Hey tuk tuk, you want lady?...

Vientiane is a great city to recharge in. We read that it is one of the slowest paced capital cities in the world, and that is no joke. The pace here, "Lao time," is by any Americans standards SLOW. Even the Mekong river it sits on just bops around without a care in the world- slowly moving north half the year and south the rest. We have been surprised by how safe and at home we feel in this very foreign city. I'm not sure if this is actual fact, but there seems to be a hopeful feel among the people. since we had almost no knowledge we did a little bit of base level education on this country, and it's pretty interesting. Laos has not always been a unified people (there are still up to about 130 ethnic groups here) and it has a long history of influence by it's neighbors - Thailand, Cambodia, and China. In the 1870s it became part of French ruled indochina. In the 1950s, the French granted Laos sovereignty. Despite a declaration at the Geneva Conference that Laos be a neutral country (the Switzerland model) during the Vietnam war, this was not how it played out. We aren't going, but there is another land mine museum here that has equally horrific stories to the one in Cambodia. Since then, Laos has had a surprisingly stable one party government. And, despite it's rocky history, the Lao GDP has steadily increased over the past decade, and though it is still among the poorer countries in the world, at least to Alex and I, and in the capital (I don't want to make sweeping generalizations because I know there is much of the countryside and other cities we won't be seeing) the people seem to be taking on a "fake it til you make it" approach. One thing we are very impressed with is the lack of beggars (we have only seen one, and that was on the outskirts of town, which I'll get to in a minute). I remarked that this was better than Los Angeles, Alex one-upped me saying it's better than Des Moines. While tourism is gradually finding it's way here, the Lao customs are still very important to follow - take your shoes off at every entranceway, accept the water you are greeted with at stores, do not touch an adult on the head (okay, we haven't had to think too hard about that one).

After a lazy afternoon yesterday (after lunch we returned to the hotel, I taught Alex cribbage - so get excited John and Liz - and we were promptly asleep by 8), this morning we set out to see all that we could of this small and manageable city. Lonely Planet was our guide. First stop - shopping! We went to two very cool stores. The first, an antique shop that sold beautiful Buddha statues (I picked up one that was 200 years old), artwork, and jewelry. Then we went on to an awesome store that sells products by two very notable not for profit organizations - one that sells handicrafts made by the Hmong women (who live in the rural mountains), the other selling Lao hand dyed silk, which is a painstakingly specific process that might die out due to machinery and chemical dyes. Then we went to the market, which is just so much less hectic than the previous ones I've written about - no one tries to force anything on you.

After that, lonely planet finally failed us. They mentioned a great spa that offered traditional Lao massages and saunas, and on Saturday afternoons from 4-530 they offer meditation time to the public, with a question and answer time slot right after. Although we were scared to try meditating, especially for that long, we decided that since we were here on a Saturday, we might as well try it. we headed out for the 1.5 mile walk from the center of the city. Oh the places we went. We got so lost! Not lost in a scary way, danger was certainly never upon us (it was kinda like a rural suburb or something), but no one could tell us how to get there - not even the staff at a very nice looking hotel. We had been walking in the heat and HUMIDITY (Alex looked like she'd just gotten out of a pool) for far too long and just didn't care about the destination anymore. We had been walking all day and just wanted our air-conditioned hotel room again. unfortunately, a tuk tuk was nowhere to be seen. This would never NEVER have happened within miles of Bangkok, or Siem Reap where drivers would call out one after another "hey lady, you want tuk tuk?" thwre are shirts, and bags, and stickers with this phrase all over Siem Reap. a bit slap happy, Alex and I found ourselves is a fit of giggles that here in the burbs of Vientiane, we were coining the phrase, "hey tuk tuk, you want lady?!" our wishes we're eventually granted and we got home. We estimate that we walked at least four extra miles today...

One last thing, while I can say I've been to Vientiane, Alex cannot. Ask anyone and they'll tell you, you haven't been to Vientiane if you haven't drunk a Lao Beer on the Mekong at Sundown. While I happily obliged, someone fancied a cocktail. So really, only one of us has truly been.



Our view of the Mekong (that's Thailand across the way!)



Proof I came.

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