Out and about in Vientiane

(Alfred: While Ruairí goes galivanting about, I am left in charge of guarding the most precious possession of our household - the internet connection. Just in case anyone out there thought I wasn't pulling my weight or anything. Just wanted to make a point.

Oh, yeah - blogspot is doing its usual wonderful job with photo placement so you may have to hunt a bit to match up text with photo! Have fun!)


SIGHTS OF VIENTIANE
Vientiane is a really nice place to live and it is amazing how quickly you get used to things that seemed remarkable and unusual at first. One is the incredible variety of temples, wats, stupas and other fabulously ornate buildings that you find on pretty much every street. Just cycling for fifteen minutes from our house to the centre of town we pass at least five large temples (a short detour would take in two more and a giant Vietnamese pagoda). Last Sunday I decided to stretch my legs and do a proper cycle for a few hours and took a few photos of things I came across (Alfred: Actually, some of these photos are from other days but let's go along with the fiction). The first set of photos is from the Victory Arch in the very centre of town, referred to as Patuxay (Alfred: Because, em, wait, don't tell me .... that's its name!). Its alternate name is the Vertical Runway as it was built with cement donated to the Lao government for the building of a runway at Wattay Airport. The alternate name fits as it is a rather unimpressive concrete block whose decorations never got finished (with the exception of a reasonably pretty ceiling inside). The information plaque does, however, take the prize for the most honest description of a national monument I have ever seen!

 
 

Around the Arch are some nice fountains, a Gong of Peace (you can see Ireland at three o'clock) and a huge wedding-cake building across the road which is the Lao National Assembly.

 

 


North-east of Patuxay you find That Luang, one of the most important sites in all of Lao: its golden stupa decorates the banknotes and is a centrepiece of national celebrations. Around it are temples and other religious buildings, including one with a remarkable reclining Buddha.

 

 

 

There was also this amazing bird which Martine identified as an Adjutant Bird or Adjutant Stork sitting on a wall in one of the temples in the centre of town (we think Wat Simeuang but we're not sure).

 I then headed south along the eastern edge of town, a long, long, highway, dusty and pretty much uninteresting except that when I looked to my left I could see what pretty much looked like countryside, reminding me of how small Vientiane really is.

CATS

Having two cats has really had a major impact on our lives (Alfred: Listen to the roar of laughter from cat-owners and even non-cat-owners everywhere! Duh!). Food, litter trays, vaccinations, spaying (to come), sources of cat litter, aggressive neighbouring cats, getting stuck up trees, demanding affection and clawing their way up your legs if they don't get it fast enough. Astérix (the smaller, male cat) was dropped off at this house to the previous tenant when he was very, very small and tends to want to suckle all the time (Alfred: And people thought I was joking about the lactating! - see earlier blog. And you won't be surprised to hear that Ruairí is wearing shorts a lot less now!) But they are great fun and great company and good cockroach-killers!

Obélix at front, Astérix behind.

 OTHER ODDITIES

Hot dog. It was 29 degrees that day. I mean ... really?

There is a prize for the first person who can guess what Martine is doing in this photo.

 I am used to having my name misspelled in a massive variety of hideous ways, in Ireland as much as abroad. But this one takes the biscuit. Already in Laos I have been Mr Martin, Mr Oliver and (in a wonderful flashback moment to Rwanda) Mr Ruairí. But the girl drawing up the lease for our new house took photocopies of our passports and this is how she filled out my name! (Alfred: Any particular reason why 'Irish' gets a bigger font and bold print? Just asking).

MOVING HOUSE

Our present house

 Shortly - next Monday in fact - we will be moving to our new house. It will be a wrench leaving this house, where we have been very happy and which was very handy for the centre of town. But its small size with no room for teaching and the complete absence of a garden (Alfred: Or any sunlight, to be honest) meant we really had to look for somewhere else. Mind you, renting a house here is not a very straightforward proposition, the most awkward part of which is the necessity to pay an entire year's rent up front (in our case, $6,600). This becomes even more hilarious when your landlord says he doesn't have a bank account and wants it in cash! (Alfred: HE changed his mind, under a little bit of pressure!)  Now the stand-off is that he (and the agency) want the money transferred into an account whose number they have given us BEFORE we have inspected the house (to see the furniture has been installed and the repairs carried out) and before we have signed the contract. Watch this space.

SKIN WHITENING
I spoke before about how Lao women (and men also) have this thing about skin whitening. But this ad on the side of a tuk-tuk really blew me away! Is this for real???? (Alfred: Please excuse the quality of the photo - Ruairí was cycling beside the tuk-tuk in heavy traffic outside the main market and, to add to the fun, the driver didn't look like he wanted to be photographed!)

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).

Tiger crying, adverbial monks and a drunken Englishman

A SLICE OF VIENTIANE LIFE

A recent visit to a restaurant provided an interesting variety of insights into different aspects of Lao life. A large, open-air restaurant with a small pond in the middle (on Rue Bourichane near the Thai Consulate if you happen to know Vientiane), it was sparsely populated with two Lao family groups, a falang man (I think Australian) with a female Asian companion and a middle-aged/elderly European man fully dressed in jacket and trousers sitting on his own.

We only wanted a beer but the waitress brought the menus anyway and they were amazing in the way that only badly-translated Asian menus can be! The menu (which was very long and varied) offered – among other items – the following:

· Order river front

· More order river front

· Frog fried salad soffle boil

· Sleeve fish fried egg with garlic

· Fried fish head

· Sour fish head (the head)

· Papaya salad along the dam

· Pork bean frame

· Noodle d-food noodle

· Spaketty

· Spicy fried wild boar bird frog

· Shrimp sleeve fish chilli burn

· Two tilapia heart (Alfred: just how big IS a tilapia?)

· Eggs staffed with minced shrimp and a pork chop (Alfred: just how big are these eggs??)

· Tiger crying

· Tilapia soffle boil stab

· Pork beef boiled nice dip

· Court refers to fish sauce

· Fish refers to a sauce (A)

· River shrimp refers a seafood sauce

Next time we are going to order tiger crying and spicy fried wild boar fish frog with a side order of papaya salad along the dam. Photos will be posted.

As we perused the menu, the waitress having brought two large Beer Lao and a giant bucket of ice but opened only one and filled both our glasses from it, we became aware of someone shouting loudly, a pretty rare event here in Lao. It was our middle-aged/elderly European gentleman who seemed to

a)         have had too much to drink

b)         be in a foul mood

c)         have taken exception to the fact that the groups around him were laughing and having a good time.

And he was shouting in English, and my first thought was ‘Oh God, how embarrassing’, swiftly followed by ‘Please, God, let him not be Irish.’ As the words became clearer, my heart simultaneously rose and sank (Alfred: an interesting phenomenon, whether experienced or observed). He was definitely English but he had only just got started. ‘You facking sit there laughing, you facking (unintelligible) bastards! ‘ And more of the same, on and on. Everyone ignored him, or at least seemed to but it was unpleasant and a sense of vicarious guilt settled upon me (and I think the Australian who finished up his drink and left sooner than one might have expected!). Thankfully, he eventually finished his drink and staggered out the door. Of course, he may indeed be a long-time resident and everyone is quite used to him (Alfred: You may find him on the interview panel when you start applying for jobs!

NOTE: Ruairí did take a photo of the gentleman in question but I figured … nah.)

HEDGE SCHOOL TEACHING

Our very first excursion outside Vientiane was to the Buddha Park near the Friendship Bridge that connects Lao and Thailand. We were invited by my Italian pupil, Maurizio and his friend Alberto who were going there for the day. It is a modern construction with a bewildering array of concrete statues and one giant reclining Buddha but some of the statues are absolutely fascinating! But rather violent! So many of the images involved people being trampled, dismembered or eaten by monsters and demons, severed heads, skulls and whatnot, all with a background of a serene reclining Buddha!

 

 

Even more enjoyable was a group of monks we ran into, one of whom promptly asked me for an English lesson! He wanted me to explain to him how adverbs were constructed and used, so I spent a pleasant twenty minutes going through –ly endings and miming the meanings of ‘noisily’, ‘quietly’ (both in terms of eating noodle soup), ‘beautifully’, ‘nicely’ and so on. Maurizio (my ‘official’ student) took the photo below and added the caption! (Alfred: and we added in some other photos of the incident as well.)

VISA RENEWAL

As we were near the Friendship Bridge, we thought it would be a good opportunity to ‘pop’ into Thailand and return immediately so as to renew our visas, which expire next Wednesday. Maurizio drove us down and there didn’t seem to be too much of a queue so Alberto (Alfred: very kindly!) said they would wait for us. The process can be done quickly but we ran into an official who decided to be more pernickity than (Alfred:we gather) is usual. He said we actually had to take the bus and go across the bridge into Thailand and get our passports stamped and THEN return for our visa. Technically, without crossing the bridge, we haven’t left Lao and therefore can’t enter it but this is usually (Alfred:we gather) not insisted upon.

So, we got on a bus, went across, got our Thai stamp, returned immediately and eventually got our Lao visa for the next month. A bit more time-consuming than expected and using up vast spaces of our passport, so the sooner one of us gets a job and a permanent visa the better!

Kittens, friendly vampires and playing tennis with yeung.

Shorts and kittens....

Asterix scar #11

... don't mix, as Alfred pointed out to me. Shorts are the perfect attire for Lao but when you are living with an insecure and easily-frightened kitten, there are rather obvious drawbacks. So either I revert to trousers or send Asterix to feline assertiveness training (Alfred: That is probably available here. There is an amazing array of foods, accessories and services for pets here. Then again, there is an amazing number of cats and dogs. I suspect if a census were held, each Lao household would be the proud possessor of 3.2 dogs, most of them reasonably friendly, with the exception of the German Shepherds some falang seem to enjoy keeping as guard dogs).



House-hunting
So we are house-hunting again. The house we are living in is lovely and in a great location. The noise issue (see below) is not a major one but there are two things we really feel we can't manage without:

• a garden of some sort (which means there would be some sunshine as well)
• a proper space in which to teach students.

We have looked at some lovely houses but they are either too expensive or too far from the centre, or both. Of course, not knowing exactly where we will end up working does make it a little difficult to decide where to live, given that we travel everywhere by bike (Alfred: and yet another contender for 'Understatement of the Year'!). Today we looked at two houses, one in a perfect location but small and cramped and with no proper garden, the other north of the centre and nicer but also with no garden.  But both of them shared one characteristic with almost every house we have seen so far - very dark inside! Lao people seem go to extraordinary lengths to keep the insides of the houses in permanent shade: shutters and screens OK, but there are always heavy curtains, permanently drawn. And the windows seems to be designed to open onto areas which receive the least possible amount of light. (Alfred: I'm thinking vampires. Extraordinarily friendly vampires, no doubt, and ones who have abandoned every aspect of their former heritage except for their aversion to sunlight). Lao people do seem to have an ambiguous relationship with the sun. Many carry umbrellas to protect themselves and it is almost impossible to buy cosmetic products such as moisturiser or suchlike that do not have whitening agents added to them. And these are widely used - you see a lot of VERY pale Lao people and not all the body parts show the same hue! (Alfred: In a strange way it is like the inverse of Ireland, driving past the disco at Wezz and seeing the acres of flesh with unevenly-applied fake tan in different hues). 

Noise and Having a Good Time
Apart from being ridiculously friendly and nice (Alfred: You make that sounds like an accusation) Lao people certainly know how to have a good time. In our neighbourhood there has been a party somewhere nearby pretty much every night and, given how often one hears and reads comments on how quiet or even silent Lao people are, they do like making noise!! Where we are living at the moment, the major sources of noise are (in no particular order and depending on the time of day):

• dogs barking (Alfred: sometimes, during the night, ALL the dogs start a barking competition, dozens and dozens of them. Impressive, or at least that is the adjective that initially springs to mind. After ten minutes or more, other adjectives are applied, most of them unsuitable for your tender ears).
• cocks crowing - the earliest so far was 0300, which is WAY before sunrise (Alfred: Send him a memo)
• children playing
• children playing a game called 'I'll shout a word and you see if you can shout it louder until one of us gives up'
• children reciting the alphabet in English for practice (Alfred: And always leaving out the 'W' for some reason)
• motorbikes (Alfred: though it is cool - on the rare occasions Ruairí bothers to get up early enough - to see the mothers piling all their kids onto one motorbike to drop them off to their various schools at 0730).
• monks chanting and beating drums (though actually there has been less of this than we would have liked (Alfred: be careful what you wish for! Remember Luang Prabang where the monastery beside the hotel had erected a sound system  borrowed from an AC/DC concert and played chants and music at 120 decibels for 72 hours straight)
• traffic - this is only when we venture out but traffic at rush hour is quite something. (Alfred: more on Lao driving habits later. Oh, right now, actually.)

Driving in Lao
Now that we have two bicycles, we have started exploring the city properly. Cycling here has major advantages and also major disadvantages (Alfred: and we haven't experienced the rainy season yet!). It is pretty safe as, compared to back at home, cyclists are accorded the same respect as anyone else on the roads (motorbikes, tuk-tuks, cars, lorries, vendors with huge carts being pushed down the wrong side of the road) and cars do not overtake you if they aren't sure there isn't enough space. Indeed, one noticeable thing is cars waiting behind you because they can see that you are going to have to swing out soon to go around a parked car (or whatever). And the city is pretty flat so no major hills or climbs.

On the downside, there is little street-lighting and it is very dusty, and the dust/sand piles up along the side of the road, which makes you have to cycle out towards the middle to avoid slipping. Lao people also have an unnerving habit of not bothering to switch on their lights - enough said.

But there are no arguments, very little beeping of horns unless actually necessary, even when stuck at roundabouts or intersections behind someone doing something that would inspire road rage at home.

The one things we really notice is the amazing number of gigantic and very expensive new cars: every kind of 4x4, Hummers, Lexus, Mercedes, yellow Ferrari sports cars, you name it. And a lot of them are being driven extremely cautiously by people who don't seem to be exactly sure what they are doing. A friend of mine who has been here longer than us says that land prices have more than quadrupled in the last five years, so many people have come into a lot of money through land sales and this is where all the big cars come from. Maybe so. It is noticeable that, compared to other developing countries, the vast majority of these cars are being driven by Lao and not by falang (Alfred: that is when you can actually see anything in through the tinted windows!). 

Learning Lao
(Alfred: Ha ha! Ruairí thought he had deleted this heading! Before leaving Dublin, Ruairí and Martine invested in an impressive array of books and CDs to learn Lao. But while Martine has been diligent about learning the alphabet and basic vocabulary - OK, 'diligent' may be putting it strongly but it is a question of contrast - Ruairí's achievements to date consist of the following phrases:

Hello
Thank You
Turn Left
Turn right
Go straight on
Mosquito

Speaking of yeung (mosquitoes), he has invested in a new toy, an electrified tennis racquet with which he swats mosquitoes to the accompaniment of huge flashes of blue sparks (the cats are NOT impressed with this at all). Maybe he could learn his numbers in Lao by keeping an audible running total of casualties! And what is the Lao for 'Gotcha!'?)

Wall chart on the downstairs wall which Ruairí should look at more regularly. Top right corner is the letter 'y' as in 'yes', illustrated by a friendly mosquito (yeung).