New house, counting dead mosquitoes and bust rollers.

Saturday December 9^th 2013

PO Box

And we now have a PO Box, so anyone wanting to send anything, please send it to Ruairí Ó hEithir and/or Martine Oliver, PO Box 5070, Boulevard Khouvieng, Vientiane, Lao PDR. But, if you are sending anything, do let us know as we aren’t going to be checking it unless we think there is something there for us!!

New house

I mentioned before, the house we are staying in at the moment is lovely but too small for teaching in and with no garden. The noise we have actually got used to and it is nice to have Lao neighbours on each side but the lack of a garden is critical. So we have been house-hunting with the help of various agencies and websites such as findinlao.com and the various Lao Facebook pages. And this morning we paid the one month’s deposit on a house and agreed a list of furniture with our new landlord plus a few repairs and paintjobs that need to be done. We sign the contract on December 16^th and move in!!

As you can see from the photos the garden is huge! And once the rainy season starts the grass will grow back almost immediately so we may need someone to come in and cut the grass (Alfred: Grass-cutting here is done by hand with a type of sickle so Ruairí is not volunteering his services). There are numerous trees and most of them bear fruit: pomelo, orange, starfruit, mango and a few more we aren’t sure about. Nice to be able to pick your own fruit!!

For those who are interested the house is located just beside the Chinese Embassy – in  fact, we share a wall with them. It is a diplomatic area, stuffed with embassies and diplomatic residences and the house opposite us is owned by the Lao Prime Minister’s personal advisor, so not quite the same type of Lao neighbours that we have become used to! But a nice area, near an open-air fruit and vegetable market and about 20 minutes’ cycle from the centre of town.

 

 

 

Learning Lao through killing mosquitoes

I have taken Alfred’s advice (Alfred: Why? You never have before?) and have been keeping a running total in Lao of how many mosquitoes I have killed with my electronic tennis racquet. At the moment I am on neung loi sii-sip baed (or 148 as we say it) and I must say in the markets, bars and restaurants, being able to say the amounts in Lao does seem to go down well. Numbers are pretty straightforward in Lao (Alfred: Unlike Kinyarwanda! Remember how long those words were!). Once you have one to ten you are pretty much set. You needs specific words for twenty, a hundred, a thousand, one hundred thousand (which is a specific word) and a million. Thirty, forty and so on are just three-ten and four-ten. And Lao seem to have abandoned their traditional numerals in favour of Arabic ones (Alfred: As in, the numbers we use in the West) which is a pity in one way, but does make life a lot easier on us falang.

Now I just need to start learning (Alfred: And USING!) some actual phrases!

The ‘Really?’ section

 We saw this house on the way home from paying the deposit on our house. It seems to have been partly constructed from an airplane cockpit! (Alfred: It reminds me of that crazy dog-car in 'Dumb and Dumber')

 OK, we gave up on this one. The nearest big supermarket, D-Mart, has hundreds of these. Anyone know what purpose they serve?? (Alfred: Of course, the way the photo is taken, it could read 'Butt Roller' but that wouldn't really be any better).