Alki in Southeast Asia and me not working - Week 2!

Sunday, July 15th – Showered and laundered. Although we had only said goodbye about 3 hours earlier, we missed Wendy and Jamie so much we had to have dinner with them. Poom, Jeff and Nong came too! (Poom is a really cool Thai tattoo artist I met at a bar the night of my birthday party. We were friends before I left, and then we started dating, but recently realized that wasn’t a very good idea, so now we’re back to being friends. He’s probably been my closest friend here since Jeff and Renata left.) Staring at the menu at the resturant made us all really miss the buffet at the Park. After that we were all kind of dead and exhausted. We said goodbye, Alki and I got foot massages, which I think I feel asleep during, and then we went home.

Monday – Jeff called and asked if we wanted to go to Laos on Tuesday. He had mentioned this before but I didn’t think it was really going to happen. But Monday we went to a travel agent and bought tickets for Tuesday. This is when we realized that Alki’s ATM/credit card didn’t work. There’s a 3% charge for using a credit card so we walked to the ATM to get cash out and it didn’t work. And then she said fine, I’ll use it as a credit card, and it didn’t work again. Then we tried a bunch of other ATMs and nothing worked. Her bank is in France. So after a lot of Skype-ing France and 5,000 different numbers for her bank, she found out that the talented office staff at Elephant Nature Park had charged her credit card three times so it was maxed out. Eventually, Monday night I think, she got the money back and it worked again. Phew that was close!

Tuesday – Poom drove Jeff, Alki and me to the airport. It was tearful. Jeff left Laos to come back to Chiang Mai to go back to Bangkok to go home. Indefinitely. So this was the last time Poom, Jeff and I were in Chiang Mai together.

While we’re at the airport Jeff asks if we have passport photos. I happened to have a bunch because of all of my visa and work permit paperwork. But I completely forgot I would need them for Laos, and therefore forgot to tell Alki. Damn! But, this is really bad, don’t repeat this to anyone, since I had so many from different times, with different hairstyles, I took a recent one with my hair pulled back and Alki took some of mine from when my hair looked more like hers. I said it jokingly but Alki said yes let’s do it. She’s the bad, immoral one; I’m just too weak to stand up for what’s right. In all honesty, we checked to see if there was a photo booth in the airport and there wasn’t and Laos is so ridiculous I wouldn’t be surprised if they sent her back or something. So the plan was to scatter ourselves so it wouldn’t be too obvious. But that didn’t work because we were somehow the first ones off the plane and got so excited that we were like first and second in line. But being white in Southeast Asia is like being Asian in Kentucky or something. White people all look the same. No one said a thing. We got through even though I was scared I was going to scream out a confession or puke in the immigration line at the time. Oh, and Laos is the only place where I’ve seen Canadians wishing they were Americans. Laos visa for an American – 35USD, Laos visa for a Canadian – 42USD. Ha! Of course, my American dollars were in my bag so I had to pay with baht and they use an exchange rate from 5 years ago and I think I paid over 42USD. Oh well.

So lessons for Laos – 1) have passport photos (turns out it’s like $1 to get them to take your picture there) 2) have American dollars 3) be American.

I can’t remember much about Tuesday. This was Jeff’s last Southeast Asian adventure before going home, so we let him do as much as he wanted. He bargained with the tuk-tuk dude, he decided on a guesthouse, he spoke his Thai and did his thing. Thai and Lao aren’t exactly the same, but they’re similar and because no one’s going to translate things into Laos (like TV shows, movie, books, etc.) most Laos people grow up listening to a lot of Thai, but speaking Laos and seem to be confused about the similarity between the two. I listened to a lot of conversations that went like this.

Every Lao person Jeff spoke to in Thai - “Oh you speak Lao!”
Jeff - “No, I can speak Thai. Not Lao.”
“Oh, it’s the same. If you speak Thai, you can speak Lao.”
“Not really. It’s close. But it’s not the same.”
“But I understand everything you say.”
“But I don’t understand everything you say.”
“Really? But it’s the same.”
“It’s close. Not exactly the same.”

Tuesday night we checked out the night market, which is like a calmer, more interesting version of the night bazaar in Chiang Mai. It’s weird bargaining in American dollars. I don’t like it. Baht is more fun. They have kip (10,000 kip = $1), but they try to get dollars for everything. We ran into a cool table with two Lao guys behind it. It’s called Big Brother Mouse and it’s an NGO that writes fun, education stories in Lao for Lao kids to get them excited about reading. They do books in only Lao and in Lao and English. So they sell the books for you to either bring home as souvenir or give to some Lao kids by yourself or buy books and donate them back for them to hand out. They make trips to schools and orphanages and hand out the books. High school and university students do all the stories and artwork. At this counter we also got a booklet called Stay Another Day in Laos or something. It turned into our bible. It had lists of “do good” projects, stores and businesses all over Laos and what you can do to find out and support them. Much better than Lonely Planet.

That night we went to an internet café and as we were leaving these three kids came in and told us that there had been three incidents of girl’s getting their bags stolen in the past three nights and that the police, tourist police, guesthouse people have all been completely useless. That wasn’t anything I had heard of while I was there last time. Oh yeah, I was in Laos in January 2006 and it was weird to be back. It’s so nice to come back to a place that you know about already. It saves so much time!

Wednesday was superproductive day #1. We walked around in the ridiculous heat all morning, and then headed out to the waterfalls in the afternoon. We shared a tuk tuk with 2 couples. One couple was nice. One couple was mean. The mean couple had to get a bus that was leaving at 5pm so they wanted to leave at 4pm. We were told we would stay until 5, but that was okay with us. The dude of the mean couple walked away from the tuk tuk driver saying, “Don’t fuck us over!” and stormed off. Mean mean mean! So we walked around, went swimming, checked out some bears and were back at 3:50. We saw the nice couple. They said they had been sitting there since 3:30pm. We saw our tuk tuk driver. We didn’t see the annoying couple. We waited. The tuk tuk driver was scared because he didn’t want to leave without them and fuck them over and I don’t think they hadn’t paid yet either. We waited until 4:40 I think. Drove all around looking for them. What jerks!!! They left and didn’t tell anyone. The tuk tuk driver was sitting in his tuk tuk the whole time. They could have at least told him! On the way there Jeff sat in the front with his new best friend and Alki and I sat in the back with two other couples, playing immature games where we talk about boys while ease dropping on the other couple’s conversation.

“Have you done Vietnam?”
“Oh yeah, it was great. Really nice. We were there for 3 days. Have you done Angkor Wat?”
”No, not yet! We’ll be there for two days next month.”

I don’t like the phrase “done” when referring to traveling. And I hate when people go to some place for 2 days and then say they have “done” it. I wouldn’t even say I’ve “done” Thailand. What does “done” mean? Like you have a checklist and then you can check it off when it’s done? Also, the nice couple was traveling for a couple of weeks. The mean couple was traveling for 18 months I said. And they were young. How do young people travel for a year and a half? I figured it out. They fuck over tuk tuk drivers. Excuse my language, but those people really made me mad.

Anyway, our freaked out tuk tuk driver eventually drove us back to town after we did our best to explain that the people were bad and he didn’t need to look ro worry about them anymore.

Back to the waterfalls. Bright blue water. It felt like a movie. And somehow the first pool we went to we only shared with a German couple. The other levels with swimming areas had a lot of people, but we got to play by ourselves! As friendly and outgoing as Jeff, Alki and I we’re also really snotty and we think(/know) we’re so much better than everyone, so we didn’t want to have to talk to other people. Lao people, ok, western foreigners, no way. But the German couple was okay cause they took our picture. Actually we’re only against annoying, smelly hippie backpackers. There was a "bear sanctuary" with maybe 15 bears. But it was pretty small, like the size of the playground at Neighborhood Park and made me feel weird.

After we got back from the waterfall we headed to the Royal Ballet Theater and watched some dancing. It was similar to dancing I had seen in Cambodia and I was exhausted, so I fell asleep. Oops. After the show we went to the market and got sticky rice and grilled chicken on a stick. I love sticky rice and grilled chicken on a stick. Jeff tried to be cool and buy “interesting” food but it turned out to be “really spicy” and “kinda gross.” I wasn’t jealous.

After eating we started drinking. One thing that everyone in Thailand knows about Laos is Beer Lao. It’s apparently the best beer in Southeast Asia. I didn’t care, but Jeff and Alki were excited. So we decided to go “convenience store” hopping on the way to the fancy, expensive bar. First stop, night market. Small can 80 cents. Second stop, 1st convenience shop, large bottle 90, 3rd stop, 2nd convenience shop, large bottle 80 cents! Then we got to the bar. It’s called Hive. It’s as cool and trendy as anything in New York City. (I think. I have very limited experience in “cool and trendy” of New York.) As we walked up a tuk tuk driver asked if we wanted to go to a disco. It was a young kid and Jeff proceeded to make best friend #3. Best friend #1 – guesthouse boy, best friend #2 – waterfall tuk tuk driver. Tuk tuk dude’s name is Leh. He said he was 23, but he looked 16. We said we’d come find him when we wanted to go to the dance club. We kept our word, like good westerns and headed to the dance club with our new friend. Jeff invited his new best friend inside and we tried to have fun. But there weren’t many people and then the electricity went out. Jeff was convinced that it was some plot to scam us out of money, but I was pretty sure they would have preferred if the power stayed on and we stayed longer and bought more drinks. Jeff can be a little pessimistic sometimes. So Hive Bar and the dance club I did last time. Then, something new that wasn’t there last time – a bowling alley. Weird! It’s the only thing open after midnight in Luang Prabang, so while all the Lao people are going to sleep so they can wake up early and give alms to the monks at 5:30am, western backpackers go to a bowling alley with their tuk tuk drivers. There are only 5 lanes and a ton of people so really it’s a bar, not a bowling alley. We stayed there for a while like good little backpackers, but it really wasn’t that much fun. Jeff took off to try to speak Thai with the girls behind the counter and I sat trying to translate flirting between Leh and Alki.

Thursday was unproductive day. We went to a cafe/bookstore with really comfortable full-length pillows and after eating breakfast I fell asleep while Alki read. I eventually woke up and we went to another place in the Stay Another Day booklet. It was called Kopnoi, which means little frog. They have a bunch of expensive clothing, fabrics and books, but they were having an art exhibit on sticky rice! Sticky rice is so cool. I didn’t learn as much as I wanted about sticky rice, but the photographs were really pretty. I think it was about this time we realized we weren’t sure if Jeff was dead or alive. He had disappeared at the bowling alley and we hadn’t seen or heard from him. Alki and I decided to walk back to our guesthouse calling “Jeff? Jeff? Anyone see Jeff?” I can’t remember much else from Thursday. Probably a lot of coffee and internet. Thursday night was Jeff’s last night so we had a nice little dinner at an Indian restaurant and then probably checked out the market a little bit more.

Friday was superproductive day #2! One of the “things” to do is to watch the alms giving in the morning. Alms giving is when the villagers line up along the street and give food, gifts, money to the monks walking by. As far as I know it happens everywhere, but in Luang Prabang it’s like a big deal because there are so many monks and novices in such a small area. So Friday we woke up early and headed out to be good little Buddhists. Personally, I read not to buy food from the street vendors and if you really feel like it will be something spiritual for you, you should by from a market. I didn’t feel like I knew what was going on, so I was happy standing back and watching it. Jeff wasn’t. He bought some stuff from the first vendor that ran up to him. She didn’t go away. She called her friends over. Jeff was pretty much harassed non-stop for the hour we waited. Some monks and novices walked by and Jeff handed them some stuff. I tried to take pictures but those damn ladies were in the way! After we didn’t see any more monks we went to eat and drink coffee! There we discussed whether or not to climb Mount Phousi (yeah, “pussy”). It’s a small little hill that takes about 15 minutes to walk up. Maybe even 10, but we were all pretty tired. We decided to suck it up and do the “hike” up the “mountain.” When I went last time, I went around sunset and it was packed. Going at 7:00am was a much more pleasant experience. We stayed up there for an hour and had a Luang Prabang photoshoot. I love digital cameras. Jeff doesn’t. So he didn’t have any pictures of anything of the last 2 and half years of him living in South East Asia. So being the good people Alki and I are, we burned a CD for him of all of our pictures. Then lunch at a fancy restaurant with sandwiches with sundried tomatoes and pesto and then back to the guesthouse to say goodbye to Jeff.

AHHH!!!!! Leh, our trusty tuk tuk dude/Jeff’s best friend #3/Alki’s potential future husband met us at our guesthouse and tried to get Alki and me to come to the airport. At first we thought we had more important things to do and then we realized that wasn’t true at all. So we hopped in and all went together.

The airport was really sad. This is Jeff leaving! Jeff is the only person I knew in Chiang Mai when I got here! My first friend! Caroline and Miriam were my good friends too but I always knew they were temporary. And Renata leaving was really sad too, but she lived the life of having lots of foreign friends, mostly speaking English and eating at nice restaurants when she went out and having a kitchen. Jeff was more my style of not having a lot of friends, trying to speak Thai to everyone and eating on the street. He was supposed to stay! I feel like it’s like outliving your parents. It’s just not supposed to happen. I didn’t want to see him go. I was so sad and flustered I dropped my camera in a mud puddle while trying to get back in the tuk tuk.

Back at the guesthouse we decided we cannot wallow in our sadness, we have to go out and freaking carpe diem. We rented some bicycles and set out to see the town. It was so hot and walking around took so long, it was really stupid of us to wait this long to get bicycles. We biked around for a while and found a temple with some novices. We totally freaked them out. Most of them had only been there a couple of days and were only staying for a week, so they were really, really, really shy. Then we headed to town and went to the Big Brother Mouse shop. In the Stay Another Day booklet it said visitors could come and help proofread books. This is my dream come true. There is so much weird English around here the thought of correcting it filled my heart with joy. So we went over there, but they didn’t have any proofreading tasks for us. The task we had involved looking at really strange .jpegs they pulled from the internet, and then giving them a one word captions so that they could eventually be put in an English alphabet book. I asked if they wanted nouns, verbs, adjectives or what, but he said anything was fine. Here’s an example of a picture. A woman in a superhero costume is ironing a green sweater while smiling. What one word can you write for this? I’ll see if I can find more examples in my journal. They were all kind of weird pictures that could easily be captioned with 8 different words.

After we left there we headed up to the Red Cross to get massages, which was also in the Stay Another Day booklet. I thought it was going to be a Thai massage but then they told us to take off our clothes but didn’t give us any ones to put on. Woah! An oil massage! I don’t usually get those, but it was nice and $3 and the money went to the Red Cross! Next we went over to my old temple. I was nervous. I knew that the two novices I had kept in touch with were both in Vientiane and I was scared the novices would be as lame as the other ones. They were all hunched over a book when we got there. I recognized two of them immediately. And they recognized me. It was alien kid and little guy! I think I probably have pictures of them from last time. Alien kid turned to little guy and started whispering, pointing and smiling. Then alien kid started talking to me.
“You from New York?”
“Yeah.”
“You come here last year?”
“Yeah.”
“You friend with Nenh Thong and Nenh Nan! I remember you!”
“Cool man! What’s up dude?”

They all know “what’s up” from movies and I don’t really use it with my students, so it was fun to use it with them.

I think he looked really cool in front of his novice (nenh) posse.

Eventually we got the rest of them to talk to us. I had told Alki how much fun the kids at this temple were I was really happy we had time to come by and see them. She had already lied to her friends and said that she had talked to a bunch of novices, so it was about time. We read one of the books we bought from Big Brother Mouse and ended up putting our email addresses in it and leaving it there for the novices to read. It was a book with silly rhymes for each vowel sound in Laos, but the English translations didn’t rhyme so they were just random and funny. I think Alki wrote some of them down.

Friday night dinner was with our tuk tuk boy Leh. We went back to the market for more grilled chicken on a stick and sticky rice. While we were eating chicken we saw April (a friend from Elephant Nature Park) and her new slow boat posse! (The “slow boat” is the other way to get from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang. It’s a long mini van ride and then 2 days on an uncomfortable boat down the Mekong. Nice scenery, but really really uncomfortable.) We said, “Yo, we’re going to a bar. Come with our boy Leh, he’s the best tuk tuk driver in Luang Prabang.” They were planning on going there anyway so they jumped in. Full tuk tuk! The tuk tuks in Luang Prabang are different from Chiang Mai. There are two kinds. One is a big bike with a cart on the back that can 4 or 6 people and has open sides. The other kind I guess is called a jumbo. It’s like a mini truck. It can probably hold 8 or 10 westerners or 20 Lao. This is what Leh had. We still called it a tuk tuk, but he called it a jumbo. So back to Hive bar, then back to the dance club (way more fun with more people and electricity) and then back to the bowling alley. We got home late and had a minor run in with what was possible the Laos Opium Mafia, but we were just freaked out for a little bit, no one was hurt. It was just weird.

Saturday I think we went to our fancy coffee shop, Joma, did internet, I bought a slightly ridiculous but I think kind of cool hill tribe skirt, and then headed to the airport. Luang Prabang was nice but 1) I had been there before 2) Jeff left 3) the Laos Opium Mafia was scary, so we left and went to Vientiane.

The flight was nothing interesting. We got to Vientiane and got a cab to the city center and walked around trying to find a guesthouse. We tried one but the cheap rooms were full. Then we found a cheap one with a shared bathroom. It was good enough. They didn’t have a safe though. I was exhausted and went to sleep but Alki wanted to explore so she went out and rented a bicycle.

This is when tragedy struck. Alki rented a bicycle, left her American passport as a deposit, got her bicycle, put her bag in the basket and took off to explore the city. A guy on a motorbike, wearing a helmet came up near her, slowly, and Alki, thinking all people in the world are good and nice slowed down because she thought he wanted to talk. He didn’t want to talk; he wanted to steal her super cute green bag she had bought at the Sunday Market in Chiang Mai. And he did. He stole her bag with her Greek passport (she has two, she came into Laos with her Greek one), that one ATM/credit card, her notebook (oh shit, she probably can’t look up funny lines from the vowel book) and her camera. She tried to yell and scream and follow him on her bicycle but nothing worked. She tried to go to the police station and they stared at her and said to tell her guesthouse.

She came back to the room, woke me up and we went down to talk to the guesthouse guy. He got really upset but couldn’t actually do anything either. He gave us a map and showed us the tourist police and the American embassy and let us use the internet for free. She called the American embassy and said come on Monday and we can help you. The problem now was that she had entered Laos with her Greek passport, but was now going to have to leave with her American one. After realizing we couldn’t do anything else until Monday we went for a walk, bought some Pepperidge Farm cookies and found a Mexican restaurant to eat at. The taste was much more Indian than Mexican and the margaritas sucked, but we were in a nice location to watch the 6pm aerobics class and watching other people do cheesy aerobics moves always makes everyone feel better.

Sunday morning we checked out of sketchy place ($5) and into ridiculously nice place ($15). It was sooooo nice! Traveling with another person is so much cheaper. It’s great. We had a beautiful, clean room with comfortable beds, a beautiful, sparkling clean bathroom with toilet paper and fantastic water pressure and free use of the computer, free breakfast and 20% massages at the place next door. It was amazing. I felt like I was staying at a 5 star hotel. Sunday morning I got an email from Nan with the name of his new temple. We decided to walk there. The directions made it seem really close but it wasn’t. We walked for a very very long time, and this was without even knowing if he would be there or not. While we were walking there we saw a couple of buses with novices drive by. I kept my fingers crossed that he wasn’t in one of them.

He wasn’t! He was there! We showed up. People looked confused for a little bit and then out walks Nan, “Hey, what’s up?” Easy!

We spent a long time there. A lot of them spoke English but never see any tourists because their temple is so far away from the town. There were more actual monks there than at Nan’s last temple in Luang Prabang and while he’s not a monk (he says he doesn’t want to be one) he was getting a little too old for the Luang Prabang temple. Alki talked to one kid who said he was really sick when he was young and his mom promised that if he survived he would become a monk, so now this dude’s a monk. Alki asked if there was anything he missed and he said beer. He was cool. Seemed very normal and real. A lot of times when you talk with novices or monks at a “monk chat” session they sound like they’re repeating a speech. It’s nice to hear honest, personal answers. We went to their little service and sat Buddhist style in the back while they did their chanting stuff. I love hearing the chanting. It gives me the “Philip Glass” kind of listening satisfaction.

Sunday night Thong finally called me back.and we met up for dinner. It was crazy. When I saw Thong last he was a 17-year-old happy, smiling boy in an orange robe and a shaved head. Now he’s a 19-year-old university student with a huge head of hair, trendy club clothes, and a fancy camera phone with Akon ring tones. Thong offered to bring us out to a Vientiane dance club but we were a little too tired and went back to our fancy hotel.

Monday was Alki’s “figure out how to get out of Laos” day. I did want to go with her, but I had this vision of them faxing the immigration papers from Luang Prabang and realizing she had used my picture and things getting really messy so I let her go out by herself and I said I’d meet up later. Around 1pm, I hear from her and she was in her last step of getting her exit visa! I pick up some food from another “Stay Another Day” business, a restaurant called Makhpet run by the Puan Mit (close friend) organization (http://www.friends-international.org/laopdr.html) which is the Laos chapter of Friends International (http://www.friends-international.org).

I think I’ve written about the Friends restaurant/store in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and the drop in center I went to with Mono in Siem Reap. Pretty much the restaurants employs former street kids to teach them about business, the store sells really really cool things (bags, purses, wallets, backpacks and more) made from recycled materials made by the parents of street kids to give them an income so their kids don’t have to be street kids and profits from the restaurant and store go back into the organization to provide health care, education, training, shelter, love all that good stuff to street kids and their families. So I picked up food from there, bought a toiletries bag made out of a Thai rice bag, then went to meet Alki at the Department of Foreign Affairs. We ate and waited and ate and waited, and soon enough Alki was able to walk out with an exit permit! By the way, Alki is luckiest robbery victim ever. Not many people have two passports. If my passport had been stolen I would have had to go to the Embassy, convince them I’m a US citizen, wait for a new passport and then do everything Alki did. Alki got to skip that whole first part. And after Thailand, she was heading to Greece with her family so she could get a new one there. So easy!

We headed back to the Friends restaurant to finish our food. (We hadn’t been given utencils so it was kind of hard to eat the spicy chicken salad.) They were so nice and so friendly! And they even gave us more sticky rice for free! Thong called and came with another friend. We looked at the shop and I think it was cool because there is often so much good stuff going on, but it’s all aimed at westerners. So getting actual Lao people to learn about this place was pretty cool. Thong and his friend seemed genuinely interested. We bought some more stuff and headed back towards our hotel to get our stuff packed to get ready to leave Vientiane. Thong’s friend had taken his bike and then somehow gotten arrested so Thong had to get to the police station and we had to get to the bus station. We said goodbye to Thong. We got to the bus station but had missed the bus, so we had to get another tuk tuk to the border. The driver was nice and didn’t pull any sketchy stuff. We stopped and picked up a Lao lady whose bike had broken down. We gave her the second book from the Big Brother Mouse.

We got to the border, waited in confusing lines, waited for a bus, and finally said goodbye to Laos.

Phew… Week 2 completed! Two more weeks with Alki!!

Pictures from home - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wigramroad/sets/72157601449996418/
Pictures from Elephant Nature Park - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wigramroad/sets/72157601449393758/
Pictures from Laos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wigramroad/sets/72157601775393486/

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