Square Inch Anthropology

This was more comfortable than it appeared.

The practice of writing the date of either purchase or creation down upon the object. In the dresser's case, the family who purchased it wrote the date on it once they had moved it into their home. When I asked the matriarch of the family, the one who had written the date upon the dresser, she asserted that she simply "didn't know" why she had written the purchase date upon it - merely that she had seen other families do so and was mimicking them. As for the family that owned the bucket, they didn't have any particular reason as to why they chose to purchase a bucket with "2010" embedded into it.

These combination tables+benches pack seamlessly into their surroundings during daylight hours - the "Murphy Bed" of tables. These are installed along the wall of a busy driveway leading off a bustling Silom soi. After dark, as motorbike and car-based commuter traffic segues into pedestrian and local resident foot-traffic, down come the tables and the space is repurposed into a street restaurant.

Ubiquitous plastic "teashop stools" repurposed to act as the base of a height-adjustable table at a downtown Yangon sidewalk market (the vendor was just setting up, hence the empty table). Spied while out and about with visiting Southeast Asia hand, Wes H. 

Most street restaurants in Yangon use the same kid-sized plastic chairs for both their affordability and portability. Sidewalk-based restauranteurs must insure their establishment is mobile so they can transport it home with them each day - unless they live on the sidewalk along with their restaurants (which costs extra, of course). During a particularly intense downpour, these chairs have evolved to serve at least two purposes: 

1) Preventing the rain from creating as large a splash radius when it hits the sidewalk, as this pot is positioned under the natural drainage point off of the tarp overhead. 

2) Harvesting the rainwater itself, as being a mobile restaurant means that clean(-ish) water for cooking, dishwashing, tea-brewing, etc., is a scarce resource. Most daytime street restaurants find ways to get negotiate around the fact that they have no running water or electricity, or, as in this case, find clever ways of generating their own.