Hola, khoy llamo xeu Sally

Last night, 4000 Islands asked me how to say something in Spanish. I learnt a bit of Spanish in high school, and I still remember bits and pieces. But last night, I discovered that every single Spanish word I have ever known had been replaced by the Lao equivalent.
But will I ever conquer this language?

Kate left a week ago, and the house has been dead quiet without her. I even feel kinda lonely- she was always around when I finished work, and always up for something. Anyway, one thing she said she would miss most about Laos was being able to perve on guys, and the abundance of perve-worthy material around.
Because, plain and simply, Lao boys are hott. And it’s not just the brown skin and black hair and white teeth. The thing is that Lao boys are just so unselfconscious- they tend to be casual and fun-loving, and when they grin at you from the back of a motorcycle and say sabaidee, they’re just happy, just joking around, ‘just kitting’ as the Island would say.
Also, boys here seem so often to be engaged in practical manual tasks that involve rolling up their jeans, shoving their sleeves up past their shoulders, getting down and dirty and generally looking hott.
Who can blame Kate for dreading going back to the land of suits, distressed denim and lame, graphic-print t-shirts?
Kate, if you’re reading this, I’m sure it won’t be so bad. At least half the boys in Aus you meet won’t be a) married or b) shorter than you.
Glass half full, right?

Just…run, I guess.
A very surreal thing happened last Saturday night, when we had a big one for Kate’s going-away. We ended up at the most dastardly night-spot in town, Don Chan (‘the Donny-C’), which is usually the only thing open at 3am and really just an awful place of ill repute. It’s not just the fact that it is inside Don Chan Palace hotel, a massive monstrosity on an island smack bang in the Mekong in the middle of town that is as out-of-place as you would expect for a tall, white thing sticking up out of the water.
It’s also reportedly sinking, which couldn’t happen soon enough for me, although it’s unlikely to happen during my time here, unfortunately.
Anyway, ill repute. It’s got a strange crowd of mainly locals. An expensive cover charge. A strange voucher system for drinks. Lots of ‘lady boys’ (gay boys), not to be confused with ‘lady nights’ (prostitutes) or ‘the boy that want to be the girl but is look like a girl’ (trannies), although there are often quite a few of those too. Oh, and shocking music, although you can opt out of it to stand on the terrace.
Which is where we all were at around 3am when a sudden brawl erupted, followed about ten minutes later by strange popping sounds that made everyone run. Or rather, sort of flail about looking for people, and stagger down the stairs and wonder what the fuck was going on. There were more shots in the carpark as we were riding off, and I realised, even in my drunken state, that, this being Laos, we would not be reading about this in the newspaper the next morning. Or ever, actually.
We will never know what actually happened, whether there really were guns, whether anyone was hurt, what happened when the cops showed up…did they even show up? Probably not.
No amount of gossip will ever unravel that one.

My flat-footed dream
I quite like to look around me as I ride my motorbike, or especially when I’m being dinked by someone else. There’s always so many little things that you probably miss when driving. One thing I love about Lao people, or probably people in this region just generally, is how they can squat on flat feet for hours with their bottoms not even touching the ground. It’s especially adorable seeing children doing it (see pic), but adults just look so cosy and casual as well.
It’s one of the first things I noticed here, and I realise now that it’s quite tied in with the fact that the Lao are actually obsessed with cleanliness. It’s unheard of to sit directly on the ground, or even, heaven forbid, put your bag on the floor. I took me ages to work out why everyone at work was constantly picking up my bag and putting it on a shelf, or a chair.
Anyway, the point is, I am quite incapable of squatting flat-footed for even a millisecond for the simple reason that I lack the physical ability. But I dream of learning to do it some day. Actually, I can’t even touch my toes, but let me dream, orright?

Mass-produced awesomeness
I also pondered, the other day, while in our brand new local supermarket, the ‘Dee Dee Pharmacy and Mart’, on the apparent Lao aversion to what we would call ‘storage’. Basically, a shop will receive, say, a box of 100 bottles of shampoo. The shop owner will then proceed to put every last bottle on the shelf at once.
It’s crazy! Two of the Island’s sisters run a market store, one that sells, you know, general stuff (soap, cigarettes, perfume, fish sauce), and I’ve watched them unpacking new stock and finding room for it all, wondering why the hell they don’t just put it out the back.
Of course, related to that is the age-old question I’ve always had about what to do when you see two shops side-by-side selling identical merchandise. You see it everywhere, even in the touristy areas of Paris and Rome, for god’s sake, but it’s especially pervasive here. The sisters have a shop that is exactly the same as the 3 or 4 on either side of them. Every stall in the Morning market sells almost the same fabric or jewellery. The lady selling bagfuls of quail’s eggs near my work chats all day to the lady at the next table selling…bagfuls of quail’s eggs. It’s bizarre. What’s even more bizarre is that there’s very little competitive retail spirit here:
Tuk tuk driver: ‘Tuk tuk, miss?’
Me: ‘No thanks.’
Tuk tuk driver: (shrugs)
Quite a blessing, actually. But I still can’t work out why I would go to this stall selling Buddhist offerings rather than, say, the next stall, which has exactly the same stock.

Also, the multitudes of things work against them. So many jewellery stores have piles of identical gold and silver chains and rings and bracelets, all the same, all obviously tipped from a box into the display cabinet. To us, it looks tacky. Get one chain, give it pride of place on a velvet cushion (or something), and you got yourself something special. Put a great big pile there, and you got yourself a great big pile of mass-produced junk.
But exactly, the Lao would probably answer. Hundreds and hundreds of them! So much stuff! From a factory! Enough for everyone! It’s…a miracle!
It’s all part of the weird discrepancy you see everywhere in Laos, between a creaky, pathetic old government with absolutely no money and a culture of consumption creeping in from all sides. You need only witness the hoards of Lao people crossing the border into Nong Khai, Thailand, on any given Saturday, to go and shop at the massive Tescos in town, as I shudder to admit I did with the Island last weekend.

And on that note, I will just finish with a recent news update, reported in our very own Vientiane Times last week: a foreign-owned company gave the Prime Minister a Mercedes. I guess it’s better that outright bribery be, you know, transparent, right? Best get a photographer and reporter on the ground quick-smart to capture downright corruption in progress!