Yangon’s Pansodan Street: where you can get a cockroach removed from your ear, among many things

Ear cleaners, roadside plumbers and typewriters for hire: just a sample of the antiquated jobs found on the pavements of Yangon’s Pansodan Street, where old-world businesses still find customers.

For years, tourists have been fascinated by odd trades in Yangon, from cycle trishaws swerving through traffic to roadside clerks going clicketyclack on typewriters.

Some professions have become victims of the political and economic reforms that started in earnest in 2011.

Iced water sellers melted away as improved power supplies made fridges viable; bus conductors lost out in the revamp of the city’s transport network; and landline phone stalls are a relic in the mobile era.

But Pansodan, the beating heart of Myanmar’s biggest city, remains home to obscure professions and evokes nostalgia among those who have plied their trade for decades along the potholed pavements below ageing colonial architecture.

“This is the street for the books, for the writers, for the poets. Everyone comes, everyone learns here,” Aung Soe Min, a long-time gallery owner on Pansodan, said.