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

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

“I ran a marathon the other day...”






Last weekend, a Lao friend standing at my bedroom window pointed into the garden languidly and said “Ngou. Snake.”

I immediately tore down into the garden to confirm this casual observation, and sure enough, there it was, a thin, greenish-brown snake, not at all unlike the slithery wooden one we have in our living room, which is more realistic than we thought. Now we regularly torment each other with it, leaving it strategically placed on the sofa, or outside each other’s bedroom door, listening out for that initial gasp of fear- could it be the one from our garden??

Anyway, the point of the story is that I found out later, much too late, that when you see a snake in Laos, you must always say “Lucky lucky lucky” and make a wish. If you don’t, it’s bad luck.
I wish I had known that at the time, because what happened next was very unlucky indeed.
I went to meet a friend for breakfast when two guys on a bike pulled up alongside me on my bike, grabbed hold of my arm, tried to grab my bag that was slung complicatedly over my handlebars, and in the process dragged me off my bike and along the road for a few metres and then rode off. This was at 11am on a Sunday morning near a roundabout on a particularly busy stretch of road.

Anyway, it happened very fast, I don’t remember all that much, except that there was some blood, and I was quite hysterical, and someone picked me up and put me on a chair, and I somehow managed to call my friend Chris, who tore over on his Supercub and called someone else, who drove me to the Australian embassy clinic, where the doctor told me it would be a miracle if nothing were broken, and that I would have to go to hospital.
Sophie, one of my housemates, packed a bag for me, and I was put on a drip and bundled into an ambulance and taken over the border to Udon Thani.
One ugly part was when I was so busting to go to the toilet at the border, and the nurse came into the bathroom with me, and I had to go on the squat toilet while holding up my drip, and I couldn’t really see out of my left eye, and I had a splitting headache, and then I accidentally bent my arm, and blood started reversing back up the tube and into the drip bag..
Gross.

I also found out later that it’s even more unlucky in Laos when a snake actually comes into your house. But our snake was in a far corner of the garden, so maybe that’s why I didn’t lose my bag or anything in it, and my cheek wasn’t broken, and I got to spend a night in pure luxury in a private room at the Udon Thani International Hospital, watching fashion TV and ordering room service.

Anyway, I worked from home for a couple of days, and the entire office came to visit me, bearing flowers, fruit, bread and milk, and even a takeaway coffee from Joma, the Lao equivalent of Starbucks, which was nice. And I sat in my big quiet house and worked quietly and talked to the maid and thought about things, and wondered when would be an acceptable time for me to explain to everyone that actually, I was totally fine.
And more friends came and brought flowers and icecream, and then on the third day, the biggest floral arrangement I’ve ever seen was delivered, from Ausaid, the organisation in Australia that trains us to work in a developing country, and that’s when I cracked it. I was back at work the next day.
Today I got my Supercub fixed and rode home. All over.

Anyway, today’s post is dedicated to a very old friend of mine from the States, JS, who sent me an email completely out of the blue last week, which began with the line “I ran a marathon the other day”, and went on to the bit where he came home from the marathon to find that his wife had left him and taken all the furniture (“I guess I should have known- she stopped wearing her wedding band, like, five months ago”) and ended with him realising how much our friendship meant to him.
I only mention it because it just highlights life, his life, my life, and how it could all be a movie. A lame, Hollywood movie, or a stylish indie film? I don't know anymore.

“Honestly, this world.”
I will also dedicate this post to the writer John Banville, whose novel The Sea won the Booker last year. I read in the hospital, and think it could well be one of the best books ever.
This world, eh? I met JS in a hotel in Paris in 1997 when we were both teenagers, and in the interim we have emailed sporadically and had a disastrous encounter when I lived in Montreal. Now I live in Laos and his wife has just left him.

Also, as an aside, I was deleting some messages in my phone and came across an old one from my good friend Nelly in Melbourne (she of the ill-fated Ramadan-sabotaged plan to dress in a burqa for a day in the name of journalism): “Hey zia (we are both aunties to half-Italian kids), I can’t make it tonight- this will be good for your blog- I’m back on the pill, and my boobs are so big my back is hurting.”
Just thought it was funny, you know?

Bangkok never sleeps
And Bangkok is the ugliest city in the world, maybe. It is also one of the coolest, the most cutting-edge. I went a couple of weeks ago, purely for business, you understand…the business of shopping.
Put me together with three other clothes-oriented females and you can get the gist of the military-style operation I’m talking about.
The thing is, and I’ve always known this and turned a wilful blind eye, almost everything you buy in Melbourne comes from Thailand. Or Hong Kong or Singapore. The point is, clothes are cheap, but by the time they make it to the racks at Kinki Gerlinki or Quick Brown Fox, they’ve literally been marked up about 200%. The nerve!
So imagine me at the source, the very source, of this glorious river: the Chatachak Market in Bangkok, on a Saturday morning, with a wallet full of cash.
I’m surprised I didn’t buy more.

Had a ball. It’s a funny place, the cops wear such tight and sexy uniforms. Mel, Georgina, Sarah and I went to a fast-food place for lunch, and the young waiter who opened the door, aside from his very standard black pants and black polo shirt with the restaurant’s logo on it, was also sporting a face covered in more makeup than I’ve seen on anyone in a long time.
Honestly, the kid had pancake foundation, blusher, eyeliner, the whole shebang. Interesting, I thought, and was about to make a terribly witty comment about it to my shopping companions when I looked around and realised that every single one of the waiters had the same thing happening on their face! It was some kind of uniform, all these young boys mincing around the noodle bar like Joan Collins.
I don’t know what’s weirder- that, or the fact that when we went to the movies after lunch to see Transamerica, we had to stand up for the national anthem before the movie started.

Aside from the massive glorious markets, we wandered around shopping malls and lingered over the beauty products in Boots. We went out on the town on the Saturday night, and I must say it was a shock to emerge from a bar at 2am to find the street still completely filled with people, with all the markets still open.
We went to Burger King to celebrate being back in the real world.
But is it the real world? Or is sleepy Laos, with its hammer-and-sickles and grinding poverty and bag-snatching poor people, the real world?
I don’t know any more. All I know is that it was a shock to come back across the border after a weekend in Bangkok, and get into a cab that drove about 40kms an hour all the way home, literally.

The blushing bride
I went to a wedding. Whose wedding? Someone who used to work at the newspaper, I think. It doesn’t matter really, because she looked exactly like every other bride in Laos!
Beautiful, traditional, identical. Ah, communism.
Mind you, this was no run-of-the-mill party. I think the parents must have been wealthy- there was a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label on every table- along with the Pepsi, 7-UP and Mirinda. Very plush.
Anyway, see one of my previous posts for a precise description of what the rest of wedding entailed.

On the same night, I went to a different kind of party, one of those parties that gets talked about a lot in the context of “the great parties I have been to” type conversations.
The thing is, here, you can afford to go all out if you care to. The guy who threw the party simply paid his gardener and meibarn a hefty wad of cash, and they organised the militia to keep watch over the motorbikes and the front gate, they hired a jumping castle bigger than the house, and the served drinks at a makeshift bar all night. And they cleaned everything up the next day.
It was some party. Everyone was there.

“The road to socialism”
Speaking of parties, the Party with a Capital P has been pretty busy of late. I’m trying to avoid the topic, because I get enough of it at work, but I guess it really has been a big deal here.
The big party was actually supposed to have been held the weekend before, but was postponed, because several days before that, the other Party, the Party with a Capital P, or, if you want to get complicated, The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, finally announced that it would be holding its Sixth Party Congress, over the weekend and spanning five days.
They’d been alluding to it for some time, but the date was kept top secret until the last minute. Suddenly, security was increased ten-fold and a 10.00pm curfew was imposed, which would have made having a party ludicrous. How would everyone get home after ten with a curfew?

Anyway, the Party Congress takes place once every five years. What happens is that 100-odd Party representatives (there are almost half a million official members) from across the country converge in an undisclosed location in Vientiane, and discuss Party Policy, Party Guidelines, and how great the Party is, and basically how the Party wants the country to be run for the next five years.
A lot of the discussion focuses around socio-economic development, and the Millennium Development Goals, and how Laos is still, still, at the bottom of the list of Least Developed Countries.
Laos wants off that list…by 2020, by which time everyone in Laos will be happy and healthy and literate and employed and self-sufficient and have enough rice to eat and poverty will be eradicated.
I really hope I get to hear about how it all turns out in 2020. Because, when 80 percent of your GDP still comes from foreign aid, I’d like to see how it could possibly happen…
Anyway, now that the Congress has met and formulated its new guidelines, the National Assembly will implement those goals.
The General Election for the Sixth National Assembly will be held on the 30th of April, on which day every person aged 18 or over has a duty to vote for the candidates who are all from the same party anyway, that being the Party party.
Look, let’s not get into it. It’s ludicrous, but dissidents still get locked up here, you know?
I don’t want to get anyone into trouble. The Lao aren’t stupid, they’re under no illusions about their ludicrous Party, but there’s just no public discussion, right?

So anyway, KPL was appointed to comprehensively cover this Congress, which meant we all had to work Saturday and Sunday. But thank god for the generous bonus of 30,000 kip ($3) in cash that everyone, including me, was given by management for their troubles.

On a lighter note, one of the girls in the office had a birthday that weekend. She turned 25, and I ordered a carrot cake from Joma and bought candles, which everyone was tickled pink by, especially when I explained that birthday cake was really an office tradition back home. Birthdays aren’t nearly as important here.
I accidentally bought those candles that don’t go out when you blow them, but merely spark back up again like a magic trick. How we laughed! The cake got covered in soot, but it was truly delicious.

“Salleee, she is strong!”
Anyway, as you can see, I don’t regard my little “accident” as a setback. I don’t think those boys meant to hurt me, I’m just a falung, a foreigner, and they just wanted my money. And why wouldn’t they?
What I like is that every day is different here. Every day at work has its own atmosphere, every night is different.
It’s just impossible to get stressed. No one really understands or responds to stress in the same way, so it really has no function.
Which is why I’m back on the Supercub, and keeping an eye out for the ngou.