ဧၿပီနဲ႔ စက္တင္ဘာလ မွာဆိုရင္ ၾကက္ေမာက္သီးအခိုင္ေတြကို လမ္းေဘးေစ်းသည္ေတြဟာလမ္းေတြတေလွ်ာက္ေရာင္းေနၾကပါၿပီ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔အေခၚကေတာ့ ၾကက္ေမာက္သီးပါ။
 Rambutan fruit is juicy and delicious with a pleasant flavor and aroma. Fruit is a good source of sugar and hence sweet in taste. It is  rich in Vitamin C and other vitamins and minerals. Rambutan fruit can be used as a fresh dessert fruit or can be processed into different items like dried fruit pulp, jams, jelly, fruit concentrates.

 


ၾကက္ေမာက္သီးဟာ အရည္ရြမ္းတယ္။ ႏွစ္လိုဖြယ္ရနံ႔နဲ႔ အရသာရွိပါတယ္။ သၾကားဓာတ္ၾကြယ္၀တဲ့ အသီးအႏွံ ျဖစ္လို႔ အရသာဟာ ခ်ိဳပါတယ္။ ဗီတာမင္ စီ ဓာတ္နဲ႔ အျခားဗီတာမင္နဲ႔ သတၲဳဓာတ္ေတြ ေပါမ်ားစြာပါ၀င္ပါတယ္။ ၾကက္ေမာက္သီးကို လတ္ဆတ္တဲ့ အခ်ိဳတည္းတဲ့ အသီးအေနနဲ႔ေရာ အသီးအဖတ္ေတြကို ယိုထိုးၿပီး သံုးေဆာင္သလို ဂ်ယ္လီနဲ႔ သစ္သီးအႏွစ္ေတြကဲ့သို႔ေသာ အမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးေသာပံုစံေတြနဲ႔ စီမံႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

Unique Horse Carriage Transportation in my home town, Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar (by Naw May Lay 노멀리)

I was born in a cool and hilly region of Myanmar and it is called ‘Pyin Oo Lwin’  located about 70 km far away from the second capital city, Mandalay.  Pyin Oo Lwin is also known as " Pan Myo Daw", means "The City of Flowers", for its different species and colorful flowers grown intensively.

During the British colonial occupation, the British, in 1896, developed the town as a hill station because of its cool alpine climate, especially during the hot season. The colonial government of Myanmar would move to Pyin Oo Lwin during the hot season to escape from the high heat and humidity of Yangon,   former capital city.

There are many British colonial houses and Christian churches in Pyin Oo Lwin. Most of the colonial houses are situated at the south end of the circular road and these houses make high attraction to visitors. Many interesting places can be explored in the town.

But one of the most attractions to tourists is the ‘HORSE CARRIAGE’.  It is very unique transportation as well as a symbol of town. Whoever comes to Pyin Oo Lwin cannot wait to try this horse carriage as it can be found only in this area out of Myanmar.

Only four people are available to seat in the carriage and the driver takes his seat on the roof. But some customers used to find funny experiences by sitting on the bench of the backside. But it is illegal action because of high risks in danger. Making site seeing around the town by this horse carriage will make unforgettable memory to everybody.

 Nowadays, although modernized transportations such as motor bites and cars are growing up in the town, native people are still addictive to see this horse carriage as a symbol of their town. On the other hand, this unique transportation attracts visitors and it will also provide the economy of the local people.

So… I am proud of my lovely home town for having such unique transportation   ‘HORSE CARRIAGE’ and would recommend you not to forget to try it if you will be there one day.

You are warmly welcome to Myanmar as well as to my home town, Pyin Oo Lwin.