The cheerful girl cutely stuck out her tongue

Girl sticking out tongue — Cheerful girl

The girl I met by the roadside was dressed far more stylishly than I had expected. But what left the strongest impression was her cheerfulness. This was Pyay, a provincial town in Myanmar. When you walk its streets, friendly smiles are not uncommon, yet such uninhibited brightness is rarer. When I lifted my camera, the girl narrowed her eyes and burst into laughter, then stuck out her tongue as if to complete the performance. For a moment I wondered if she was self-conscious about being photographed, but the opposite seemed true. She appeared to be amused by the whole situation, perhaps by me as much as by the camera.

She looked to be of school age, and girls with that kind of energy probably laugh often in the classroom as well. Whether she is the popular one among her classmates, I have no idea, and I had no intention of conducting that level of research.

Pyay itself is an old town on the Ayeyarwady River, not far from the site of Sri Ksetra, an ancient settlement that occasionally appears in history books. Yet when you actually walk through the streets, history is quieter than everyday life. What you hear instead are the ordinary sounds of the town. The girl’s laughter was one of them. It carried farther than expected, bouncing off the walls of the narrow lane. A dog that had been dozing lazily behind her lifted its head in mild alarm, as if wondering why its afternoon nap had suddenly been interrupted.

Pyay on Google Map

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