Am I a Writer?

Time will tell. Note: Quite often, I write about people I know. If any of you object to anything I have written, let me know and I will remove it.

My Photo
Name:

Wannabe. Living in Vientiane, Laos. Has blog to avoid sending lengthy emails.

Monday, January 30, 2006

The Clue of the Buddha






"Phabat is a polite word use for Buddhist god, which means foot. The story told by word of mouth said that once Buddhist god used to pass the area and he has left his giant footprint on the rocky ground of the temple and the footprint still exist today so that visitors can eye the clue of the Buddhist god."
Sousekhone, KPL News, January 2006

Well, I guess I'm not a writer, am I? No. No writing of late for me. Nor have been brooding, emailing, reading, listening to music or surfing the net. I've been too busy doing immature and unexpected things, like playing badminton, ten-pin bowling, riding my motorbike when drunk, and watching bad frat-boy movies late at night on HBO.

Oh no, not that bad. In between all that, I've been working my arse off, learning Lao, lunching with the ladies, showing my sister round town, getting massages, and falling into bed every single night completely exhausted.

Someone said I might get bored. Who was that again?

Activities
So anyway, ten pin bowling. You just do it here, no questions asked.
Hey, does anyone remember that ad on TV when we were little? "For $8.95, you get two games, shoe hire, hot dog, fries and a coke!" Over and over again.
In Vientiane, you get two games, shoe hire, uncountable beers, a brand new pair of Nike socks and someone to watch your motorbike, all for about $3.
I still can't believe I live in this city. The other evening, I rode on the back of housemate Kate's bike down a long, winding dirt road filled with potholes, to a mansion with a badminton court in the front yard. More beer, more unusual physical activity.
The group of Aussie aid workers here is so small and close-knit, it's like a ready-made family waiting for you as soon as you arrive.
Again, no questions asked.

Transport
The motorbike (Honda Supercub circa 1963) has been giving me trouble, stalling a bit and leaking petrol like a bitch. Tom, my other housemate, says that's why it's leaking- because I called it a bitch. I've currently got no other mode of transport, so I'm going to be have to be civil to it from now on.
Mind you, that clanging sound is probably the chain that I 'loosened' when I 'collided' with 'another bike' on the 'wrong side of the road' the other night when I was 'drunk'.
It's all relative, isn't it?

Food
The office is literally obsessed with food. I walk in the door and everyone demands to know whether I've already had breakfast, what I had, and whether I want more. At exactly 11.45am, the editor barks "Lunch!", and everyone goes off to eat. The boys go to a cheap buffet round the corner, where you get all you want (including frog, ewww) for about 7000 kip (70 cents). The ladies eat fish and drink this incredibly sweet coffee that comes in a bag. In the afternoon, there's always snacks. Weird, unexpected snacks, like chunks of unripe mango dipped into spicey fish sauce, peppermints, or little Lao doughnuts.

Pristy left last week, after a couple of very drunken evenings. The whole office went out to the airport to see them off. A couple of the ladies cried, and then so did Paul and Cristy, and then everyone laughed uproariously and took photos and filmed them and pointed and held their sides. It was really pretty funny.
In the car on the way back, my stomach rumbled, and instantly the car turned off to a roadside restaurant so that I could be bought breakfast. Which, here, is foe, a massive bowl of noodle soup with all kinds of things in it- vegies, bamboo shoots, and literally five kinds of meat, including this white stuff that looks like a towel but is actually the lining of a cow's stomach. Mmmm, just the thing I need when I'm desperately hungover at 11 in the morning, especially when there's a paper to put out. Meanwhile me, and the editor, and several of the writers are all sitting miles away from the office tucking into what is probably their second breakfast.
Bor pen nyang. No worries. I'm learning to understand that it's all ok.

My sister Philippa has been staying. She visited me at work last week and the whole office just dropped everything and went next door for a feast, for the hell of it. A massive big feast with more food than anyone could possibly eat, including chunks of pork crackling that still had black bristles attached...ewwwwww!
I never ever thought it could be possible to get sick of cheap awesome asian food, but I've been here four weeks and already I'm pining for a chicken parmigiana and chips. You know?

Oi Oi Oi
A couple of weeks ago, we all got tizzy invitations in the mail to an Australia Day reception at the Australian Ambassador's house. Most of us had it in our minds that it would be a laid-back affair, and would have turned up in jeans had we not been warned in advance that the whole thing was very formal indeed, and that all the ambassadors would be there. Ties for boys, sins for girls.
Too right- it was a massive garden party with about 200 guests, and about 2 billion fairy lights ("Rented 'em from Novotel!" the Ambo said when I asked him where the hell they all came from). And stacks of food: "Aussie lamb". "Aussie apricot chicken" ??? "Aussie beer-battered fish" (that's more like it), and pavlova. At the end of the night the ambassador put Jet on the speakers really loud which worked like a charm- everyone left.
Anyway, we came home and watched Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle on HBO and I laughed from beginning to end, like an adolescent boy.
The next day, for our first colour edition of the paper, we ran a photo that I took of the Ambassador and other dignitaries, with the Lao and Aussie flags in the background. Next to it was a story with the headline “Prime Miniter welcomes Luxembourg delegation”.
I try my best.

The news
I'm pretty glad we've got cable tv over here, if only so that I can watch BBC World News and ABC Asia Pacific in the mornings in lieu of the paper. The Bangkok Post doesn't get into town until the evening, so I often find myself reading it in the evening, which can be disorienting.
I’m still reading The Age, the Canberra Times and the Guardian most days. But what I really want to do is work at the Bangkok Post.

The weirdest things
Philippa and I went to Vang Vieng, a village about three hours north of Vientiane.
It's beautiful, alright, but so are lots of villages. This one has for some reason captured the imagination of every Aussie, French, British and, bizarrely, Israeli, backpacker in the whole of South East Asia. The place is packed with cheap guesthouses, riverside bars, massage parlours and places to do ‘activities’ like tubing down the river and stuff.
Also, Friends. The whole town is obsessed with Friends, and there are four or five restaurants on the main drag all showing different seasons of Friends, really loudly, on big-screen TVs. The low tables are set up on platforms and surrounded by cushions, so you can sort of eat lying down while watching the adventures at Central Perk. No shit.
Once the sun went down, we had a beer and watched the later season where Phoebe gets married. It seemed boring, so we went to another place where the first, early-90s season was playing. Way funnier. We ordered some food and lay down. Laos being Laos, four episodes later and our food still hadn’t arrived.
I think we watched Friends for about five hours that night, and I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again. But really, there are worse and less odd ways to spend a Saturday evening with your sister in a village in Laos.

The next day we rented bicycles and rode out to the nearby Mulberry Farm- an organic, volunteer-run Mulberry Farm- does this country get any stranger?- and then down the road to find some caves. About halfway there, we passed a couple of young Lao boys on the road, also a pushbike, one dinking the other. They told us, through surprisingly simple hand actions, that they knew of some cool caves and would show us. So we found ourselves riding behind them through a remote village in the blazing sun and then climbing up some steep rocks to the mouth of a creepy cave. We sat around on the rocks, not talking. One of the boys took a photo out of his pocket and passed it to the other boy, who looked at solemnly and passed it back. I asked to see it- it was a Lao girl in a denim mini. Girlfriend, he said. Ngam, we said, the Lao word for beautiful. He liked that. Afterwards, right when were trying to decide how much to pay them, they just rode off, singing “See you tomorrow!” It can be so confusing being around people who have no ulterior motives other than just being nice and, you know, helpful.

Work
Oh, incidentally, my status at the office has been upgraded from “beautiful today” to “sex-see”. Sexy today, that’s me in my calf-length sins and flip-flops. Although Siphondone, the layout boy who has brought in the new lingo, thinks the weather is also sex-see when it's not too hot, as well as the page layout when everything fits, and when we finish the paper before 4pm.
So, whatever.
The title of this post is dedicated to Sousekhone, one of the feature writers who did a feature on a nearby temple. You can see what I’m dealing with. The Word spell-checker means their stuff is always spelt correctly. The Word thesaurus means they can always find a bizarre alternative to a word they don’t quite understand. None of it helps non-English speakers in the slightest.
But there’s something touching about it, don’t you think?:

Why I haven’t posted anything or sent any emails in two weeks
When we were kids, we used to go to the beach every summer, and every time we got there, our mother would marvel at the ocean, and how amazing it was that the waves had just kept on rolling in and out day after day even in our absence. That's how I feel about Melbourne. Every time I think about home (which isn't often, incidentally, it's all too weird and difficult), I just try and imagine life going on and on, my old life, and I'm not even there. All my friends that I saw every day, all the things I used to do. Although the equivalent, I guess, of leaving the party at its peak.

Anyway, this weekend was the first time I had left Vientiane since I got here. And returning on Sunday night felt like coming home. It was comforting.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Settling in




“Instead of bringing back 1,500 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.”
-Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, 2002

My friend Emma Caine gave me her own, well-travelled copy just before I left Melbourne, and I started reading it on the plane. I’ve been dipping into it every day since then, in between all the other things I’ve been doing.

It’s full of gems, such as this: “My body and mind were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my destination. The body found it hard to sleep, it complained of heat, flies and difficulties digesting hotel meals. The mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.”

Anyone who knows me would think I had written that paragraph myself, but no. It’s Alain de Botton, a writer in Britain ten years my senior. Such a comfort to read, though, and to realise I’m not the only one living under an angst-ridden, Sylvia Plath-style bell jar (though not quite as dramatic or depressing), even when staying in an exotic locale like Barbados, or Laos for that matter.

On that note, I’m happy to report that I have not yet succumbed to the everyday me. Aside from a couple of weird, work-related (and probably guilt-related) dreams, I’m having a ball. Cristy’s prophecy has not yet fulfilled itself, and I am still enamoured of everything I see.

You would be too! This place is so dirty and sleepy and fascinating. Not like anything I have seen before. I’m still taken by surprise at the way people break into a huge, spontaneous smile each time I smile at them, and at how good-looking the boys are. Not to mention too cool for school.

Am also heart-broken when I see lonely street vendors peddling along late at night, half-heartedly trying to sell pancakes, or ice-cream. Or when a mangy dog flinches when you go near.

One drawback of having Cristy and Paul as my tour guides has been that I have completely failed to pay any attention to actual directions throughout my entire first week here. I am directionally challenged enough as it is. Aside from dozens of tuk tuk rides, I have ridden behind Paul on a pushbike several times, and still I just follow, and forget to orient myself each time.

All that will change next week, when I move into Kate and Tom’s house- more of a big, weird mansion, actually, and Pristy leaves, and I have to strike out…alone.

Anyway, I shan’t worry about that just now. Aside from Alain de Botton, the best advice I have received this week has been from Paul himself, as one would hope, given that I am taking over his job.

As always happens for me in jobs, I end up liking the people more than the work, and I have no doubt that is already happening to me at KPL news. The ladies have adopted me as their food and beverage protégé, which means they take me out for lunch whenever they can, ostensibly to encourage me to sample the local food, but secretly, I think, to fatten me up. I am a novelty after Paul, who is a) very very thin and b) a vegan. I, on the other hand, will eat almost anything they put in front of me. It can only be a matter of time before my first bout of illness strikes.

This week I have eaten laap (a spicey salad with minced meat), papaya salad, nem on the banks of the Mekong (check out the picture above: I thought it would be a roaring, raging river too, but no, not in the dry season), barbequed fish and sweet basil. I’ve drunk a great deal of sweet Lao coffee (comes in a bag!), and sampled this bizarre Lao dessert that everyone seems to love- it’s a bowl of coconut milk, sugar syrup, barley, weird lumps of green jelly, and ice cubes. But dammit, I ate it. When in Rome…

Anyway, the boys at work have taken a liking to me as well. A few of the lads are quite a bit younger than the ladies, and two of them approached me shyly during the week and asked me to translate some song lyrics for them. It was Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”, from the film Titanic.

I think I did a good job. “It’s a love song,” said one of them when I had finished explaining. “It means she is always there- near, far, wherever,” said the other, ardently.

Since then, they have gone out of their way to be nice, telling me I am "beautiful today" and buying me snacks on the street.

The work itself, though, is much, much harder than I expected. It’s also much simpler. (One of the photos above is the view from my office.) The editor keeps telling me not to work too hard- he won’t hear of it. But I doubt he knows the extent of what needs to be done, not really.

Paul said that I shouldn’t try to focus on trying to make the paper better and that it’s not my job to fix it. My job is to help the journalists with their writing, so that they can go on to bigger and better things.

It’s the best thing he could have said, because now I feel like I have a focus, that I can actually do something useful.

On a lighter note, check out the photo of "Dude fixing (my) Fully Sick Bike". Could that bike get any cooler? Could this place get any cooler?

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Sabaidee, welcome, etc






Well now, this is something.

This place has to be seen to be believed- which is why I’m so glad to be finally here. Nothing like what I expected- it’s sensory overload. I’m seeing everything in technicolour.

Cristy, ever-practical, assures me that the novelty will wear off soon enough, and to take lots of photos straight away, while it’s all still new. (See pics of cool buildings and stuff.)

Vientiane is more dilapidated than I anticipated. Most of the big houses are run down and peeling paint. Shabby-chic, if you will. It’s hot and dusty, and everything is bustling, and sort of sanguine at the same time. Last night, going back to Pristy’s house at the end of my first day here, I sat in the back of a tuk-tuk, watching people ride by on their motorbikes, none of which really go over about 40ks an hour. Slow enough for the boys to slow down and wave hello. It was surreal, like a Fellini movie.

Cristy and Paul are selling me their motorbike when they leave in week. It’s a Supercub, whose aesthetic retro value only just surpasses its efficiency.

Thank god my welcoming committee comprised Cristy and Paul, the two most efficient people I know. Within an hour of getting here, Cristy had already drawn me up a detailed year-long expenses plan, got me a new sim-card for my phone, and organised my day, with several options for me to choose from.

I went for my very first pedicure ever. It cost about $2. I’ve always thought my feet are pretty gross, so tend to avoid them. But the pedicure lady went totally gung-ho on my toes and soles, using an actual razor to scrape all the dead skin away. She held up the razor for me to see how much gunk there was. Then she painted my toenails silver. (See pic.)

I visited my new workplace, which, as it turns out, is two very small rooms with a few tables, above an internet café.

We went to the Morning Market and I picked out some silk and had a traditional skirt, a “sin” made. See photo. All the women wear these to work, as will I, most likely. Coming into town this morning, we drove past the most lovely girl in the world, lounging in jeans against her parked motorbike. Too cool for school, I thought. Then she saw what I was wearing and broke into a massive grin, pointing at my skirt and giving me the thumbs up. The ladies dig it!

Today is the 36th birthday of KPL, which is being combined as a farewell party for Paul and a welcome for me. Hence the skirt. Now I’m in a French café called Joma, where there’s wireless internet. I suspect I will be spending a lot of time here.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Razzle Dazzle

So this is it, my last night in Aus. I'm less stressed than I thought I'd be, but then stress has always manifested itself in the most unusual ways for me. For instance, on one of my last days in Melbourne, I awoke feeling particularly rested and optimistic. When I got out of the shower, however, I discovered a weird, unsightfully, non-itchy rash all over my body. Yesterday, I was also in a good mood, but for a sort of haunting nausea all day long. And tonight, I have an intermittantly bleeding nose. What a weirdo.

So I'm all packed. As usual, my bag is enormous and hefty and I am humiliated to find that I can barely move it at all. I've checked the weather: it will be 30 degrees in Vientiane on the day I arrive, this being Thursday morning at around 9.30am. It's been disgustingly hot in Canberra for the past few weeks, so this will be no great shock.

I went to the supermarket to buy toiletries, assuming, rightly or wrongly, that most of my basic supplies will not be available in Laos. There, in the shampoo aisle of Coles in Manuka, I came to the awful realisation: I am high maintenance.

I think I always knew it, deep down. I think it's been getting worse over the years, but I've been pretending the opposite. But as I piled my basket with about 4 different moisturisers, conditioner, mascara, all the things I cannot do without, I was forced to admit that I am, in fact, a girly girl.

Anyway, two things. First, NYE was really pretty bad, but that was nobody's fault but mine, really. I didn't beat myself up about it, as already discussed in the previous post. I did get drunk, at least, and spent the following day with SC and his boyfriend, just lounging around. It was 38 degrees and the air was full of smoke and ash.

Second, the title of this post is in honour of Brooke, Glorious Brooke, who specifically requested that I a) call this post Razzle Dazzle and b) dedicate it to her. Done and done.