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.