Champagne!

I spent the day wondering the streets, being stared at, eating as much street food as possible and generally getting to know Yangon. I met up with Nick and Liv from the airport ride and we walked to the famous golden Shwedagon Pagoda for sunset.

In the evening we went for some more street food and then headed north in a taxi to a famous music bar called Mr Guitar. When we arrived, we discovered that it'd been closed for two years but the taxi driver hadn't realised. Instead we went to a fancy wine bar full of tourists and expensive cocktails, so left after one drink. We'd had our hearts set on live music so I looked up potential venues and found a club inside a hotel. We headed there but didn't exactly have high hopes. We arrived at the ParkRoyal Hotel and had to go through a security check and then walked around the hotel trying to find the club. We ended up in the basement carpark and eventually found 'Club 5'.

It was clearly a high-end hotel and we were definitely under-dressed. The club cost $12 each to get in, which is a fortune for us poor travellers, so we started to haggle. We were all in a good mood and we didn't really care about going in, so we joked around with the staff, trying our luck to get in for much less. At one point I even told them we were 'One Direction' (that didn't work). Firstly they offered Liv to go in for free and us guys to pay the $12 each. Then we got them down to $8 each. We continued joking around and in the end we made the manager laugh so much that he just let us all in for free!

Once inside, we found various rich-looking people sat around. The band were just finishing up before a break and then a group of teenagers did some street dancing, followed by a catwalk show of 'Thai models'. It was all completely surreal but good fun. We moved to the front of the bar, closest to the stage for a better view of the entertainment and a half-Thai, half-Swiss guy came over to me and said that I look like Sergio Ramos and jokingly asked for my autograph. I signed on a napkin "Sergio xx". A few minutes later, he sent over three large shots of vodka for us. I think it was the first time any of us had been sent drinks by a stranger at a bar.

Soon after that, the manager came over and said to me and Liv "you are very lucky, you are being given a bottle". A different man from across the bar had sent over a bottle of Champagne for us! We later checked and it was $200! We couldn't believe it. We're in Myanmar and we've just been bought a bottle of Champagne by a local. Our grins couldn't have been any bigger and we couldn't stop laughing at the ridiculous situation we found ourselves in.

The Champagne guy (a local, probably in his 50s) later come over to us and it quickly became apparent that he had his eye on Liv, so we had to pretend to be a couple. His initial reaction was to say "Bullshit!" and walk off. He wanted to dance with Liv but she clearly wasn't comfortable with him and it got a little bit heated. He pointed his finger right in my face (apparently a big sign of aggression) and said "You don't know who I am!"

We didn't let it phase us and spent the rest of the evening with the half-Thai guy (in the photo). He continued to buy us drinks and we helped him finish his bottle of Jack Daniels. We sent requests to the band, including Michael Jackson and Nick moonwalked across the dance floor.

It was an amazing, hilarious and surreal night - one that couldn't have been further from what I imagined my time in Myanmar to be like.