On a busy strip in eastern Myanmar, restaurants with bomb shelters serve sizzling plates of beef washed down with Belgian beer and French wine. Teenagers mingle in snooker halls, women relax in beauty salons and revolutionaries get inked in tattoo parlours.
From dawn, steaming bowls of noodle soup are devoured in teashops and, come dusk, shaky bass echoes from a karaoke club. But unlike the country’s heartland, this settlement has one notable absence: military rule.
