In the city of Mandalay, where there ain’t no flying fishes nor have there ever been any flying fishes along any road going there either, a woman on the tour ran out of space on her not very new Samsung phone. Not knowing that it was of the vintage where you could take the back off it and look, I googled the phone and determined it would take a microSD memory card. The morning before we left, we finally had a chunk of time and I suggested we Grab a tuk tuk, hit a phone store, buy a microSD memory card, and tuk tuk back to the hotel before the bus left.

I googled the closest phone store as one is wont to do in unfamiliar cities, and casually asked the doorman for the best closest phone store. He gave me one that was a bit further away, but I entered it into Grab, the tuk tuk arrived, and off we went through the morning rush hour traffic in Mandalay.

When we got to the phone store, about twenty sweet young things approached us in matching phone store uniforms to help us. Since neither of us spoke any of 136 languages of Myanmar, I asked if anyone spoke English. One of the girls said ‘yes’ and I carefully explained that we needed a ‘microSD card’ for the phone which produced absolutely no response Now trying not to be the usual idiot tourist, I did have a picture loaded on ma phone of a 128GB memory card, which I thought would hold a whole lottta pictures.

‘Memory card?’ she asked and off we went to the memory card area. A discussion broke out in the local language, and a tech guy was summoned who knew more about the phone than I did. He recommended a 32 GB card, Ma mouth almost dropped open when they pulled the back off the phone and inserted the memory card. I had figured it had the newer SIM card, microSD popup that you need a pin to open — yes I am past my eye exam date. Vivian paid for it, they made sure it worked, and we went outside to Grab a tuk tuk back to the Mandalay Hilton after saying goodbye to our twenty newest friends.