Asia Vision

Asia Vision
Housemates Tom and Sophie moved out the house last weekend to their own little love-nest, and Cait and Sunny moved in. It was possibly the hottest day of the year, and Tom was sick with what he later found out was dengue. Hmmm, didn’t stop him from stripping our kitchen of a great many useful things, though, did it?
Thinking vaguely of perhaps replacing some of them, I finally went inside this big newish home interiors shop in the city during my lunch hour last week, and discovered a homewares paradise that is about as close to Ikea as I’m ever likely to get in this part of the world.
Rugs! Cushions! Lamps and cotton sheets and stripey coffee mugs and cheap shiny cutlery!
I shared my new find, generously and enthusiastically, with Mel.
“Mind you don’t get Asia Vision,” she warned.
She’s right- I need to tread carefully. Asia Vision is a curse with which foreigners living or travelling in Asia are often afflicted, and involves purchasing an objet-d’art / salad bowl / wall hanging / dress that you are categorically convinced will look really good once you get it home. But if your brain has become fuddled with Asia Vision, you will be in for a rude awakening.

Daylight robbery!
Related is the fact that I bought a new kettle recently, not that this is anything of any note. It’s a nice kettle- shiny and olde worlde looking. The reason I bring it up is that I believe I paid far too much for it. I bought it at the dingy Kouadin Market, where things are generally, you know, cheaper, but this kettle…
I think I got ripped off, frankly. The woman at the shop kept going on about how it came from Thailand, and was therefore special. Look lady, I told her in my best Lao, I can pop over to Thailand and get one myself any day of the week, it’s no big deal. So just give me a discount, right?
She wouldn’t budge.
So how much was the kettle?
It was $7.
I know, it’s a topsy-turvy world.

English as a Second Language
This week, in my Friday ‘workshop’ at work, I focused on contractions, and how they should be used in quotes.
The trouble is, Lao people, using English as their second language, don’t tend to use contractions either, understandably, so how to get them to imagine a Lao person who really doesn’t speak English using ‘didn’t’, ‘I’m’ or ‘can’t’?
What’s even worse is that I’ve noticed myself, and many of my friends, lapsing into ESL English at any given moment.
“You leave already? But it is only 6 o’clock!”
“I know this, but I must arrive home to eat some food. I am hungry. Hungry very hungry.”
“I am hungry too. I hope that I do not get fat.”

'Mobilising' the roads
It has been so hot recently- around 40 degrees on most days, and so dusty. The government, in its infinite wisdom, is in the midst of digging up all the main roads in the centre of town AND instituting a one-way policy on most of the small side-streets that allow on access to any of the said roads which, on any given day, will completely unpredictably, be blocked off by roadworks.
The works themselves seem completely haphazard- just a lot of dirt and gaping holes, with absolutely no end in sight. And meanwhile, each corner is manned by no less than five people- a cop and four or five village volunteers in fluoro vests, waving flags and blowing their whistles smartly when you innocently try to make your way, the wrong way, down a one-way street. One will ask you your name, another will write it down, a third will give you a sheet of paper (in Lao) explaining the new road rules, while the other two will just sit there. This is called ‘educating’, as in ‘those caught disobeying the rules will be educated’. I had come across this phrase countless times while editing the papers over the past year before I finally found out what it meant last week, when I was stopped and ‘educated’.
In about a month, they will start fining people 30,000 kip (about $3), unless the roadworks are still not finished, in which case they will just keep on ‘educating’.

I suppose this all sounds very comical to you, back home in Aus or wherever you are. But I’ll tell you what: when you’re trying to get to work, and the sun is already so hot that you’re covered in sweat, and you’re sitting in a traffic jam because the road is backed up with enormous gravel-filled trucks (which, incidentally, are the very reason the roads keep needing to be repaired, because they are too heavy and the roads are too crap), and some girl has been pranged and come off her bike, and the convention is that the bike must be left at the very place it fell, usually in the middle of the road, until the police arrive to investigate, and so everyone is waiting for this to happen, and you just can’t get around the fucking truck, and the office is just a few hundred metres away, well, it can all become very frustrating.

Record bust
Another frustrating thing is that the café that was dealing in downloaded music has had to shut down that particular operation, and just go on selling food instead. The guy who set it up in Phnom Penh apparently got busted for, you know, breaking the law.
Where am I supposed to get my music?
And more to the point, why the hell do record companies care about some café run by Lao locals making a comparatively puny amount of money burning music onto backpackers’ ipods? What is the world coming to??

You're a good man, Charlie Brown
I’ve been reading so many good books lately, but really I’m just procrastinating. I’m trying to write an article about some of the stuff I’ve been covering on this blog for a newspaper back home. You know, so that maybe I can get a job or something one day. Is that too much to ask?
I’ve just turned 28 (Thursday, since you ask) and I’ve never had a real job. You know, with a salary and stuff. But maybe I need something real to show for what I’ve been doing here.
It’s quite difficult, though, to sit down and write something, what with the heat, and the internet, and all the other distractions.
My birthday was a particularly good one this year, and a lot of it had to do with the cake, pictured right, which the office got for me. Happy Birthday Sally Pryor. You’re a Good Gal Sally Pryor.

I dreamed a dream
So Cristy and Paul’s Lily finally arrived, the little darling. Poor Cristy- the babes came out the wrong way! But what a lovely baby she is.
But what’s really weird is that I had a dream two nights before Lily's arrival, about the baby being born. It was a typical dream- the baby came out looking exactly like Suri Cruise in the Vanity Fair portrait, when everyone was saying it was wearing a wig because it had so much hair. So in the dream, we were all marvelling about the baby looking like a celebrity baby. But – and here’s the scary part – in the dream, the baby was called Lily! I know, I predicted it, despite Cristy guarding the name like a jealous secret throughout her pregnancy!
It was probably just that I have known Cristy for so long that I could accurately predict the type of name she would give her firstborn. But when I mentioned the dream to one of my Lao friends, her face grew white and she stepped away from me a bit. Like I said, the Lao take their dreams very seriously indeed.

Speaking of, there’s an extremely bold little Indian Mynah bird that has been tormenting us in the early mornings, when the sun is suddenly rising before 6am. This bird clings onto the flyscreen and just squawks endlessly, often penetrating my already-weird-and-messed-up early-morning dreams and becoming part of the, you know, narrative.
My question is, does this count as a dream about an animal, aka a lucky dream, aka a ‘sign’ that I should buy a lottery ticket? Is the bird a lucky and kind bird, giving me the heads up for a bit of good fortune?
Or is it all just bullshit?