Am I a Writer?

Red & Gold

2008-04-26T18:35:00.004+10:00

Living in limbo does have its advantages. All the serious things are on hold for the moment, while I concentrate on settling in. Yes, still in that phase. It’s autumn here, the limbo season, my birthday season, half cool, half freezing. Nothing seems permanent.

Every morning I walk 5 kms around my neighbourhood - the neighbourhood I grew up in – and get my head ready for the day. I see the eye-popping red and gold trees, and think again, nothing is permanent.

Because it isn’t. This feeling of displacement won’t last, and I’ve decided to cancel out regrets for good.

I took these photos a couple of weeks ago in the stage right before the leaves started turning crispy and falling onto patchy lawns. Autumn in Canberra is pretty spectacular – it’s a shame it will be over by the time the Island arrives. The air is crisp and clear, and there are hot air balloons sailing over the city almost every morning. Can you imagine?

As you probably can imagine, moments of happiness in Canberra are quite different to those in Vientiane. I realised this the other day when driving to work in the car I bought recently off my friend’s girlfriend for $1500. The heater was starting to warm my freezing toes and I switched over to Triple J to see whether those breakfast idiots had shut up for long enough to actually play a song. The new Death Cab For Cutie single was playing, the day was new and I had no idea what was coming up. Happiness.

Despite my nightly calls and relatively frequent updates, Vientiane and the newspaper and Ban Saphanthong and Judy and the V Shop and Sunset Bar and ping pha could not be further away- they could’ve happened last century. There’s just nothing around here that triggers any spontaneous memories, and as I said last time, I’ve been carefully avoiding photos and music. I did stop for a surreal moment to marvel last week at the fact that a year ago I was walking around Luang Prabang soaked to the skin, and this year I was sitting in court with a notebook and it's chilly outside.

To counteract this apparently deliberate forgetfulness a bit, I wrote a feature last week for tomorrow’s paper about what it was like in the Vientiane newsroom – something that’s been kicking around in my head for ages, and I finally managed to get it all on the page. Much harder than I thought it would be, writing a personal account, rather than something sourced from what's happening right in front of me.

I’ve been at The Canberra Times for a month now, and most of the day is spent covering the courts’ daily menu of assault, theft, drink-driving, rape, incest, murder and negligence. It’s endlessly interesting and a bit depressing – many Canberrans would have no idea what really goes on in this town unless they spent a day in the Magistrates Court.

But I’ve also written on such varied subjects as Gallipoli, ACT club policies, the rights of security workers, pre-nuptial agreements, patent law, the need for a female governor-general (someone obviously listened), a fistula hospital in Ethiopia, petrol prices, airport security and the competitiveness of Australian grocers, among other things.

The best thing about it is that you get the work finished, and it’s over. By definition, a newspaper story can’t be left for the next day – you just have to do it, and when you go home, it’s done. Worries rarely carry over to the next day, and you can see the results of your work on the page the next morning. I’ve made mistakes, some of then bad, but they’re mostly forgotten after a day or two. Gosh how this job suits me…

My 29th birthday came and went without much comment. I got a dress, a rice cooker, flowers, a necklace, an American Apparel sweater. Posh dinner with the three of my friends who were in town at Chairman & Yip, one of the Canberra institutions that was absolutely cutting edge in, like, 1995, and hadn’t changed its menu since. It has stood the test of time, though. Pretty different from my last birthday in Vientiane, although it too involved dinner.

I’m sorry to say I haven’t been going out much at all, and not necessarily by choice. Just not that many people are around, and I’m trying so hard to save some cash. But I’m really willing to put my social life on hold for the moment if it means, like, developing my inner life and stuff. New restaurants and bars open in Canberra on an almost weekly basis, and I have friends here who define their whole existence by which ones they’ve been to. I mean really.

But staying in has meant renewing my relationship with ABC, which is great- so educational. And The Bill’s on tonight- orright sarge?

I also came across a couple of very heavy boxes under the house recently, containing about 500 CDs- my beloved music collection, begun when I was 15. The joy!

So, picture me walking along to old tunes, working late, cursing modern life and watching Australian Story on Monday nights. All is right with the world...

Thoughts about the 'Berra

2008-03-10T18:14:00.003+11:00

This post is dedicated to Jackie Chan. Yes, that’s right, the international superstar, and I’d like to draw your attention to the front page of yesterday’s Canberra Times which had a story all about Jackie, who was back in town to bury his dad. Yes, that’s right, back in town to bury his dad. Irrefutable proof that he did in fact used to live here.

My friend Nicola, who is also in Canberra now, says that I can easily outdo her in the Bountiful Supplies of Useless Information Stakes. And yet when I know I’m right, I’m cruelly mocked. You know who you are…Cait.

This post is most certainly not dedicated to the guys at Customs in Melbourne airport, who confiscated the whacky clock someone at Vientiane Times had given me as a farewell gift. It was a clock with seeds and beans in it, and they took it away! They did, though, let me take a photo of the back of it, where Pong, the entertainment reporter, had drawn a picture of me - wearing a sinh and with my motorbike!

And I will give a special shout out to those individuals - you know who youse are - who participated in my 'classy' last Saturday night in Vientiane- the crowning glory in that fortnight of Last Times (last Khao Piak Khao at Judy, last beer at Sunset Bar, last massage etc). And when I say 'classy', what I really mean is 'absinthe'. Say no more?

The new daily grind
So here I am back in Canberra. It’s all going well. The weather is great, the trees are changing colour, and work in the courtroom is a breeze, as I find I already know half the lawyers and prosecutors from law school. The Island will be here soon, and enough of my friends are still around to give me some semblance of a social life. I’ve been blessed with the glory of a weekly pay-check (weekly!), and pulling out all my old clothes that I didn’t take to Vientiane is like having a whole new wardrobe. I’m still working my way through all the great DVDs I brought back, and it’s all pretty good living rent-free at my parents’ house for the moment.

But every time I think about Vientiane I get all negative, and find I’m still having difficulties. With many things, but mainly the general inconvenience of living in a developed country. All these 'road rules' stink, and I’m really not inclined to go out if I have to pay more than $5 for a drink (ha!). Also, I just don’t get why the shops all close at 5.30pm here. When am I supposed to buy stuff? Or go to the post office? Or the bank? In my lunch break? I don’t think so. And when my external hard drive broke last week with all my photos on it, I really did half expect the guys at Harvey Norman to just shrug and take to it with a screwdriver, and return it later semi-fixed. You know, like they would have in Laos. But no, it's busted, gone, and there's 'nothing they can do'. Pathetic.

I can’t seem to listen to much music, either, because everything takes me back to Ban Saphanthong, in that overwhelming rush that only comes from music. Or look at any photos, for obvious reasons.

Plus, I’m just not interested in any food that isn’t, at the very least, Asian-inspired. Which isn’t such a problem I guess; I have recently rediscovered the delights of the Asian Noodle House, which has just opened a city branch. It’s run by a Lao family, and I certainly don’t hesitate to engage all the staff members in conversation in their native language, ignoring the fact that the restaurant is packed and they’re completely run off their feet. Because, see, it’s all about me these days.

These days…Well these days I’m spending at least half my days in the ACT Magistrates Court reporting on rapists, murderers and paedophiles (of which Canberra really does seem to have a disproportionately high number), while studiously ignoring how well dressed all the young female lawyers are. There’s some serious competition between them, I can tell. In fact, girls in offices everywhere are trying to outdo each other in the fashion stakes - it's probably all that gets them through the day, really.

Well, I shall rise above it. True Colours have done me proud with my classic work wardrobe. I don’t care if that prosecutor who’s usually on Tuesday mornings has an $800 suit from Saba. I’m too good for those kinds of insecurities...

Anyway, so I guess things have changed. I’ve changed, certainly – my whole personality has changed. I realised this the other day when I found myself screaming “Faaaaaark!” outside the court after waiting with other journalists and photographers in the freezing cold for 40 minutes only to discover the dude we were waiting to photograph (a teacher who’d been busted feeling up a student) had slipped out the side door.

Also, these words coming out of my mouth in yesterday’s exclusive interview with Paralympic world biking champion Michael Milton (appearing on Australian Story tonight): “So Michael, you’ve successfully battled cancer twice now. What is it that drives you? Is it courage,...or fear?”

I’ll leave you to ponder that, and perhaps to mourn the Sarrie you once knew…kidding! You all know I’m nothing if not a consummate professional! I’m just doing my job!

Bye for now…

Another jolly tale that I think personifies Lao culture.

2008-02-04T12:08:00.001+11:00

Like most people living here, our house is on a dirt lane off a main road. A few weeks ago, some of our neighbours dug up part of the track to lay pipes. Then they resealed it all up, with clay. This seemed perfectly fine all the time, but now there’re snowstorms in China, the bad weather has filtered down to Laos so that it has been raining non-stop, and very unseasonably, for the past three days. And do you know what happens when clay and water meet? A huge, impassable sludgy mess that snags bike tyres and suctions your feet right into it like quicksand, that’s what. The first time I attempted to use the road, the clay effects were completely unexpected, and I got completely stuck. The guards at the barracks stood and laughed at me, like they’d been doing to every other poor unsuspecting sod that morning, and finally came out to help me. It took them about half an hour to lug my bike out of the mud, and it was so clogged up it wouldn’t start. They had to take it up to the ex-president’s house and hose it down, while I went into the barracks to clean all the mud off my clothes and feet and legs and hands and bag, crying tears of embarrassment and fury (but so much that I didn’t completely take in my surroundings – I’ve always wanted to see what that house was like inside. There are about 30 guards living there, and some have wives and kids. It was dark and dank and made completely of concrete inside. Depressing, and I know for a fact they would get paid next to nothing.)
Anyway. I’ve since accepted that until the rain stops, I can’t ride my motorbike, but instead have to pick my way through the mud and get a tuk tuk at the other end. That’s all fine – the rain is forecast to stop tomorrow or the next day. No, my boiling, almost uncontrollable rage stems from the fact that, even though several cars have been bogged and most people living along the lane can just barely get their motorbikes through the last 100 metres of road, and despite the fact that clay mud adheres to everything it touches in large wet chunks and that it’s just getting worse with every passing day, no one has done or said anything about it. I’ve made grumpy comments to several people I’ve passed on the treacherous journey to the main road, and all I’ve got is the usual smile and shrug.
This is what it’s all about. Bad or annoying or inconvenient things happen and Lao people, much like Catholics, simply accept it as their lot. They could easily fix it; the original road is still visible under the churned up layer of wet mud, and it would be relatively easy to just shovel it all off while it’s still wet, or lay down a truckload of gravel. But no - everyone will just put up with it, because that’s the Lao way.
I’ve since found out that families responsible ‘ran out’ of money once they’d laid the pipes, and that a truckload of pebbles will cost 800,000 kip (about US$80 – really not that much given that the majority of the people on our lane are comparatively wealthy, and drive SUVs).
Paying for it ourselves could be seen in two ways. The first would be as a gesture of goodwill, simple thanks for being good neighbours, keeping us safe and un-burgled and always ready, like most Lao people, with a smile, so that you never feel lonely. That would be nice, wouldn’t it, to say thanks? The other way, however, would involve perpetuating the problem I’ve just outlined. That is, that something bad happens and people here wait for someone (usually foreigners) to come and fix it for them. Dilemma or what?

“A bead and a shoe”
Going away and coming back reminds you of what it means to be fashion victim.
One thing I forgot to talk about in my last post was how bewildered I was at the way people were dressed in Sydney and Melbourne. Actually, I felt the same way the first time I went back, in 2006, but that was more to do with the fact that everyone was dressed the same, and I realised that, being a fashion-conscious type, I must have looked the same as everyone else as well. And I felt a bit stupid, because actually I thought everyone looked pretty lame. Anyway, sorry if I sound hopelessly behind and out of touch, but I alarmed to understand that this year, it’s all about high-waisted everything – jeans, hotpants, skirts. I was appalled. (The Island, of course, was relatively sanguine about it all, but like I said, nothing much fazed him except for the birds and the obesity crisis.) But I spent a lot of time in a haze of confusion; everyone was walking around looking like their own grandfathers! I mean really.
My own rule of thumb is that I refuse to wear something that I would never have dreamt of wearing a year ago (bubble skirts, smocks, maxi-dresses, ponchos, leggings, etc), because it would usually mean that I wouldn’t end up wearing it the following year either. (Thus, I’ve embraced the currently in-vogue vaguely maternity-style top because a) I’ve always liked the way it looks and b) it’s very Bangkok.)
On New Year’s Eve in Sydney, I was almost more taken up with some of the ridiculous outfits than the bands. I saw large, tall girls in too-small vintage dresses and weird dancing shoes, and others in skirts that went to just below their boobs - looks that don’t look good on anyone. Sure, people can wear what they want, but if you’re going to so much effort in, why not choose something that at least suits you?
“When did every single boy decide that skinny jeans with baggy crotch was the way to go?” I wondered aloud. “Like, last year,” Brooke answered.
When Brooke and I used to go out on the town in our early twenties, it was all about cool sweaters and designer sneakers. In theory, I still favour that look – so low maintenance. Of course, I’d graduated to pointy shoes, skinny jeans and boots once I moved to Melbourne, but it’s definitely dropped a notch since I’ve been in Asia; jeans or shorts, some funky top from the Bangkok markets, and, if the night is special, what my housemate Cait and I call “a bead and a shoe’, meaning a nice necklace and cool shoes.
I have a feeling I’ve hit on works best.
Related is the fact that, after mining the Indian merchants at Thalat Sao for cashmere wool blend in blue and grey and black, I’ve commissioned the girls at favoured tailor True Colours to put together an entire working wardrobe before I leave – in less than two weeks! This is because I haven’t had to worry about proper work clothes, like, ever. And I can hardly go around in a sinh in Aus, now, can I?

Buddhism Canberra-style
Another thing I forgot to write about last time was that the Island and I checked out the Lao temple in Canberra just before we left. Although it was a long drive away through the drab southern suburbs, we really only intended to have a look and leave, but of course we ended up staying at least an hour, as the monks emerged one by one to have a chat- all six of them, one of whom emerged in his under-robes, wearing a blue Bonds singlet underneath.
The first one took us into the temple (a disappointing 80s-style cream brick house that happened to have a pointy roof and some sparkly bits around the outside wall), and he sat across the room while we knelt before the shrine. He was young, from Champassak, and had come over because family members had told him the temple needed monks. The conversation was slow and seemed awkward until I remembered how very Lao it was for people to sit without looking at each other, and to make comments punctuated with long silences. I’d forgotten because it seemed so out of context, and once I remembered, it was much easier to relax. The monks gave us offerings (potato chips and packaged fruit juice), as is the custom for all visitors, and took us to their orchard to pick a massive bag of organic plums.
The Lao community in Canberra, numbering about 3,000 nowadays, celebrate at least 10 Lao festivals every year. It’s nice to know it’s there.

There and back

2008-01-27T21:45:00.000+11:00

This post is dedicated somewhat cheesily to Heath Ledger, but I'm really upset he died last week. It so happens he was born the day before me in 1979. He also reminded me of at least two guys I know, and he really was a great actor. I still can’t believe he’s dead; I read so much celebrity gossip that when someone like him dies it can almost feel like a friend has gone. And he wasn’t even in the news that much.

Pai Sai Mar? Where have you been and come back from?
So we’re back in Laos, and people keep asking how the Island went over in Aus, and what blew him away the most. My answer is always: the birds. And not only the variety and beauty of the birds (Canberra has a lot of lorikeets and rosellas and suchlike) but also the fact that we were happy to look at them without eating them. “Why don’t you eat them?” he kept asking.

He was especially flummoxed by the pelicans when we went to the coast on Boxing Day. And again, not just by the sheer bizarreness of the birds, with their weird beaks, and not even by the sight of one swallowing a fish, which lodged sideways in its gullet, still moving. “Such a big bird with so much meat – why don’t you eat it?” Gah.

Also, prices. I thought he’d be more shocked by how expensive everything was, but in fact, I had warned him sufficiently beforehand, so that it was really only me who spluttered with rage at having to pay $5 for a small glass of orange juice at breakfast in Fitzroy. He just shrugged. “You said it would be expensive here,” he said.

Also, sizes. Of everything – the sky, the buildings, meals, and of course the people. I myself was shocked to see so many young people – people my own age in fact – who were grossly overweight. But then I think there must be a direct correlation to the size of the meals people eat.

And why does the sky seem so big in Australia? People at home scoff at this notion, but spend some time in Asia first and you’ll see what I mean. We took the ferry around Sydney harbour on a perfect blue-and-white summer’s day, and the sky seemed to be this massive, never-ending canopy.

Beautiful city, Sydney. The Island liked it the best. I always associate it with weekends away, when I would save up to shop on Oxford St, and Brooke would always tire well before me. That was when Brooke and Cristy lived in Surrey Hills. We had breakfast there, for old times’ sake, with three partners and a baby in tow. Times change, but things still seem comfortingly familiar. We spent NYE watching bands at the Sydney Uni Bar.

Melbourne had not changed. Everything in the Fitzroy-Carlton-Collingwood-Brunswick area fairly pulsed with memories, and I heard songs in my head, songs I haven’t listened to for so long. We had lunch at Tiamo with Zia Nelly, and dinner at Trotters’ with Libby and Billy and Emily and Adam. Hung out at the Standard, met Patrick at the Napier, and Sky and Merryn in Edinburgh Gardens, just like last time. We stayed on Westgarth Street and hung out with a Lao-related crowd, all home for Christmas, on Meyers Place, had breakfast on Gertrude St, walked through the CBD and shopped on Brunswick St. Can you imagine I don’t even live there anymore?

Canberra, ironically, is the place that has changed the most. All the places that formed my little personal landscape during the uni years are there, but there’s also triple the number of shops and lots of new people, nephews all grown up, new baby niece Annabel, as well as Paul and Cristy’s Lily. I took the Island into town for a drink one night, and as we sat by the bar’s open window watching people go by, I didn’t recognise a single face. This was never the case when I was growing up, right up until when I left.

Almost everyone we met up with in Aus seemed to be in a couple, and talking about real estate. I joined in, given that I’m soon to join the dreaded Canberra rental market. Everything has just kept moving on.

Taking it all in
Anyway, we’ve come home and I’m looking at everything through a lens of melancholy now that I know I’m leaving so soon.
I went home for a holiday and came back with a job. I start as a journalist with the Canberra Times on February 25th. My dream. My dream of buckling down and getting some experience under my belt at a good city newspaper for a couple of years. You know, the way I was supposed to when I finished law school five years ago, before I was thwarted by all sorts of distractions.

The Island is coming to join me later in the year, and together we will pursue our respective dreams. He dreams of becoming an architect, me a writer. We’re now in the arduous (and expensive) process of securing a visa for him before I leave. Boring - documents, photos, testaments, photocopied certifications, etc. The type of process I’ve only heard about from other people having to prove their (usually completely legitimate relationship) to a suspicious Immigration Department. Did you know that “A spouse relationship is a relationship between a couple who have a mutual commitment to a shared life to the exclusion of any other spouse relationships”? I guess I did know that, but it sounds so odd and forbidding when written on these forms.

What it means
Back in Vientiane, riding to breakfast on my first morning home, the day was warm and clear. I got a thrill being reminded of how dirty Vientiane is. The horizon over the river is smudged, the kind of marks a slightly dirty finger would make on a white page. The buildings are mottled with peeling paint and soot. Motorbikes are strewn over the footpaths, streetside food stalls smoke and steam all day long. Tuk tuks screech with always reliable breaks, and oversized SUVs hoot as they threaten to flatten the nearest motorbike rider.

Perhaps this blog will have to go; if someone’s finally paying me to write, the answer is clear, the joke’s on me. I’ll start a new one, perhaps. I’ll do my old trick of making Canberra seem glamorous simply by saying it is.

It’s so hard to imagine just how abruptly my life is about to change. I’ll have to adjust to a new job, where I’ll be writing my own copy rather than editing someone else’s. I’ll be riding a pushbike, not a scooter, until I can afford a car. I’ll have real newspapers, instead of reading them off the screen. I’ll be eating muesli, hummus and risotto, and breakfast out, a rare occurrence, will cost me $20 or more. No khao piak khao for breakfast, or noodles for lunch. No massages, or pedicures. I never had them in Australia anyway. I’ll be able to go to the cinema. Which is great, except that the appeal of buying the latest movies on DVD for $1.50 each is very high. I’ll be able to browse in bookshops, but I won’t be able to get clothes made to order. I won’t be able to call whoever and meet up at an hour’s notice (life doesn’t work like that in Aus), or spend hours at the Sunset Bar on Friday nights. I’ll be going to the same places I went to when I was a student. That’s how long it’s been since I was there. I’ll also be on a low income. Canberra is not a cool place to be poor, at least if you’re not a student. In Melbourne, it was different – you could just blend in with the general scruffiness. Canberra is not scruffy.

My life will be different. So will the Island’s. But that will be the subject of another post. Or another blog, even.

Hey, I’m still here though! Three more weeks. I’ll write again.

Holding On

2007-12-18T12:19:00.001+11:00

Yesterday evening, I watched the sun go down in the reflection in the window from the far wall of the gym, where I was busting my guts on the bike. It was a perfect circle, laced over with palm fronds, and I could stare right at it as it slowly dropped out of sight, as I counted down the minutes and watched the sweat break out in beads on my wrists.
I’m going home for Christmas in six days, and it’s all I can think about. Going to the gym most evenings is the only way I can keep my mind clear.

I think I’ll probably be leaving Laos in the next few months for good, so this time, I’m taking home as much stuff as possible; I’ve started to feel weighed down by stuff. Although, in fact, considering I’ve been here for two years, I don’t have that much. Books, clothes and some framed pictures. And piles of papers in my room.
I’ve mentioned my lifelong habit of gathering and keeping documents. When I was a kid, the desk in my room used to be bulging with files and papers, and I would put off emptying it all for as long as possible. I remember at the age of 12, we had a Tahitian exchange student stay in my room for two weeks, and she couldn’t understand why I, a kid, had so much paper. I was more of a slob back then, but I haven’t stopped filing things away.
Sorting through piles of papers in my room, I’ve chucked three quarters of it, for practical reasons, but I’ve also uncovered some things that I remember why I kept and intend to hold onto. All my Lao language notes. The medical report from Aek Udon hospital when I fell off my motorbike last year (I had forgotten all about that!). The letter informing me that I had been accepted for the AYAD program, two years ago (changed my life!). A couple of Lao wedding invites, festooned with pink flowers and gently perfumed, addressed to ‘Miss Sally’. Some birthday cards and things torn from magazines and newspapers that I obviously felt the need to keep at the time and still do.
But all in all, it’s a pretty small pile that’s left. It’s the books that are the killer.
It’s going to be a strange trip home, not least because the Island is coming with me, huh? But I’ll also be assessing the scene – I’ll either realise how desperate I am to go home and focus on my ‘career’, or decide I never want to leave this place. Who knows?
But I think I know already.

My seat of learning
I went to a lecture a couple of weeks ago by a French man who is an ordained Zen Buddhist monk. He gave a sort of beginner’s guide to Buddhism, and this is what I learnt:
Buddha died when he was 80, or maybe 60, of dysentery. He ate something called ‘Pork’s delight’, which meat-eaters assume was some kind of pork-based dish, while vegetarians were adamant it was something containing mushrooms or something else that pigs would like.
That solves the vego / non-vego dilemma, right?
He also reiterated that Buddhism is completely tolerant, against any sort of proselytising, and is devoted, above all, to the middle ground.
This means it’s ok to be a Christian and to spend time in a Buddhist temple, or to be non-religious altogether. As long as you don’t do anything that prevents others from practising, it’s ok.
I like it, I really do. It’s such a gentle philosophy, and no one ever minds if you do it all wrong, like me at important events like the Island’s mother’s funeral, and I can’t see that people feel hemmed in by it. They’re not praying to sacrificed, bloody figure, but rather for a good life, and a good afterlife. I think I’ll always respect it.

Boys and their things
I went for lunch recently with some of the boys from my office. They always go to this dive-y old noodle shop that sells a bowl of yellow noodles for 50 cents. As I doused my noodles in chilli, fish sauce and lime, they all complimented me on my Lao-ness. My sinh, my shoes, my bag – I wore all like a ‘real Lao girl’, they said. This is the highest compliment, really. Boys here always say they want a falang girlfriend, but really they just want to please their parents.
One of the guys was already in the restaurant when we arrived, sitting with some girl. There was a solemn moment when he introduced his girlfriend to me- the boys were all respectfully silent. I asked her where she worked, realised I knew someone there, mentioned this, said she had a nice office, and then they left.
I felt obliged to ask a couple of the others whether they’d hooked up yet. They looked down, played with their food, shuffled their feet, and admitted that no, they had yet to find the perfect woman.
Most of the guys in the office (it’s mostly guys, and just one young woman left on the reporting staff) are married, gentle and quiet, the ones who keep their heads down, do their work, never ask questions, never seem to progress. And yet, the boys in question were the ones in the office I admire the most- the ones I can have almost normal conversations with, who like to argue, who respect their profession and drink hard, have phenomenally messy desks and keep thick chaotic files of contacts from throughout the city, ranging from farmers and shopkeepers to high-ranking officials. These are the boys who can’t seem to score chicks. It makes no sense to me.

Big Brother Mouse
When Mum and dad were here, we visited the Big Brother Mouse office in Luang Prabang, a local organisation that takes storybooks to Lao children in poor villages. It’s such a great idea – young artists draw the pictures and write the text, which is translated into English on the opposite page. For US$250, you can sponsor a ‘book party’ – a group goes to a village with stacks of books and snacks and spends the day playing games and eating with the kids, and gives each one of them a book. They teach them how to look after their books and swap them with their friends.
Mum, of course, didn’t hesitate to slap down the cash and demand a ‘book party’ in Ban Sop Kong, the Island’s hometown, which we had just visited that morning.
That was months and months ago, but last week, an envelope finally arrived at my office, containing a letter and a CD full of photos taken of Ban Sop Kong’s very own ‘book party’.
Now, you can probably tell that although I may be passionate, irritable and emotional, I don’t normally cry at cheer sentimentality, but these photos most certainly brought a tear to my eye.
The last thing the Island’s relatives said to us as we left the last time was ‘Please bring some books’, and here were all the boys and girls, in their matching dirty school uniforms with the red scarves around their necks, sitting enthralled as this group of young adults handed out books. These poor, poor children having a day of unexpected treats! The ‘report’ that came with the CD finished with “All students are very happy and exciting that day!”

Saying goodbye (not me!)
There’s been a whole spate of goodbyes here of late, as a large proportion of my closest Vientiane friends have finished up and left. Many seem to have found it really difficult, but I’m so used to it that I find it almost impossible to shed a tear.
I suspect I’ll be the same when I actually do leave for good.
In the meantime, I’m focusing on compiling lists, lots of them, hording small change for my next trip to Bangkok, enjoying the weather, exercising and counting the days until our big holiday. Hoorah.

“Maxine McKew is being mobbed, ladies and gentlemen”

2007-11-26T12:44:00.000+11:00

Great stuff about the election, I couldn’t be happier. And as my dad said over the phone the next day, it was such an interesting election, so much more dynamic than the last one. It really did make me feel homesick. I wanted to be there in the tally room. I wanted to be at a newspaper, covering it. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? What am I doing over here at a time like this?
That’s what I was thinking on Saturday, anyway. But I know that one day I’ll get there. In the meantime, I’m just going to think about Christmas, when me and the Island head over to Aus. Can’t wait. A new beginning!

Wrinkles in time
It’s getting cooler, and my skin is all dry and itchy. But I do love this weather; I’ve busted out all my Light Cotton Sweaters that have been folded up in the cupboard all year. And scarves!
The End of Buddhist Lent boat racing festival has been and gone; we drank a lot, we all wore dresses, I went to bed with a headache.
Later, Mel and Gregory, who have both been here for almost three years, went through all their photos from the last three boat racing festivals. “Ha ha,” they said. “You’ve got older. All of us have. You too, Sally.”
I paid Mel back by stealing some of her Clarins Beauty Flash Balm last time I was at her house. Must remember to pick some up duty free on my next trip home. That, and some eye cream, or something.

Suburban karaoke
Of course, the End of Buddhist Lent means the start of wedding season. And I’m happy for all these happy couples and their happy families, really I am. I’m happy that taste goes right out the window during this period and people fill their backyards with pink and white plastic chairs and pink lacy archways and fluorescent ribbons. It’s great. But, you know, the speakers, the speakers! Why does the wedding need to take place in my living room when I’m not even invited? And why is it always the same music, and why are drunken guests allowed to take to the microphone at around 10pm? Cultural sensitivity? Pah! A drunk person who can’t sing is just that, and I think we should all be spared this, no matter what country we’re in.

Speaking of culture…
I had a small mystery resolved for me this weekend. Last week was this big Francophone conference in Vientiane, which was kind of a big deal, at least for the Lao government. The conference itself was pointless and nothing happened, but there were delegations from more than 60 countries here, and that meant curfews and lots of cops and new street signs suddenly informing that this or that street, for no apparent reason, is one way, so please pay this fine so we can go and buy lunch, etc - really tiresome stuff. Not to mention all the workmen chipping off the old street markings and repainting them, and the poor monks in their undergarments repainting the outer temple walls all day long…
Anyway, Le Renovateur, the French magazine that is part of my department (the Lao Press in Foreign Languages), which is a usually a weekly, did a daily edition all of last week, a task for which the staff were hopelessly unprepared. They brought in some French people to help. One was a lovely woman from Paris, who has been living and working for three years in Phnom Penh doing roughly the same thing as me. Then there were these other two guys who I’ve seen at the magazine and around town a million times and who never say hello to me, even though they know me and know that I speak French etc etc. Rude. Not that I really care, it’s not like I don’t have my own friends and all that. But I mean, really, it’s a bit naff, isn’t it? Being a French person and being rude?
I had a drink with La Parisienne after work on Sunday, and she basically confirmed that many French people working in Asia can be asses. So maybe it really is a French thing, rather than an imaginary barrier set up in our minds to explain why we don’t get along! I'm saying I agree with her, necessarily. I know many perfectly lovely French people, here and elsewhere. But they do have a reputation...and perhaps it's not that misplaced.

Lentil as anything
For the first time in years, or at least since I left Melbourne, I’ve finally started cooking, for various reasons. The main one is that the Island made us the best ork lam from Luang Prabang, one of my favourite Lao dishes ever, the other night. He said I had had to help him, so we went together to the 103 market, and I thought for the millionth time that I should just damn well start cooking while I’m here and can get all these fresh vegetables for next to nothing. Piles and piles of leafy greens and tomatoes and mushrooms - honestly, the other night I bought ingredients for a stir-fry, and it came to about 9,000 kip. That’s, like, 90c. I have to learn to appreciate this while I’m here. Now that I’ve mastered the stir-fry, the bean curry and ork lam, one of my friends, Nicola, has promised to tell me all she knows about lentils. I’m really getting into it. I love lentils.

Travel bugs
Here’s something that shits me to tears (what, another thing?): a woman at my work has just found out that she has been offered a place as a PhD candidate at a Swedish university.
This woman, in her 30s, has studied in Australia and Sweden already, though god knows what she actually learnt during that time, because she sure as hell can’t speak, read or write English for shit. She must have had an awful lot of ‘assistance’ while there. Either that or she has simply ‘forgotten’ everything she learnt since coming back to Laos.
She can’t even write a proper paragraph, much less a clear article! And she refuses to admit it, hence my waves of anger and frustration that it’s her, and not someone else in the office who can actually write, who gets the chance to do a PhD.
A lot of donor countries like China and Sweden think overseas training is the way to go. I think they’re wrong. It would be more efficient and cost-effective to send experts over and train them on the spot. Most of the people in my office have travelled more than me, but you’d never know it to talk to them. They’ve all been on so many press junkets, attended so many conferences and undergone so much ‘training’, in Asia, Europe, America and even Australia, and yet most of them retain nothing. They are for the most part completely unworldly, and when you ask them about their trip, usually the most you get is something about the weather, and the cost of living in relation to their per diem. One guy I worked with last year went to Japan for three weeks, and all he could say when he came home was that his per diem hadn’t been nearly enough and he hadn’t been able to save any of it. Japan! Another kid is currently at a conference in Tehran- imagine! How exciting! He didn’t seem remotely interested- you’d think he was off to a team-building exercise at a local conference centre.
Obviously it takes away from the experience if you’re just sent to a place whether you want to go or not. It’s not as though people in the office are ‘rewarded’ for their good work by being sent overseas – it’s simply a case of taking turns. And a lot of the people in my office have young families, and don’t even want to go away, so it becomes and extra burden for them, rather than a golden opportunity or the fulfilment of a dream.
It’s different if you work towards something- save money and dream about a place.
As it is, I think it’s just a waste. But that’s just curmudgeonly of me, isn’t it? I’ll shut up now.

Coffee shop
I’ll never stop discovering new places in Vientiane. My latest is an old new discovery, dating back almost a year but sorely neglected – the Roasted Coffee House on the Tamarind Road in town. This Japanese woman has a little coffee shop all painted white with cane chairs and navy blue cushions and meticulously chosen glasses and crockery. And the coffee, well! The girl goes out and handpicks the beans and dries and roasts them herself! And serves it all up in these chic, Japanese-minimalist cups. And sometimes some scones. Only, don’t go there too often- she has a thing about publicity and would really prefer the place to be empty most days. So she says…
On the other hand, last night I abandoned the cooking regime and had dinner at Vong. Vong? What is it about Vong? It's a typical Lao restaurant selling typical, cheap, MSG-laden Asian fare. Not close to anything, not too far away. Just Vong. I've yet to find anyone who's been here long enough to remember when it wasn't the most dearly beloved dinner joint in the Vientiane 'burbs. It's even in the Lonely Planet, but only because it's apparently 'loved by expats'. Anyway, it was pretty good.

Time marches on
I watched Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep last night, which I considered a constructive way to spend my Monday evening, especially when I have no other inspiration around me. I mean, Charlotte Gainsbourg's sweaters alone... On the other hand, after reading that great piece about The Wire in the New Yorker, I started watching the show, and realised pretty quick that the article was more worth my while, time-wise. Sure the show is slick and has lots of cool, creative swearing in it, but I simply can’t dedicate that kind of time. The first series is 13 episodes – each one is an hour long!
I would rather sit in front of my laptop and try in vain to write something. You know, like a real writer.
I have all these ideas, but I keep thinking there will come a time when I will be able to write about that, but not right now. But it’s silly. Not that long ago, I told myself that I just had to start being person I wanted to be, rather than waiting to become her. It worked, more or less. Athough I am a bit bored at the moment. It’s Tuesday morning, and everyone is out or away, including the Island who has this intense new job and has had to travel to Luang Prabang for two weeks, and tonight I’ll have to cook for myself like a loser, and, you know, it seems a bit lame.
But it’s times like this I always think back to Parul, my housemate in Montreal in 2000.
“Dude, romanticise what you do,” she always used to say.
Ok Parul. I’ll do that. Off to work.

Filmy or Banky

2007-10-23T11:11:00.000+10:00

First up, this post is dedicated to Noy and Sisay's kid, who I rote about a couple of weeks back. Remember "Bobby"? Well, they've recently discovered another Bobby in the village, so they've decided to change his name after a few short weeks. Down to two choices now: "Film" or "Bank". I kid you not. Whatever the bizarre reasons for these preferences, I challenge anyone, categorically, to find a single Lao person who can pronounce the word "film". Seriously. And anyway, whatever happened to nice traditional Lao names? There are thousands to choose from!
Imagine being called "Bank".

Crimestoppers
As if to prove one of the points I made in my last post, this week I saw a cop writing a text message while directing traffic. Seriously. He even got so absorbed at one stage that he dropped his arm and his whistle altogether, leaving one side of the roundabout stranded.
But these coppers do get some things right. I think I mentioned some time ago that my friend Mel had her bag stolen at knifepoint while riding her motorbike late at night. It was about five months ago now, but last week, Mel rang me at work to tell me about the strangest thing. The police had called her that morning to tell her they had all of her stuff back. Bag, camera, wallet with the entire large sum of cash she had just taken out of the bank in Bangkok on the night she got robbed- five months later. A mystery! And the police were unable to completely explain to her, through the translator, how it all happened, except that they had come by each thing separately, and the boys who robbed her were all in custody.
Well, I don’t work at a newspaper for nothing, and I got one of the journos to use his police contacts to find out more. Here’s what I got.
The four guys who stopped her had been on something of a rampage before they got busted, snatching bags in public, flashing knives and ripping necklaces off women’s necks in the street. Just for fun, too; apparently, they weren’t even on drugs, just bored after all the nightclubs had closed. They never wore masks or anything, and in fact, the guy wielding the knife had a tattoo, which Mel got a good enough look at to be able to get him nabbed.
The guy driving one of the motorbikes bike that stopped her was 14 years old; the guy who got off the bike, held a knife to her neck and demanded that she hand over her bag was 18. Knifeboy spent all the cash she had on her (20,000 baht) pretty quick, but his parents had to pay it back.
Last year, Mel’s neighbour had to spend three months in gaol because she was unable to compensate for her son’s robberies.
But, as Mel pointed out, she would feel sorry for the kids if it wasn’t for the knife. If the boys had stopped her and demanded the bag, she would have handed it right over; the knife was an unnecessary little flourish that took the crime into Violent Little Prick territory.

More than just a friend…
I’ve mentioned before how devastatingly simple the Lao language is – a fridge is a ‘cold box’, the tyres a motorbike are ‘motorbike feet’, your jeans pocket is ‘trouser bag’, etc – but every now and again you can come across a word for which there is no English equivalent. One such word is ‘gik’, which refers to a friend who is more than a friend but not a boyfriend or girlfriend, whom you may or may not be sleeping with. You can have a gik and a boyfriend at the same time.
There have been endless discussions over an English equivalent; all Lao people seem to have trouble in drawing the ‘gik’ boundary. But it’s a mystery to us. If it’s not a best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend or fuck-buddy, then what is it? Our Lao friends just think we’re narrow-minded, that we can't envision this type of relationship. But that's the power of the language, or lack thereof!

Sitting on a jewel
I’ve been hoarding all kinds of beauty products all year, for fear of running out of staples (as if that will happen!), and I came across a tube of moisturiser I got my parents to bring on their first visit, more than a year ago. Nivea from the supermarket, nothing special, and I’ve since moved on to other things, but I came across it this week and slathered some all over my hands and face, only to find it had acquired a nasty acrid chemical stench that drove me to chuck it out.
Related (bear with me here) is that the Boom Boom Room at Full Moon Café is up and running again, thank god, and in a fit of glee I went and bought a handful of albums last week. A mistake really; as my housemate Cait points out, it’s dangerous to buy too much music at once, because you take ages to get around to it all, and sometimes you realise you’ve been sitting on a gem for too long. I’m still absorbing some of the stuff I bought in Hanoi, and here I am stocking up with more.
Not that music would ever go off, but all this hoarding can be a dangerous addiction.
Cait and I, luckily, have similar tastes in music, and mornings are always made far more pleasant by the day’s soundtrack set running over the morning papers (on websites). Working out at the gym is also a joy, and there’s nothing like finishing work early on a Friday, pouring a gin & tonic and cranking up…something, whatever is obsessing me at the time. Elvis Costello. Regina Spektor. The Rapture. David Bowie.
But I also have a Lao boyfriend.
Are you with me here? Can you imagine the vast chasm between our tastes?
How can I explain to him the horror of Britney Spears and her ilk, when that’s what he listens to? And indeed, why do I feel the need to explain it at all? He dislikes all the stuff I listen to, despite my lengthy explanations of the evils of commercial pop confections that have no soul...

Bookworm
It’s a circular argument, exactly the same as when I try to explain why I, and other falungs, like to read a lot. It’s seems to be incomprehensible here that anyone would read by choice. And anyway, there’s not much to read.
I went to a talk a few months ago by an Australian academic, Grant Evans, who’s a world-class expert on Laos. He spoke a bit about this problem, saying that the government has never traditionally encouraged reading (very uncommunist, reading), but that they’re starting to realise how embarrassing it is for Lao officials to attend international forums or summits, and to be completely behind in terms of intellectual capacity. Grant Evans pointed out that there are plenty of books translated into Thai and that it would be relatively simple to have these Thai versions translated into Lao as well. The government usually requires permission to have books translated, but Grant pointed out that organisations could just have books translated and see what happens.
You know, if I could start again here, knowing what I do now, or if I had the resources, that’s where my money would be. It's one cause I would champion all the way, even if only in the main cities. Reading fiction shouldn't have to be a weird foreign fetish.

More hoarding
Talking of reading, in 2005, when I was cleaning out my desk at my old job, before leaving forever, I found dozens and dozens of articles that I’d printed out from the Internet. My desk was right next to the printer, and I would read the papers online in the morning and automatically print out anything that seemed worthy.
I don’t do this much anymore- ashamed of wasting too much paper, and anyway, the newspaper doesn’t always have paper or functioning printers.
But anyway, here’s some I downloaded and have kept on my computer:
On the weekend, I read this piece in the Guardian, and felt a rush of relief mixed with vindication- “Yes, yes, that’s right!” I said, aloud. And then I sent it to my parents.
I also read this essay in the Morning News about leaving a boring town that you’ve been trying to love, to move to New York. Jessica Francis Kane talks about taking walks and playing the Redeemable Element Game, in which she has to find something worthy in the “otherwise undistinguished suburban landscape…the café downtown where, if you sit with your back to the front door, it feels like Seattle; the wine bar downtown where, if you sit with your back to the door, it feels like Manhattan.” She could easily be talking about Canberra.
I also read one of those great 12-page long articles in the New Yorker that I love so much. I would kill to be able to write like this, about anything. And that’s the point: if the writing’s good enough, you will read about anything. The New Yorker is like that. I’ve never seen this show (although I’ll probably seek it out and watch it now) and I’ve never been to Baltimore, but it all resonates.
Also, here’s one about Jerry Seinfeld, who I was shocked to learn is 53 and has three kids!! I only point it out because Cait and I have been watching a lot of Seinfeld, lately, and finding comfort in watching about 30-somethings who sometimes have difficulty paying rent. And who are are crazy and obsessive and a bit vain...It's all a bit familiar, and not just in the sense of having seen every episode several times over the past five years or so...

'Cultural Sensitivity'

2007-10-06T18:44:00.000+10:00

Well, I’ve just come in after being very nearly run down by a four-wheel drive. That’s another of the baffling things about Lao people in general- while they may be, as a rule, slow and laid back with little sense of imperative about anything, this all changes once you get them on the road and in control of a vehicle. Drivers here simply can’t seem to accept that sometimes you may just have to wait another millisecond for that light to turn green before you can shoot off, and that there’s a reason for the whole ‘give way’ thing.
Conversely, there is very little evidence of road rage here. There never seems to be anyone, other than me of course, getting the shits when they have to break suddenly because a car just couldn’t wait their turn.
Like many things, I think this is a metaphor for Laos in general. People here put up with all these self-imposed ‘cultural’ annoyances as though there’s absolutely nothing to be done.

Club Girls
Related is that I had a fight with the Island the other night over, of all things, his sister. We went over to visit the family for dinner, and the whole evening deteriorated into arguments when the Island discovered his father hadn’t been eating dinner because no one had been around to cook for him.
Ok, alright, that’s bad but that’s not the thing that incensed me. Mr Island has had a hard enough life - his health is failing, a lifetime of smoking has ruined his lungs, and at 50, he can no longer work. He’s never had to cook his own meals, so why would he start now?
The thing that had upset the Island, Jr, was that his 23-year-old sister was going out at night. I couldn’t see the problem, really. The Island goes out regularly til the wee hours with his friends, to my eternal fury (why would he go out when he could spend the night with me?) It’s an agreement we have come to- we go out with our own friends.
But apparently, Phonesavanh, being a girl, must stay at home and tend to the house, while her (younger and older) brothers go out at all hours.
Because, you see, the Island calmly explained to me later, Lao girls who go out are probably sluts and will never get a husband.
Well, I answered, maybe girls who like to go out aren’t interested in marrying a nasty little man who expects her to sit at home while he goes out every night drinking beer and having fun.
This suggestion was met with the usual “You just don’t understand Lao culture, things are different in your country, blah blah blah”.
And yet this country has aspirations, voiced daily in government speeches and quoted in our esteemed Vientiane Times, of becoming a ‘modern, industrialised’ country.

Meanwhile, Miss Apone Lao was crowned - “I will use the money for my education, but I will keep my crown to wear on special occasions and represent my country” - with one second-place winner and four runners-up. Strange, huh? Unfortunately, my personal favourite, Number A8, didn’t make it, probably because she was about 6-foot tall with buckteeth and a wonky eye. I kid you not. I think maybe she was related to some official, but it may have had to do with the fact that last year’s winner won because she was so tall, nothing more and nothing less.

Ordering In
I’ve been reading a lot of books set in New York recently, and getting all lovey-dovey about it. I love New York for all the clichéd reasons that New Yorkers love New York, especially the way you can get anything, pretty much at any time of day or night. Car services, laundry services, home delivered coffee from the local deli, etc.
But you know what? Vientiane is not that far off it – like in many Asian countries, service and income-generation are, for a developing community, pretty much 24-hour pursuits. So, when the Island ran out of gas the other night in the middle of cooking me dinner, he just rang up the gas company (run out of someone’s house) and got them to bring another canister. Last Friday afternoon, the whole office went over to view Noy’s new baby -

[side note: Noy had her baby, finally. And such a little one, too, even though he was 10 days’ late. And – you’ll love this – they called him ‘Bobby’. “Oh, that’s nice,” I said to Sisay, Noy’s husband, when he told us. “Short for Robert!” “No, no,” he replied. “I look in the dictionary and it mean ‘English policeman.’” Of course, why wouldn’t you want to name a Lao child after a cockney copper?]

- and everyone settled in for a long evening of cards and whiskey, ordering serve after serve of tam ma khun (Papaya salad) and beer from some local store, the owners of which just sent their kids over on bicycles, back and forth, for hours on end.
And you know what? I’m also thinking, as it’s raining, and looks set to rain for the rest of the evening, I may just order my food in. How am I ever going to leave this place?

Procrastination measures
I have been reading a lot lately. It’s pure procrastination, of course; I should be diligently carving out my career as a writer and a journalist each evening after work, but it’s just too draining. So it’s been short stories by Alice Munro and A.M Homes, Paul Auster, John Updike, Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb, and now, of all things, Crime and Punishment. Remember how, before I left Australia, I sent ahead a box of books to read in all the downtime I thought I’d be having here? And how I put in, among lots of other stuff, all those worthy books I thought I’d finally have time to get through? Well, those are the only ones I have left now. Now’s the time for C & M, Anna Karenina, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, etc.

Oh, what, you think I can’t do it? I’ll show you.

Office update:
Last Friday, I wore a pair of black trousers to work – nice ones from MNG that I bought last year in Bangkok – and couldn’t believe the reaction I got. I still wear a sinh to the office pretty much every day, for various reasons: it’s easy to get dressed in the morning, like putting on a suit or a uniform; I always get nice, appreciative comments, and the ladies all seem to see me wearing one as a sign of respect, or solidarity; and anyway, I really like them - they’re comfortable, and beautiful, and forgiving, and I’ll never have the chance to wear them again, probably. But anyway, it was my own personal Casual Friday, and there I was in black, man-style pants not expecting anyone to notice or say anything, and everyone, even the guys, all said I looked ‘sexy, like real working woman’! Isn’t that strange? I had no idea people felt that way about ladies in pants here. I mean, Lao girls nowadays wear pretty much anything they want outside the office, but what is it about these pants? A mystery.

Redemption

2007-09-25T11:32:00.000+10:00

I was made to feel bad for not going out of town last weekend for a friend’s birthday. It was his 30th, so really I should have gone, but the thing is that I’ve recently absolved myself from ever having to set foot near a large body of water, a boat, mud, rain or strenuous/unenjoyable physical activity ever again. Isn’t it marvellous? Thanks Mother and Father for your relentless adventurism. I’ve done it all now, which leaves me to a future of peace and comfort- at the tender age of 28. I’m tickled pink!

Holiday
We’ve been away for the past couple of weeks, in case you haven’t noticed. Parental duties, by no means arduous or imposing, took us criss-crossing the city in search of exciting new aid projects- the Lao Disabled Women’s Centre, the Lao Rugby Federation – and then to Luang Prabang. How I love it up there! How I wished we could have stayed a little longer.

But we were happy, in the end, to head onwards north, to rustic Meung Ngoi, a gorgeous village with a tiny main street running through it; we stayed in the only guesthouse with hot water, and the electricity was only on for a few hours. We even managed to stop off a couple of times at the Island’s village again- it was on our official itinerary! It doesn’t surprise me that travel agencies consider Ban Sop-Kong as a model rural village.

The Island, of course, has relatives living up and down the river, and we dropped on some distant cousin, Xiengvong, who, it turns out, makes boat propellers from old bomb casings for a living. Should’ve seen my dad’s eyes light up at that one.

Xiengvong later invited us over for dinner with his family. Mum and Dad were hesitant, feeling like they were intruding, but I assured them, from my own personal experience, that not only would the food be quite easily the best Lao food they would ever taste, the family would also vastly over-cater, in true Lao style.

I was correct in every respect- there was enough food for ten people, and the best thing was it was 100% locally produced. The family had grown the rice, chillies and spices, foraged for the riverweed, caught the fish, and shot the unidentified wildlife that may or may not have been related to the buffalo.

Our trip was organised by the very competent young Frenchman, Francois, at Exotissimo travel, who presented us with a detailed itinerary involving boats, ethnic villages and trekking- grade ‘easy’.

I suppose, Monsieur Francois, it would have been easy, and the whole thing more pleasant, if it hadn’t been, you know, the rainy season… And mud, towers of it, piles of it, everywhere I looked, in my dreams for days!

And I suppose I would have enjoyed it more if I were more coordinated. Or outdoorsy. Or adventurous. Or just a generally more pleasant person. As it was, the only satisfaction I found was in the knowledge that I could safely not ever have to do this kind of thing again if I didn’t want to, because I’ve done it more than enough…

Well, anyway, I suppose I can also be thankful for the fact that the delighted grins barely left my parents’ faces the whole trip, even (or especially during) our ‘grade easy’ treks through the mud, when Dad fell flat on his back on several occasions, each time brandishing his hand, bandaged up after a recent (minor) operation, in the air to triumphantly display its pristine whiteness.

I suppose, too, I should be grateful for this inexplicably gung-ho attitude, although those shiny faces gave me little comfort as sat white-knuckled in the back of an overloaded speedboat on a seven-hour trip to Huay-Xai. We really did think ‘fast boat’ meant ‘slow boat only faster’. Since when did ‘fast’ mean that much in Laos? Since when did it morph into a hair-raisingly dangerous careening across the vast Mekong, dodging storm debris and slamming through the wakes of other boats? Of course, it wasn’t until we reached the halfway point- a falling-down jetty with a roof on the edge of Pakbeng- that I bothered to whip out the Lonely Planet, echoing my mother’s indignation that we hadn’t been adequately warned about the noise, the cramped conditions, the general unpleasantness of this so-called ‘fast boat’.

"Serious accidents…fatalities...almost weekly...boat striking a hidden rock or tree limb...contact with a standing wave is sufficient to capsize...a simple capsize may have serious consequences for the passengers...tremendously noisy and disturbing to both animal and human life along the riverbanks...very cramped and uncomfortable...avoid all speedboat travel unless absolutely necessary."

Can you blame me for having a mini panic attack? Can you? We had no choices left at that stage. Having stayed on for the Luang Prabang boat-racing festival, we had one day to get to the border and catch a plane, and there is still no road, although I did catch wistful glimpses as we sped up the river of bulldozers high in the mountains.

After that, the sight of the Huayxai airport with its dirt floor and antique typewriter was especially welcome.

A Night on the Gay
So my whirlwind trip to Bangkok straight after couldn’t have been more surreal, really. I went to meet up with my old friend SC and his boyf Ben- our first time in Asia together. And my first real trip to BKK with someone who really knew the place.

We arrived in the evening and met at some sort of hip fashion show at the Siam Centre, a good start, I thought. But I did start panicking a bit when I felt myself fading shortly after dinner- that’s normal, right? 10 o’clock is a normal time for one’s energy to flag, isn’t it? ISN’T IT? I had an awful feeling this wouldn’t be acceptable on a Friday night in BKK with the gays, and I was damn right. We went back to the hotel to get changed at 11pm, and stayed at a bar until 2am.

The second night, the boys left Lou and me in an empty bar on Saturday at 10pm while they went and got changed, and it took me some time to realise, as the place slowly filled with people, that we were the only girls there. Not that we felt out of place.

We then moved on to what can only be described as Four Floors of Gay, one of those throbbing, druggy clubs playing very bad music, that I enjoyed for about an hour if only for the novelty of seeing so many goddamn men crammed into the one place.

It was 4am by the time the last bar shut, a time at which nothing is more vital than a serve of McDonalds on the way home- thank god there was one open. I felt lost, in another universe, as I climbed, exhausted, into bed. (And yet still, my eyes snapped open like a machine the following morning at 6.30.)

It was altogether a far more relaxed weekend in Bangkok than any time I’ve spent there before. The Chatuchak markets in particular- a mandatory destination on any given weekend in BKK, can be a desperate place if you’re alone- the panic associated with buying seizes one uncontrollably. But catching up with old friends means time needs to be taken to relax, chat, eat at a table, try some new-fangled tea drinks. This time we found ourselves taking a lot of pit-stops, lolling on pavements and steps, eating roadside food, nipping into 7-11s. I saw shops, restaurants and bars I never knew existed.

And my sustainable shopping mode is more or less permanent now, which means I buy less and less, and that I bypassed the most perfect bag in the world because I had spent all morning in Chatuchak and lost perspective. There, 500 Baht (about US$12) is considered excessive, for anything, and this bag I saw was 2000 baht- excessive, but not really when I think about it now, with regret.

But I did buy a new iPod, which I desperately needed, and a couple of clothing items and some Christmas presents and a pile of books, oh and I had my hair butchered by a smarmy masochist at Toni&Guy. Honestly, it took about 20 minutes, and if he’d cut any more off I’d have a crew-cut.

Me: What have you done? Where has my hair gone?
Toni&Guy Top Stylist: I have made you look good.
Me: But I only wanted a little bit off! You have made it far too short!
T&GTS (shaking his head dismissively): No, no, no. This one is good for your hair, it is best for your head, it is best haircut.
Me (whispering, eyes welling): Ok. I think I’ll go talk to my friend now.
T&GTS retires to the corner to snigger at me as I hiss “I hate it! I hate it!” to Lou.

My feeling of desolation didn’t leave for hours, even though SC, one of my more honest friends, shrugged when he saw it and said “It looks great! What are you worried about?” and even though Lou said she liked it better than before (what’s that meant to mean?) and even though I couldn’t help noticing that no one seemed horrified/replused by me when we went out later. In fact, I saw several girls with short hair. And in fact, I don’t need a hairdryer anymore and it takes just 2 minutes to get ready. And in fact, I’ve been feeling secretly jealous of Posh Spice ever since she cut her hair off and have been musing vaguely on the possibilities. And in fact, maybe that evil hairdresser was correct, even though I hate him for laughing at me…

I’ve had mixed reactions at work. No one said anything at first. A couple of the girls finally asked me, bewildered, “Why, why you cut your hair so short??” And a couple more since have sidled up to me and said, “I want short hair too. Not short like you, but shorter. What you think?” Short hair is exceptionally rare for Lao girls. I have a fond notion of starting some kind of revolution – a hair revolution - right here in the newsroom. Now that would really be making a difference, wouldn’t it? That’s something I could put in my end-of-project report under achievements. “Encouraged young Lao women to think outside the box (to layer, shorten, add highlights), thus empowering them to make further, more radical individual decisions…”

Lao womanhood
But, judging by the state of this year’s Miss Apone Lao contestants, who made their way prettily into the Vientiane Times- a major sponsor- this week to, well, you know, look pretty and do nothing, a revolution of this kind is still a long way off.

Miss Apone Lao is a beauty contest put on by the Lao Women’s Union, to determine which of the country’s young women best embodies traditional Lao womanhood. Auditions are held across the country, and 18 girls are chosen as finalists. The girls appear on stage and on TV, introducing themselves with a demure little curtsey, and stepping back to smile vacantly. Their hometowns and measurements are recorded meticulously, the better to allow the general population give their most informed opinions, which ultimately influence the official vote. The winner gets her face plastered across billboards and newspaper ads for things like Lao Airlines and coffee. It’s desperate to watch. We cover the whole thing from the auditions onwards, which means a lot of commentary from the organisers.

“As you know, we look for both beauty and intelligence in this contest,” one of the organisers will say. “The Luang Prabang auditions were impressive. We saw a number of girls who, although pretty, did not display intelligence. And of course, we had many girls come through who, although obviously very smart, just weren’t attractive enough.”

At this point, my feminist instincts, always lurking, obediently concealed, just below the surface, boil upwards.

Me: But this is disgraceful! Tik, how can you write such things! We should be encouraging these kinds of attitudes in Vientiane Times. I don’t care if she is a senior member of the Women’s Union!
Tik, the reporter assigned each year to cover the event: But Sharlie (that’s how people pronounce my name here), everyone knows Lao girl must be beautiful for to have successful in life. For me, beautiful girl is most important.
Me (almost speechless with rage): So you would rather marry a beautiful girl who is stupid, than a smart girl who is ugly?
Tik: Yes. This is correct.

I must point out that Tik himself is no oil painting- pimply and scrawny with crooked teeth and a deep-seated phobia of air conditioning. Convinced that it is slowly destroying his health, for the sake of all the ladies who must be queuing up to marry him, he insists on a prime desk in a corner of the layout room, and works wearing a surgical mask.

Stand back, ladies- he’s mine!

Office update:
The electricity was off in most of the office for a couple of days last week- a cable burnt out in the night, we could have died! - and the reporters resorted to hopping onto the various available computers throughout the building. Inconceivably, we finished all the stories by 4.30 on both days- can you imagine? I should like to impose a daily crisis in the newsroom on a daily basis, if it means they actually get their arses into gear. An actual crisis is the only thing that can really instil a sense of urgency in this place.

Plagiarism in all its forms

2007-08-28T23:04:00.000+10:00

One of the most frustrating aspects of my daily travails at the newspaper involves plagiarism. And I’m not just talking about press releases copied out word-for-word on the page with a reporter’s name slapped across the top. I mean those instances in which I'm toiling away through a lengthy story on, say, the importance of vaccinations for measles, reworking every sentence and adding an ‘s’ on every plural and an article before every noun, when all of a sudden, I reach a paragraph that fairly glitters with perfection, so good I wish I had written it myself.

Me: Where does this come from?
Reporter: (feigning puzzled look)
Me (droning): Remember to always attribute a quote or a piece of information.
Reporter: I wrote it!
Me: No, you didn’t.
Reporter: Yes.
Me: No. There are no mistakes in it, so I know you didn’t write it.
Reporter (defeated): My friend helped me.
Me: Which friend?
Reporter: My friend.

At this point, there’s no point in going on.
The worst is when I get a whole story that has clearly been copied, or written by someone else, and it’s almost always the daftest reporters who try to pull this trick on me.
The problem is that the Lao language isn’t subtle enough to allow for many differences in style. There doesn’t seem to be a separate writing style for, say, government reports as opposed to entertainment stories, and it’s only the most dedicated reporters who have been able to pick this up when writing in English.
It means they can’t understand why ‘moreover’, ‘furthermore’, ‘thus’ and ‘hence’ are unsuitable for newspapers. Also, they are always shocked when I can instantly see when they have lifted material from somewhere else.
“The style is different!” I will say, begging them to just fucking get it.
They don’t, and possibly never will.

Travel snobs
I’ve been having conversations with old friends back in Aus lately, and thinking vaguely about what it will be like when I finally go home.
It sounds shallow, but I know the biggest adjustment issue I will face will be daily expenses.
I lived a comparatively extravagant life in Melbourne, given that I worked part-time and was a full-time student, but I still always had to think about whatever I spent. I rarely bought things on impulse, and never went on big-time shopping sprees. I occasionally had to add up items in my head at the supermarket to decide whether to purchase, and frequently stocked up on cosmetics when I saw they were on sale. And I mostly lived from paycheck to paycheck, with an empty bank account at the end of the fortnight.
Here, despite my (relatively) small living allowance from Ausaid, I almost never have to worry about such petty things. I can afford to eat out every night (which I do), and hardly ever say no to a trip away. Drawbacks include excessive drinking and getting fat, but that’s by the by.
Not to mention the fact that I am supporting a whole other person, an adult that is, and not a child.
I’d like to think that, given my chosen career, I’ll always be good at getting by on not much with only the occasional freakout, but the fact remains that this little jaunt I’m having in South East Asia will have damaged my attitude to money, possibly for years to come.
And this brings me to my main point. To all my friends at home who I know would never even dream of visiting me in a place like this, I have just one thing to say: you’re missing out.
It’s nice and warm and pretty here, and if gourmet food and posh hotels are your thing, you can do it here at a fraction of the price! You can eat and drink extensively without dinting your budget, and in some places (Bangkok, Hanoi) the shopping is fabulous. All I’m saying is you should just give it a go.
And I’m also pretty much saying that I don’t know how I’ll cope when I’m back in Australia and back on a strict eating and drinking budget and no longer able to buy anything I damn well want…

Joseph and Mary
Since we were recently on the subject of food, I just want to give a quick nod to that Vientiane institution that is Joma.
Joma is a café - a chain, almost, with one here and one in Luang Prabang - modelled on slick, urban chains like Starbucks, that serves up coffees in different sizes, cakes and bland, failsafe food, like bagels, salads and sandwiches. It’s always spick and span, the staff are so highly trained that they rarely make mistakes, and get your order to you so fast you wonder whether they knew you were coming.
It’s like a well-oiled machine, with uniformed baristas rarely standing still but never looking stressed. It’s always packed and never seems to run out of anything. The place has a distinctive smell, the food always tastes the same, and if you go there often enough, the staff will remember your usual order. And somewhere, unseen, someone is pulling the strings and keeping it moving smoothly.
I struggle to get my head around it. My feelings are sometimes ambiguous: I like the reliability of it, but resent the American-ness of it. There’s a rumour going round that it’s run by a Christian couple (and a more extreme version that they force the staff to convert, although I doubt that’s true), and all the coffee served is fair trade and organic. I get irritated by the prices – 15,000 kip is too much to pay for a fruitshake, which is 5,000 kip anywhere else, and they make you pay for WiFi – but there are (occasional) times when all I crave is muesli with yoghurt, really.
But above all, I think I tend towards loving it to death, if only because it’s one of those places that’s designed to linger in, with smooth, clean tables and benches big enough to park your laptop and spread out all your stuff, read the newspaper, or have a work meeting over coffee paid for on someone else’s expense account.
I’ve been going there a lot lately, comfortable with the subdued clatter, the drone of people discussing budget strategies, and the tapping of other people’s laptops. I like it. I’m out of the house, and not cooped up in my room, but I feel like I’m at home.
I never thought I’d admit it, given all the great local-style places around. But there you have it. I’m a laptop in a café kinda gal, I guess. Maybe I always have been…

Kanom saep
Oh, are we still on food? I’ll finish this post with a dedication to Mr Pom, our business reporter who writes exactly one meticulously written and mind-numbingly boring story each day. He also, on occasion, deposits a delicious Lao kanom, or dessert, on my desk in the morning - the kind that’s wrapped in a banana leaf and offered up in temples. Indeed, his wife cooks up a batch every couple of days to give to the monks on their morning alms rounds, and sometimes she makes too many. Mr Pom is always amused and faintly surprised by my excitement and pleasure at finding this little gift on my keyboard, but how can I fail to get excited about sweet sticky rice all mixed up with custardy banana and sometimes jam?
It’s like heaven, all wrapped up in a banana leaf. Those are some lucky monks.

Me and my life, continued...

2007-08-21T11:09:00.000+10:00

Do you want to know what a typical weekend in Vientiane is like? Here goes.
I worked until 5.30 on Friday and went home feeling entirely frazzled. I changed my clothes and made plans to meet up with Sophie and others at Sunset Bar.
But then I realised I was so hungry that I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything until I ate. So I poured us some strong gin & tonics and got some pad thai from the V-shop. Suddenly I realised life was complete and there was no need whatsoever to go out, so I stayed at home and watched Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim starring Parker Posey, which I had bought months ago and never got around to watching. I can’t think why- it was so fantastic, and inspiring. I thought back to my days as a wanky film student, writing about Hal Hartley movies with love and adoration.
I slept in on Saturday (until 9am!) and bought breakfast for me and the Island. Read the papers on the Internet, settled down with my book for a while, got a massage (the first in several weeks), and went to the supermarket.
Later, I went to a party, and later still, had dinner on the river and a couple of cocktails at Jazzy Brick, before riding home in the pouring rain and catching the end of Walk the Line on HBO - the sad/happy bit where Johnny proposes to June on stage.
On Sunday morning, I got up early and ate French toast with Mel at Kung’s, and then did some washing. Went to work (grrrr) to finish off Monday’s paper- had my usual tantrums about the fact that nobody had done enough work on Friday. Ate custard éclairs that someone had , bizarrely, brought in to the office. Left. Bought a new sarong at the Kouadin Market, the kind that all Lao women wear around the house, and a new gym bag to replace my old one that stinks. Went home and finished reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which ended badly and was indescribably sad.
I had dinner with the Island’s family, and came home feeling slightly hysterical the way I always do when I ride home during a downpour. His sisters were in paroxysms of hilarity over the eldest brother’s new girlfriend who, according to them, is 21 years old (the brother is 32), snooty and ugly as sin, with a big fat face. They went on and on about it. We ate barbequed fish and chicken soup with sticky rice.

And now I’m going to talk about food…
Without a doubt, one of the best things about Laos is the food. This has been a source of argument between my friends and me- there is enough variety here for people to be able to disguise their dislike for local fodder, or reject it altogether.
I think it rocks- the barbequed fish - which comes with a huge plate of cold noodles, cabbage, peanuts, mint and dill – laap, or papaya salad, which makes my mouth tingle. I love eating fried crickets or pork knuckles as bar snacks. I even love the chewy dried up fish.
Mind you, I never really get sick, apart from the odd bout of giardia, and last year’s sick-on-the-plane fiasco. I can get right into it without worrying.
But not a day goes by when I’m not grateful for not being a vegetarian, and that I like almost all foods as a general rule. No disrespect to the numerous vegos here, or to my lovely vegan friends back home. None at all- I’m just happy that this is an aspect of life I don’t have to forgo here.
I’ve mentioned before that I dislike sharing food, but that’s more to do with ordering a dish from a standard, western-style menu and having to endure plates being passed back and forth while people ‘try’ each other’s meals, rather than just making their choices and sticking with them…
Anyway, it’s completely different for Asian-style meals, obviously. Perhaps it’s just that it almost always hits the spot for me. Eating dinner at work every night is easily the highlight of my day. A typical Lao spread usually includes a meat-based curry, fish, chicken or shredded beef, a couple of vegetable and mushroom dishes, a sauce or two - usually eggplant or tomato - a soup, and sticky rice. There’s almost always a weird western-style dish as well, like potato salad with mayonnaise, or macaroni. But the variety of tastes- and I’ve always tended towards savoury rather than sweet- is just perfect to me, and best of all, there’s no need for decorum. I’m often derided for eating too fast- something to do with an unfounded paranoia about all the food in the world disappearing before I've had my fun. But at any given dinner time here in Laos, I just get right in and sample a dozen tastes all at once, and all I get is congratulations! It’s polite to gobble! And after a year and a half of this, I never ever feel ill after eating Lao food- I always feel completely satisfied.

Romance in the air
A couple of weeks ago, I met by chance the parents of an old school acquaintance, strangely enough, a guy called Hugo who I went to college with in Canberra, and who joined the army for a while, before coming out to do J-school at RMIT like me. He was in the undergrad class. Anyway, his parents, Mary and Peter, explained to us that they had met each other for the first time in Vientiane in 1973. He was at the Aus embassy and she had been teaching in Borneo, when a friend convinced her to come here for a visit.
They took me out for dinner, and told me about how little Vientiane has changed. The sunsets are the same. The streets are still sleepy. The textile shop on Samesentahi where they first met is still there. But back then, before the liberation, when the war was still going, the place was crawling with CIA agents, and no one could leave the city without a military escort.
Obviously a great story, and Mary agreed to come into the paper the next day to do an interview. This was my chance to finally see Ekaphone, my star reporter and thorn in my side, in action.
Together, we cobbled together a couple of questions, and he got hold of a tape recorder, and sat Mary down.
Ekaphone started by introducing himself, and explaining what he does. “I am the features writer,” he said. “I write political reports, profiles and…” he waved a hand in the air, “life stories.”

“Now,” he went on, “tell me about the day you met.” He sat back and pressed his hands together. “Was it raining that day?”

“Um, well, not so much, now that I come to think of it,” she said.

He looked slightly impatient. “Describe the scene,” he commanded. “Was there, how can I say, romance in the air?”

And so it went on. He had clearly half written the story in his head before he had even pressed record. This is something I will have to keep an eye on, when he comes to actually writing the thing. Stay tuned.

Natural disasters

2007-08-14T01:33:00.000+10:00

It has rained pretty much every day since I last wrote, and those little lover-frogs have taken up residence just inside the veranda doors.

It has brought the river right up the banks, and it sure is good for the farmers up north; in a country like this, rains that come two weeks late constitute a natural disaster. Farmers, unable to contemplate predictable variables such as late rains, fail to account for this when planting their rice at the time the rain usually comes. By the time the rain arrives, the seedlings are dried up and expired, and the crop is destroyed, leaving the family with nothing. It’s a drought.

Meanwhile, in the past weeks, there has been significant flooding, leading other crops to become waterlogged, and also destroyed. There is also a small flood in the far corner of our yard, and I’ve been sleeping like a baby for the past week, because there’s no washing on the line and nights are cool.

Six-finger discount
Tom and Sophie had a gathering at their house on Friday, and after having been reprimanded for being a crap (read ‘non-existent’) host, and considering I fully intended to drink a large portion of their gin, I thought some flowers were in order.

I’ve always loved giving people flowers, and here, of course, fresh-cut flowers are cheap as chips. The florist near our house is run by a girl who has six fingers, and I like to joke that she can arrange the bouquets extra fast, giving me a ‘six-finger discount’ in the process. Lame. In fact, it’s just an extra limb, splayed and without muscles, which sort of flops just under her thumb, but I can’t stop looking at it.

With child
Ms Noy, who works in the layout room at the paper, is due to give birth next month (she's pictured above, from behind, in red, in the afternoon snack-time photo). Her husband is the features editor and also one of the sports writers, and it makes me laugh the way she orders him around. She’s one of the most serene pregnant ladies I’ve ever seen, and the only one here who has continued wearing her usual sinhs, without resorting to those awful smock-like dresses a la Diana in the 80s that most ladies here rush into by their second month. I would have thought that the sinh would be the most comfortable and practical garment to wear when pregnant, with enough fabric to merely adjust and take out at the waist as the months roll by.

I quizzed her this afternoon about whether she’ll do the hot coals thing - the whole lying over the fire business still fascinates me - and she just shrugged (serenely) and said ‘tamadaa’, which means ‘as usual’. I asked her about what kinds of food she had to eat, and whether it was uncomfortable in the hot season. A slow smile crept over her face then, and she asked me whether I planned to lie over the fire when I had a baby.

My face, on the other hand, darkened. Since when did the concept of me and pregnancy come up in the same conversation? Since I began working in a big, gossipy Lao newsroom, that’s when.

Fashion hypnosis
I’ve been doing some freelance editing for UNDP, reworking a report by the National Statistics Centre written by Lao researchers.

It’s killing me, really it is. My neck is sore, my eyes are filled with statistics and my brain with dodgy and questionable scientific data. The authors are educated Lao people, but as we all know, education here only goes so far when it comes to hardcore statistical analysis:

Surveyed enterprises reported that 75 percent of businessmen have to pay very high taxes and duties. Of these, 13.4 percent indicated that this is a very serious problem while 38.2 percent considered it a big problem. The remaining reported this is just normal problem.

I love the concept of a ‘normal’ problem in Laos, really I do, almost as much as I love the notion of someone finally getting annoyed enough to classify something, anything, as a ‘serious’ problem.

Anyway, I’m over this 90-page report and everything that goes with it, except of course the cash.

Last night, I bought a British Vogue on my way home (something I’ve done when stressed out with work or study for as long as I can remember), and saved it until I’d finished last night’s quota of pages. I don’t know what I’d do without the world of high fashion, without the pages and pages of faces (almost of all which I can put a name to), without the gentle suggestions that it’s time for a new handbag (something ‘vivid’ this time). By the same token, nothing makes me happier when I get home from a late night than turning on Fashion TV and growing mesmerised by the endless catwalk shows. Endless! Guaranteed to put me in a trance.

Related is that I haven’t watched a movie in ages- I keep buying new films and can’t get around to watching them. It’s because I am still, as always, trapped in that all-important institution of pre-adulthood known as Group House Living. My tolerance has all but run out; I can’t be bothered to try to ignore the comings and goings, the ‘What are you watching?’ and ‘What’s happened so far?’ etc. Can’t deal with it. Next time I have the house to myself, I’m holing up with the DVD player for a night.

Boites de Nuits
Riding home from dinner at Tom and Soph’s on Saturday night, we went past the Meuang Lao Hotel, a big nightclub that was recently ordered to close because of licensing issues. Saturday was its last night, and the grounds were swarming with teenagers and Young Adults, absolutely swarming. I dislike nightclubs- they’re another thing I forced myself to enjoy until a couple of years ago, when I finally decided to let go of all my pretenses and actively hate all the things I’d always secretly hated (see previous entries re karaoke, camping, board games etc), but I don’t quite hate them with the same furore reserved for all those other things that I hate to make up for lost time pretending to like.

This is because I spent such a large part of my teens and early-to-mid 20s in clubs, and I can still remember the promise they once held. Heaven, Lot 33 and Academy in Canberra, Unity in Montreal. I put up with them because of the inherent possibilities of a particular someone, or a particular anyone, walking through the doors, just at the moment when I hoped I was looking my finest. Nothing compares to that feeling when the person in question walks through the door, you know?

And I could see it all playing out as I passed the hoards of Lao kids on Thadeua road, carefully not-too-dressed in a way that makes you certain they put a lot of thought into their outfits. They were milling, dancing, preening, hanging off the backs of motorbikes, tossing their hair, popping their shirt collars. It was all so familiar.

And yet, does anyone really get in to clubs, really? I often find it hard to believe. They make me so bored and tired nowadays (and by nowadays, I include the couple of years well before I met my current love, so none of that eye-rolling, thanks). I mean, they’re so loud you have to shout, so dark it hides all the icky stains on the walls and floors, so mundane that you just want to go home to bed. Don’t you? Don’t you?

See, there I go again, willing everyone to agree with me on everything. But then aha, because this morning I was vindicated, yes, vindicated once again by Guardian writer Charlie Brooker, who I’m certain is my soulmate, my brother-in-arms in the war against crap. He published a diatribe this morning about how much nightclubs suck, and how he’s only glad that now that he’s in his 30s, he doesn’t have to pretend to like them any more.

He also did one about Glastonbury last month- he hates music festivals, but the Guardian challenged him to camp out there for two nights, surrounded by mud and hippies. He lasted one night, and then had to go and stay in a serviced cottage where he could get a massage, drink tea and watch TV to fortify himself before he went back in.

Amen to that- did you know I hate music festivals too??? It’s true, that’s another one I haven’t mentioned, at least not on this blog! I did write a column about it, back in my Canberra Times days when I had my own column, complete with a photo of me looking grumpy at the top.

But I’m not going to go into that. Read Charlie to find out how I feel (almost). My point was that those obnoxious Lao kids made me feel nostalgic for the days when I was fraught with anxiety over things that were never going to end up mattering.

Everything seems to matter nowadays. Things have changed.

Language freak

2007-08-07T00:11:00.000+10:00

Surprise! It's me again! I told you I was going to post more, and I meant it, even if it means vaguely uninteresting and perhaps even self-indulgent posts like the one below!

So, how surreal do you think it is that on the sports page I edited the other night was a story about the Lao Badminton Federation (and how shit it is), with a story about Andy Roddick directly underneath? Or a story about some woman who sings traditional Lao songs for the army, right under a story about Britney and Federline finally getting a divorce?
News is news, I guess, even in Laos. And what I love most about the local sports pages is the tone of constant, unending disappointment:

"Football fans were once again let down last night, when the Lao team was thrashed by Indonesia 11-0 in the ASEAN Cup. But this time, they won't be content with promises to try harder, because now, fans are simply demanding an explanation."

Or:

"The Lao Karatedo Federation is holding out little hope for a gold, or even a silver, in the SEA Games in Thailand this December.
'Our team is weak, and unskilled,' the president of the federation explained. 'We may have to be content with a bronze, and not much more.'"

I've never enjoyed sports writing as much as I do at the Vientiane Times.

I'm a language freak, and everybody knows it. When it comes to English, that is. I just can't understand how people, English speakers that is, are incapable of grasping basic grammar and punctuation , wilfully, knowingly, constantly. It's not so much a love of language, I guess, as an obsession with bad grammar.

But then, on the same night as that usual bizarre selection of stories I just mentioned, the editor-in-chief, a suave Party man with ministry aspirations, who generally regards me with bemused surprise at the fact that never get sick and never stop running around, surprised me by suddenly speaking to me in Lao. He’s never done that before- he speaks fluent English and adores the sound of his own voice. But he kind of appraised me quite hard on that evening and started babbling away, purposely too fast, almost a kind of test.
A test that I failed, miserably. And I could tell everyone resented me for it, me who has about 20 mini-tantrums a day at their inability to distinguish between nouns and adjectives, and the difference between ‘law’ and ‘raw’, etc, but unable to answer inane questions like “Did you bring a raincoat with you?” and “When will you get married?” But hey, these guys are paid to write in English all day every day! I, on the other hand, have…been in this country for 18 months and should be able to answer non-difficult questions by now.
So now I’m home, after finishing at 8.30 this evening, poring over what I learnt in my last Lao lesson.

It’s confidence, really. I’m still at the stage where people get all amused when I break into Lao, so I find myself doing it not as much as I should. But I’ve really got to break through this stage.
Another resolution: almost everyone foreigner I know here has one answer to the question “How’s your Lao?” and that’s “Crap, how’s yours?”, as though that’s acceptable.
I don’t want to be one of those people anymore…

Last week, apart from having a Lao lesson, being run off my feet and tacitly getting into trouble from the editor, I also kept a long-held promise and took the crew from the KPL office out for lunch, to the place we always used to go for special occasions, where they serve barbecued fish, fish laap and great fish soup. I dragged the Island along with me, against his will – he used to work there too, after all – and it was all fine and jolly. But I struggle to come to grips with the fact that they are all still there, all still plugging along on minimum-to-non-existent wages in that crappy bloody room – and for what?

Weather update:
I’m sitting up in my room listening to one of the albums I picked up in Hanoi - Lunatica by the Gotan Project- and leafing through a months-old copy of the New Yorker, left behind for me by Sandy Forbes, another journalist who came to work at the VT, doing short-term training. The rain has cooled the weather right down, but it’s hot up here – the fan is spinning and I’ve got the curtains and door to the veranda open.

I read two awesome books while I was in Vietnam - The Brooklyn Chronicles by Paul Auster (so good it was like eating icecream- I felt guilty at how much I enjoyed it!) and Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn, which was nominated for last year’s Booker, but of which I’d never heard. Absolutely hilarious. I laughed out loud all the way to Hoi An, and on the plane on the way back to Vientiane.
Now I’m deep into Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's giving me nightmares. It won the Orange Prize this year, and the author is my age! I can’t see how it’s done.

The animal kingdom
Yesterday morning, I opened the front doors in our living room and a tiny pair of green-and-black frogs sprang apart from each other, guiltily, as though they’d been having a tryst, and hopped away. I’m still at the stage where I’m fascinated by frogs, and there are plenty of them around! Big serene toads, especially, and snakes. I’ve seen a few when walking in the morning. The most recent was a black one with white stripes. It was dead on the road.

One of the photos I've put up is of the Ladies in my office 'cutting loose', as it were. We had a baci for Sandy's farewell, and then they cranked up the music and really let their hair down. Yes, I joined in. Rock on, ladies!

The others are more cool pics of cool houses in my now-beloved Hanoi.

Alright, I've had enough now.

Mixed Blessings

2007-08-01T01:30:00.000+10:00

Yesterday was the first day of Buddhist Lent (again), and we went to a temple in the evening for the candlelit procession. After the monks chant and people have prayed, they light candles and stroll slowly around the temple holding flowers and incense- a striking site in the early evening darkness, with not much sound except the shuffle of feet and some happy sighing.
I had come more or less straight from work, and wasn’t wearing a sinh because Sundays- especially in the office – are strictly casual. But you know what? It didn’t matter, because I felt quite peaceful, for the first time in the past week, as I strolled with the hundreds of other people, holding my candle and lotus flowers as offerings to all those dead relatives up there, somewhere. I made a few resolutions that really won’t be that hard to stick to, and went home feeling quite happy.

Resolutions
One of the stories we had in the international pages last week was about a Korean (I think) actress who had received a world record number of hits on her blog – a ‘daily diary of musings on life in general’, how dull! But still, I felt a bit ashamed.
The thing is, every single person I know, except for my old housemate Tom, is currently obsessed with Facebook – how I loathe it! – and, to paraphrase my friend Grant, if I had a kip for every ‘invitation’ I’ve received to be someone’s ‘Facebook friend’ or somesuch, I’d be able to buy a bowl of noodles by now.
I don’t get it- I’ve never been all that curmudgeonly, at least not when it comes to technology, but really, Facebook? For grown people? Summing up your personality in a series of retardo questions? Posting on each other’s ‘walls?’ ‘Sharing photos’? What’s wrong with email, I ask you? Why do people get so bored so easily with something that’s really just entirely functional and works just fine?
Then someone pointed out to me that I already had a blog, so what’s the difference, and I was momentarily chastened, mid-anti-Facebook tirade. And didn’t post for ages.
But now I’ve thought no. The blog is in my own chosen format, I don’t answer arbitrary questions on some list, and I’ve tried to find my own voice instead.
And some Korean actress has been disciplined enough to post every day? I’ve got to get my act together. Resolution: I need to post more often so as to keep my voice going, and not degenerate into a foul-mouthed whinger.

And in fact, that’s another of my Lent resolutions- to stop wanting everyone to agree with me on everything. My heart almost skipped a beat a few months ago when I was reading The Golden Notebook, and came across this passage in the first few pages:

“But now, sitting with Molly talking, as they had so many hundreds of times before, Anna was saying to herself: Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel.”

I think of it now whenever I find myself feeling perplexed when someone disagrees with me. I like certain bands, don’t understand ‘other’ types of music, I hate karaoke to the max, I like green mangoes, I think Orlando Bloom looks like a 12-year-old gay boy, I hate Radiohead, I think vitamin supplements are a rort, and so what?? Who cares if others might not agree? Honestly.

Daily diary
This should, in theory, be the beginning of my efforts to document my days on a more regular basis, get a bit of a conversation happening.
From when I was 10 to when I turned 21, I kept a diary religiously. I stopped cold when I went to Montreal, and haven’t written a serious diary-style word since. I just don’t see the point of writing something that no one will read. I need to be kept on my toes. I’m supposed to be a journalist, after all. And even when I did keep a diary, I always half-imagined that one day, someone would come across them. Eventually, that thought mortified me so much that I just stopped.
But people do read this, I know, even if they’re just being polite. So here goes.

I applied for a job with UNDP a few weeks ago and actually got an interview. It was basically down to three people, and I sort of thought I was in with a chance. It would have been a big deal, based in Luang Prabang. It would have meant leaving my current project early, moving away from the Island for a bit, finding a new place to live in a new town, etc etc. I waited and waited to hear something until finally, late on Friday night at Sticky Fingers, a girl I know who works on the project stumbled up to me, completely off her face, and said “as soon as you walked in I knew I would have to tell you that you didn’t get the job but you were a close second I’m so sorry the girl who got it was already working on the project so we had to choose her etc etc etc…”
So now that I know, I’m interested in exactly how long UNDP will take to let me know, you know, officially, that I’ve been rejected.

In the meantime, here’re some things that make me feel better:

- The fact that I don’t have to part from the Island just yet.
- The fact that I don’t have to betray everyone at work by pissing off early…just yet.
- The big stack of excellent new music I bought in Vietnam (more about that later), which has just renewed my faith in the beauty of the world – the music world! I’d been feeling so deprived of new music, and then my bestie Brookie arrived brandishing a brand-new album (23 by Blonde Redhead) and a $50 itunes voucher. Yay for her! And then I found a whole lot of great stuff in Nam, and feel like everything is ok again and it wasn’t even bad before! Such is the mystical power of music…
-My new black sinh – all black, with a black band - which is the envy of all my friends (all-black ones are quite rare), so much so that I may even buy another, similar one, just to spite everyone.
-Most of the clothes I picked up at the tailor in Hoi An.

Hanoi, Hoi An and Halong Bay
Vietnam was so great, and I did indeed find myself wondering, constantly, both to myself and out loud, why on earth I wasn’t living there.
Because it’s too damn hot! I thought, triumphantly. It really was consistently about 5 degrees hotter than here in Vientiane, almost unbearable really. But then I remembered that in fact, Hanoi gets really cold in the wintertime. Gosh that lake would be lovely with all those beautiful trees in the wintertime, I thought as I morosely purchased a painted sketch of Hanoi in autumn, with leaves on the ground, and almost stepped right in front of a boy on a devastatingly cool navy-blue Vespa…
Everywhere I looked my eyes were instantly pleased by all the quaint, haphazardly tall terraced houses, and the crowded cafes, and the never-ending stream of motorbikes.
But I will say this: Vietnamese people aren’t very nice, at least not in Hanoi. They were grumpy and unhelpful and uncooperative, basically, and I had a difficult time feeling any sort of warmth deep inside my heart for them the way I do for Lao people.
Hanoi is also kinda nuts- people sit all day long on the pavement outside their houses and just shoot the breeze for hours and you have to navigate over and around them, and meanwhile the traffic just never stops moving, and you have to learn to just step right into the open traffic and walk quite slowly and artfully so that people can just swerve around you. And they all beep their horns constantly, for no apparent reason except to let you know that they are, in fact, on a bike, with a horn, and quickly get out of the way, now!
But, surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly given the state of the Vietnamese government, the whole city stops bang on midnight, which I can’t help appreciating since I became such a nanna when it comes to going to bed at a reasonable hour.

We also spent a night on a fancy sort of boat in Ha Long Bay with a bunch of annoying tourists, and were also stunned to discover that all sleeper trains down to Danang were completely booked out.
And that’s although another resolution that Brooke, Niamh and I all made, during the 15 most miserable hours of our lives, that we would never, ever get a long distance train (unless it’s a first-class sleeper), ever again. We’re too old! The revelation! The relief! It was enough to make those 15 hours from Hanoi to Hue in a filthy, ‘soft-seat’ carriage filled with slightly menacing Vietnamese yobs, slightly more bearable…

Luckily, our hotel in Hoi An, when we finally arrived, was plush and lovely and be-rose-petalled enough to make us forget our worries and just focus instead on the matter at hand: getting right into the vast buffet breakfast to fortify ourselves for the relentless, pushy tailor women.

Brooke and Niamh went AWOL on boots and suits and coats and all the sort of stuff that makes me feel so grumpy about not being able to wear, ever. But I had seen an excellent tangerine bag at Nine West in Hanoi for US$100, and consoled myself by getting it semi-copied by the tailor for half the price, as well as a couple of Marni-style dresses, some ballerina shoes and other bits and pieces.

Hoi An was just like Luang Prabang but with a beach, a lovely beach within cycling distance where all the locals came to drink beer in the evenings.
See pics, I can’t be bothered going in to much more detail. The last one is of a pair of sisters discovered near the St Joseph’s Cathedral in the Old Quarter. We had spotted Albino Girl a few days before, but I was alone this time and seeing her made my heart stop with sudden fear.
Also, the face shots where our angles look strange are the result of a queer experiment, the 'look down, look up and click' technique. Supposed to make you look sexy. YOU decide!

We flew back to Hanoi. Yes we did. And when I got back to Vientiane, sad as I was for my holiday to be over, I breathed a sigh of relief and pushed my backpack into the cupboard way back where I can’t see it, I hate it that much. It hurts my shoulders and I can’t find anything in it!

Weather update:
Last night I awoke to an apocalyptic downpour, and couldn’t get back to sleep. In the house where I grew up, my bedroom was a walled-in veranda, and one of the windows always leaked when I rained. It gave me a life-long insecurity; even today, whenever it rains, my mind races to think of anything I might have left outside, or what on the windowsill might get soaked.
I did love that bedroom though.

Work Update:
My heart was in my shoes when went back to work last week, knowing that my newsroom mentor of all things calm, Liz, was still back in England and would be for some time.
I’ve been struggling to finish before 8pm each night, but you know what? IT’S NOT MY FAULT! It takes exactly four hours between the reporters finishing their stories, layout putting them on the page and the editors giving them a final check- a process that should really take an hour. Do you think I would allow this to happen if I had even a modicum of control in this place? No, I wouldn’t.
That said, things are definitely more organised with me in charge. The staff are slowly coming round to the usefulness of lists, and the sheer beauty of being able to cross things off each day. So I must be making some difference.

Counting the ways

2007-07-07T19:12:00.000+10:00

This week marked my 18-month anniversary here. Can it have been that long? Yes, and I’ll tell you why: because I no longer care quite as much about what is happening back in Australia. Or rather, I still care, but I no longer have half a mind residing there, the way I did this time last year.

"Ecrire tous les jours, génie ou non." ("Write every day, genius or not.")

That's a quote by Stendhal, sent to be by my old French professor in Canberra during a recent email exchange.
I’ll tell you what, though: I’ve really got to start updating this thing more regularly. I’ve got it in my head that one day, I will be writing for a living, probably for the Guardian, or as a freelance journalist in New York. Why not, right? Never mind that I seem to love small-town life more and more – the fact remains that my output in the past 18 months has been pitiful, and I can hardly blame poorly trained Lao journalists for sapping my strength and will to write independently on a daily basis. Dammit, a real writer can overcome all that external stuff!

Clearing the mind
I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, and I’ve been getting up at 6.00 each morning to walk it off before work. It’s better, somehow, than the gym. Walking is something I haven’t really done much of since I came to Vientiane, what with the zippy scooter and the long stretches of busy road with no footpaths, etc. I used to love walking in Melbourne- with no car and only a pushbike, I often used to opt to walk to and from work, especially if it was raining.

Anyway, the world is such a different place at 6am, especially in Vientiane. People are generally early risers here, not to mention the monks, who are out giving their alms at this time. I’ve tried taking my camera with me a couple of times, but the things I notice really can’t be captured: old and young women showering, covered by a sarong and frothy streaks of soap and shampoo; a boy on the back of a truck, carefully plaiting his little sister’s hair; a man cutting his toenails while a cigarette hangs precariously from his mouth; teen boys meandering behind skinny cows, absently slapping their rumps with sticks; two young women squatting on flat feet and watching, proudly, while a toddler parades around in a pair of black patent heels.

It all changes, too, in the hour between 6am and 7am. When I set out from the house, I have to keep bowing my head for the monks, and often catch small curls of smoke coming from the top of fenceposts, the source obscured by foliage. If you look closer, you’ll see a stick of incense, surrounded by flower petals and a ball or two of sticky rice – offerings for ancestors; it’s oddly comforting to think that everyone, no matter how poor, has dead relatives they can call on for help.

There are so many more temples in my neighbourhood than I had realised, and the other day I came across a series of fishponds, surrounded by cool green and palm trees, eerily misty like something from a poem, practically in the middle of town.

By the time I’m nearly home, I’m passing old men sitting at roadside noodle shops, arguing over cups of coffee, and people, washed and showered, watering their plants and stirring huge pots of rice soup. I walk until my legs ache and the day has kickstarted- all before 7.30am.

Road to nowhere
I mentioned last time that I hadn’t really been taking many photos lately. Well here’s one to illustrate all my griping about the roads, chiefly one of the town’s main arteries, which happens to run right part my work, and which I have to negotiate, in some way, each and every day.
I just can’t work out what they’re doing: they dig holes, and then fill them up again. They lay pipes and cables, seal them, then dig them up and take them out. The ruts fill with water and become slippery with mud and clay every few days. The piles of rubble heaped around the footpaths are starting to sprout weeds and wildflowers. And for this, the Japanese have donated millions of dollars.

We ran a story last week about another road in town, the Kaysone Phomvihane road, which runs from the Friendship Bridge into town, and on which repairs are finally complete. The story took care to explain, quite matter-of-factly that the reason it took so long is because the road was dug up and resealed last year, before the workers realised they had forgotten to lay the water pipes! So they had to do it all over again.
Anyway, that’s the only thing I’ve been bothered enough to photograph in the past few weeks.

“Gentle facial cleansing; Effective skin exfoliating; Enhance the youthful looking.”
So it says on the tube of this truly excellent cleanser I picked up at a local supermarket. Main ingredient: tea tree. Brand name: Young and Beauty.
Do you find it amusing? Do you think it’s funny that I have ended up in an Asian country, I who am capable of actually having a conniptic fit at the merest whiff of bad grammar???
I just don’t understand it. If the good people of “Young and Beauty” made the effort to look up these words in the dictionary, why didn’t they also see the various alternatives for adverb, adjective, etc?
I read a great short story in the New Yorker recently, and it had a lot about language in it, specifically, what it means to be able to speak more than one.
Incidentally, I sent the link to my old French professor at ANU in Canberra, and I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said he loathed it -"It left me rather flat, taken aback and still wishing for a young writer who knows how to design a fine sentence". But that’s by the by- the point is, you certainly see and hear things differently, depending on the language at the front of your mind at the time.
I still lapse fairly easily into French, but learning Lao has helped me most in what I’m doing now. If I weren’t taking lessons, I wouldn’t understand that the Lao language is largely circular, imprecise and riddled with tautology. Sentences begin and end with the same statement. There is no word for ‘it’. There is no system for inferring subject matter. There is no different formula for plural and singular, or masculine and feminine. Knowing this makes my editing work much easier, if not less frustrating.

Retail therapy
I’ve been to Bangkok in the interim- took 4000 Islands and Housemate Cait this time. The more time I spend in Bangkok, the more I feel sure I could never live there. Not that I’ve got any insight into the city beyond the central shopping district and Chatuchak market.
And how awesome are they!! The Island bought three pairs of jeans while I stood and watched, because they only cost 200 baht, or $6 each. And then I bought some myself- black skinny ones, like I’ll be needing those in the coming months, ha!
That said, I’ve become a very sustainable shopper since moving to this part of the world. You’d think that access to such a large variety of dirt-cheap fashion would cause me to gorge myself on a regular basis, but this is far from the case. Basically, if it doesn’t go with a sinh, or won’t suit the weather, or is too formal/prissy for my current lifestyle, I simply put it back.
I also got a great haircut at Toni&Guy, one that is sure to last.

Backyard barber
Speaking of which, I actually took the Island up in his offer to cut my hair last month. I had already made an appointment at a local salon to have it cut by a woman who had been “trained by a falang” and usually did “an ok job but you might have to touch it up when you get home”. This was going to cost me $12, and I was apprehensive. “Don’t waste your money, my darling,” the Island said to me. And, based on the photo I had recently come across in a Vogue of the model Stella Tennant (granddaughter of the Duchess of Devonshire, otherwise known as the sister of Nancy and Jessica Mitford etc etc) with a shaggy sort of bob with a fringe, I let him go ahead.
He actually did quite a good job! Because so many locals set up hair and beauty salons in their own homes these days, you can buy quite decent hair utensils in the oddest places. It was pouring with rain that day, and after breakfast, we stopped at a tiny minimart and the Island disappeared inside. He came back with a professional-looking razor with a handle, the kind you use to sort of raze strands off a chunk of hair to make it look layered, instead of cutting it straight across with scissors. It only cost 1000 kip!
It certainly took me back to my days at Napier Street, when Oliver used to cut my hair in backyard or, if it was raining, in the kitchen. Those were always the best haircuts, and not only because they were free.

Cultural norms
Next week, in a few days actually, me, my bestie Brooke and her bestie Niamh of Dublin are taking a trip to Vietnam. I can’t wait. I’m especially excited about Hanoi, although I’m a tad concerned that I’ll wish I had ended up there, in what by all accounts is a fascinating, bustling metropolis, instead of here, a kind of riverside could-have-been with half-dug-up roads everywhere. Grass greener, etc, but that’s my brain’s default setting.
Anyway, I’ve been poring over the Lonely Planet at every spare minute and dreaming of our getaway, and in the process, I came across one of those typical lists of cultural do’s and don’t’s for countries like Vietnam:

• “Always smile and be pleasant • Don’t run around complaining about everything • Expect delays – build them into your schedule • (and this one made me laugh the most) Never show anger – ever! Getting visibly upset is not only rude – it will cause you to lose face.”
Whatever. The thing is, these rules are all very well when you’re a tourist- around just long enough for these little local foibles to seem quaint and amusing.
But when you live here, even when you know exactly what to expect, it’s difficult not to get angry at the level of base incompetence that exists in the service sector. And you know what? I still refuse to accept this notion of 'elastic time', even as I can see myself having already adapted to it, to an extent.
I guess I have become what the LP might term as ‘culturally insensitive’ because I often get quite impatient, and let it show.
I’ve yet to actually raise my voice and shout, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time…

Everyone at the office thinks I’m pregnant

2007-05-31T12:10:00.000+10:00

I keep forgetting to mention that one. Not that I’ve suddenly got fat or anything – I’ve just been eating a lot of green mangoes which I buy off the street with a little bag of chilli, sugar and MSG. Apparently, this is what pregnant ladies eat! And I sometimes wear smock-style tops with my sinhs. Unfortunately, Ms Noy at the office, who is pregnant and quite stylish, has a similar look going to cover up her growing baby bump.
I can’t believe everyone assumed I was pregnant! As a volunteer! Unmarried with a local boyfriend!
It always amazes me how happy everyone is that I have a Lao boyfriend, like I’m paying the whole country a compliment or something.

Marching time
Life has really settled into a routine that I couldn’t have imagined this time last year. I wake up early, go to bed at a reasonable hour, eat lunch with the Island most days, get massages most weeks, read the papers online avidly every morning, pick and choose whatever social engagements come up. Having spent last year agreeing to participate in every activity, regardless of whether, deep down, I even wanted to do it or not, these days I am a firm No Thanks girl. No more cards, or bowling, or cricket, or Don Chan Palace after midnight, or binge drinking. I’ve accepted that it’s just not me, and I’m most unlikely, on balance, to enjoy myself. It’s a blessed release.
On the flipside, unlike only few months ago, the idea of riding a bicycle around Melbourne, working at an Aussie newspaper and spending $7 on a beer is now almost completely foreign. That's not good, is it?

Down at the club
That said, I have been playing golf. The driving range, that is. There’s something soothing about golf to me – I don’t see it as a sport, even though sometimes my shoulders hurt the next day.
But let it be known right now that secretly, the reason I like golf, or rather the idea of it, is that I read in Patricia Highsmith’s biography last year that a large portion of one of her acclaimed novels was written in her hometown, in a period where she spent her mornings writing, and played golf and drank gin with her cousin in the afternoons.
Although she was a bitter nasty broad in later life, she certainly was a rakish young thing once upon a time.

One of us one of us one of us….
A few weekends ago, we drove to Tha Ngon, a river crossing about half an hour out of town, to celebrate Tim’s birthday. We ordered food and rented a boat and went on to have one of the best days I’ve had since I arrived.
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt part of a group; I stayed on longer at uni than most of my friends, and when I moved to Melbourne, I became more or less permanently displaced. But a friend here confessed to me the other day how intimidating or off-putting a group dynamic can be, especially when you’re not a part of it. I was surprised to realise that she was talking about me, and the group of people I hang out with. Mainly the people who’ve been around longer than anyone else, who have formed and reformed as people come and go, eventually becoming a sort of posse.
For me this means a dependable group of friends that I see more less every day, who I know I can turn to in a crisis, and who I know other people view as a group, of which I’m a part. I’m not sure how I feel about this, deep down.
But I do know that this particular day was just the perfect example of pure, transient happiness. A day when you know, at the time, that you have to hold on to it even as it’s happening, because it will just disappear so quickly. This weather, this mood, this group, slipping through your fingers.
Tim, the original volunteer, who was here long before we became an intimidating gang whom future groups would be warned against, wanted to hit the bars when we got back to town, but we insisted on going back to his house. He was sure this would spell out a dangerously and disappointingly early night for all, when in fact, the mood caught everyone, and we proceeded to get enormously and spontaneously drunk. The rain pelted, and the music got louder, and everyone was still going past 1am, having started drinking around midday.

My town
The stretch of Mekong in the middle of town has been so parched this year- the sand bank was wider than the water, and grass grew all over it. Last weekend, despite the heavy rain over the past week, people were still playing frisbee and volleyball out there. But this week, suddenly, we have a mighty, flowing river once more, filled with northern rains. That is to say, filled with the water flowing in from a newly-opened dam in China. But the official line, in my esteemed workplace the Vientiane Times this week, is that it was the rains. End of story.
Anyway, I’m ashamed to admit that I felt a measure of relief about the whole river thing, because I no longer need to feel anxious about the impending arrival of Brooke and Niamh, who are visiting later this year.
My first visit from friends back home. Only my family have visited so far, and I like it that way! I’m a terrible host. I get anxious even inviting friends over for beer and pizza. Anyway, ever since they told me they had booked their tickets for July, I’ve been looking at the city with new eyes. And I see scorn and derision in every open sewer, unfinished road and charmingly misspelt menu I see!

Related: I’ve started writing an article about what I see and how it makes me feel. Because basically, I have many of the same emotions about Vientiane as I did about Canberra, and one of those is a strangely fierce sort of defensiveness.
Maybe one of the reasons I never felt like I fit in when I lived in Melbourne was because it’s such a self-assured place, so objectively fabulous, that it didn’t need me to defend it.

Notes about work
Every time I feel my - by now all-too-familiar - frustration rising to choke me throughout an average day at the paper, I can’t help thinking, well, at least I feel something. It’s better than being numb and submissive and unable to imagine what might lie beyond. And that’s the other thing - I’m old enough now to realise that boredom is a state of mind, and one that I can overcome if I look hard enough for things to entertain me.
The other night, I went to a reception at a local bookstore for an exhibition of art from the Torres Strait Islands, put on by the Australian Embassy. One of the artists had been flown over to talk about it, so I brought a journalist with me. A very young, very pretty young man called Poonsab. And as I watched him whip out his little notebook and make a beeline for the artist with hunger in his eyes, I couldn’t help feeling a surge of pride that almost made me laugh out loud.
I wish now that I’d taken a photo of him, but my hands were full, what with the glass of wine, and the catalogue, and the mouthful of hors d’oeuvres, and all the witty repartee I was having. Another thing that I mentally reached out and held on to.
No photos this time, did you notice? It’s not that I’m less enamoured of this place, it’s just that I feel like I’ve got most of it on record already.
Also, ever since my friend Mel got robbed at knifepoint on her bike last week, I don’t carry my camera around as much.

Stop reading and write, dammit!
So Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fell by the wayside about 100 pages in. Far too dull for me. Anna Karenina is also on hold, as is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. I read instead a couple of drossy books just to keep my mind active, along with all the newspapers and magazines I check on the net every day.
But anyway, I found a copy of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing in a second-hand bookshop in Melbourne, and chucked it in the box with all the other earnest stuff I thought I might have time to read while over here. But secretly, I never thought I would.
I’m now three quarters of the way through it, and strangely, it’s one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read - 650 pages of teensy-weensy print and I’m loving every bit of it! I think it has to do with all the introspection and self-examination. All that “what am I doing and why” stuff- I guess it’s just all about me at the moment! It’s slow-going but I’m glad- I don’t want it to end.
There’re so many books I read as a teenager and in my early 20s that I literally don’t remember anything about, only that I’ve read them. I think it’s a waste. But this one, I think, would have left me cold five years ago.
For one thing, there’s a lot of stuff about communism, and the communist party in Britain and the US in the 50s and 60s. Fascinating stuff. I absorbed a lot of that in the biography of Jessica Mitford as well. I never really thought about the fact that most communists in those times were intellectuals, who really did envision a beautiful future under the Party. SUCH a far cry from this mess of a country we’re living in now, where the editor refuses to allow a photo of the president to appear on any page other than Page 1.
Also, the main character is a writer, which as you may have picked up by now, is something I’m inherently interested in. I’m certain that every time I read about a writer, it will inspire me enough to unlock my creative flow. A shame, then, that this book happens to be about a woman who wrote one book which was so awesome that she is still living off the royalties and feels incapable of ever writing another.

Anyway, I took up Lao lessons again this week, mainly to give myself something to focus my self-improvement-craving side on. If I can’t write, or be more disciplined, the least I can do is properly learn the language. And I’m already halfway there, I reckon. Phitsamai, my teacher who had a baby last year, was pleasantly shocked, I don’t mind admitting, at how much I have managed to retain and pick up since our last lesson, when she was a week away from giving birth, because Lao women always work until the very last minute, and I was certain her waters would break right on our living room floor!
I know all the basics, and I can carry out professional conversations and conduct social chit-chat with shopowners, tuk tuk drivers, what have you.

It’s certainly more enjoyable being able to converse with the Island’s sisters, about clothes and haircuts and those things, rather than the relative delicious-ness of the food. ("Delicious?" "Very delicious!" "This one?" "Not so delicious!") We had dinner with them last week, and I went to the night market with his sister Phonesavanh to buy some food for the evening meal. As we wove amongst all the people- I was the only foreigner there, as usual - checking out the steaming pots of awesome Lao food, piles of sticky rice and lychees- fresh, beautiful lychees!- Phonesavanh linked her arm tightly through mine. She’s with me! she was telling everyone. But the thing is, the Island would never in a million years even touch his arm against mine when we’re out in public. Because I’m a girl and he’s a boy.

I know, imagine how frustrating it would be if your own boyfriend refused to even hold your hand in public! Weep for me.

An inquiry into Supercubs

2007-04-27T17:44:00.000+10:00

“I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance.”

I had a moment of truly pleasing symmetry this week when I found myself sitting at yet another mechanic’s, waiting for my motorbike to be fixed and reading, yes, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Yes, I thought, of course. My bike has a personality, for sure. We hated each other in the beginning, and then you got used to me, and I learnt how to handle you. And you can now go for months at a time without so much as a flat tyre. And I love you. And then you break down three times in one month, and I hate your guts. But I then I read this stupid hippy book that someone left at our house, (a book I’ve always meant to read and now have taken it up on the spirit of reading anything I can get my hands on), and find myself actually enjoying it a great deal, and contemplating actually learning something about how you run.

It’s such a cool bike, really, the Honda Supercub. The Japanese designed it in the 50s, to be ridden on unpaved roads, in a skirt, a dress, a suit, hotpants, while carrying a variety of stuff. Like noodles, or beer, or your entire family as is frequently the case in Laos. Cheap to run, easy to fix, unlikely to depreciate in value if you take care of it properly. There are plenty of them around here still, but it’s not the locals who are riding them, usually- it’s mostly expats.
And there are some cool, funky ones, in bright blue or metallic green, but you know what? I like my classic dark grey and cream. It suits my general aesthetic.
[What, right down to the big crack in the front mudguard? I hear you say. Yes indeed.]

Zia Sally x3!!
Tim and Niva had a girl, against all expectations, and they were so surprised they needed 24 hours to decide on a name. We waited with baited breath, from our respective parts of the world, for a formal introduction to…Annabel Clare.
Lovely. Look at her, just look at her. Isn’t she just lovely?

“This would be me”
Pi Mai came and went in much the same style as last year- Luang Prabang, water fights, monk processions- only this time, 4000 Islands and I escaped the madness and took a boat to the village where he was born in Luang Prabang province.
We stopped at a larger village first to visit his uncle and aunt. They sat us down and fed us, and the aunt warned us to stock up, as there wouldn’t be much food where we were going. No much of anything, really. What were we thinking?
The boat driver pointed to some steps cut out in the mud on the far bank. There it is, he said. We clambered up and over, and came upon an old, dusty cluster of bamboo shacks, pigpens, chickens and bamboo clumps, with no electricity and no clean water supply.
Now, knowing a bit about the Island’s background, and knowing what I do about general village life throughout the country, I wasn’t all that shocked at what we came upon. But the Island couldn’t believe it, basically. Having left there when he was seven, he had no memory at all of what it was like to live there. His mother was born there. His father lived across the river, and came and married her when they were 15. He helped build the tiny temple, and built the family house, out of wood and bamboo, with his own two hands. All eight of the kids were born there, before the whole family left for Vientiane, and a better life.
But the first person we came across recognised the Island instantly, and immediately took us on a tour, first to an older matriarch type who bore a striking resemblance to Warm House, the Island’s mother. We went to four or five houses- all similar, with woven bamboo mats- they take three days to make, we found out- and were given shot after shot of Lao whiskey, glass after glass of muddy water and coconut juice.
Everyone knew that she had died, I’m not sure how. One woman in a pink shirt, who had been Warm House’s best friend growing up, threw herself on top of us as we sat on the bamboo floor, and sobbed inconsolably.
We moved around the village and ate around six dinners, more food than the villagers themselves were accustomed to eating, and I congratulated myself privately for the millionth time for digging Lao food so much and having a strong constitution. Buffalo skin, unidentified barbequed wildlife, fish and chicken soup, bamboo shoots, sweet sticky rice desserts- the food was surprisingly varied and non-repetitious, and I ate the whole lot.

The village isn’t that small- 72 families. Village populations are always measured in the number of families, but I can never work out how many people are in the average family, or, in fact, what actually constitutes a discreet family, given all the inbreeding that goes on.

And there was plenty of evidence of that- I counted two children with club feet, one retarded kid, two people with dwarfism and a guy the Island’s age who was completely mute, and communicated with exaggerated gestures, just like the country’s slapstick idol, Charlie Chaplin. His mouth doesn’t work, everyone told me.

But it was an old village, quite pretty, with lots of trees and hillocks, and houses that had settled in comfortably over many decades. And in the morning- after a long night of complete blackness in the village ‘guesthouse’- a bamboo shed with a bed and a mosquito net, through which the Island couldn’t sleep and I apparently babbled continuously- the villages was covered in soft mist, something you never see in Vientiane.
Before we left in the morning, the extended family gave us a baci- a particularly authentic baci, unlike any that I had been to before, and not nearly as stripped back and bearable as the Vientiane variety.
They had made the offerings themselves, with banana leaves and wildflowers- much prettier than the shop-bought marigold variety here- and everyone brought money, which went into a bowl of rice, was blessed, and eventually given to us- more than 50,000 kip, which is a ridiculously large amount of money, really. There was a lot of chanting, and when the time came to tie the white strings, they really swarmed us, attaching their good wishes on our overloaded wrists like their future happiness depended on it.
We sat for a while with some guys his age, all of whom were long-married with several children each, and who spent their days fishing, harvesting rice and drinking whiskey. The village had no beer supply, some one of the boys went off in a boat to the nearest big village to buy a crate. We sat and they talked about their lives.

“If I didn’t leave here, this would me!” the Island said to me later. “Focking hell!”
(Me, appalled: “Where did you learn that?”
Him, baffled: “From you!”)

After we were finally home, we toted off a big bag of Luang Prabang specialities, some funky gifts from the Luang Prabang Night Markets, and a sackful of bamboo shoots from the village, to see the Island’s dad, and show him the photos. The sisters all clustered around, shrieking in horror at the images of the dilapidated old family home. “Sooo ugly!”
The father just nodded sagely. They left the village for a reason, after all.

‘Something practical that will last’
My parents sent me a man’s Swiss Army watch for my birthday- a classic, practical piece of armour that I can’t believe I ever did without. It has a crisp white face, a black leather band and glow-in-the-dark hands, and it’s big enough to make my wrist look skinny.
Well played, parentals. Well played.

‘Strange weather phenomena’
It’s been especially filthy and hot in the past week, which has brought on a spate of weather stories at the paper - overwrought, panicky stories about drought, natural disasters, unnatural heatwaves and ‘strange weather phenomena’. To be honest, Laos has not had a drought for a very long time. The type of downpour we had for about 20 minutes on Wednesday evening would have been enough to break the drought in Canberra, I reckon - the rains have never failed. Occasionally they’re just a couple of weeks later than usual, a fact which I guess does constitute a natural disaster for the many farmers who simply can’t seem to prepare for this contingency, and watch their newly-sowed rice fields dry up.
But this still doesn’t constitute a ‘drought’, although try telling the staff that.
So yes- weather hot. The type of hot where you go to bed and wake up completely drenched in sweat, and opening the door is to be confronted by a wall of heat. I hate it, it makes me grumpy – more than usual, that is.

Highly recommended
Speaking of reading a lot, which I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I recently found a book I had forgotten I’d brought, called The Story of San Michele, by Axel Munthe.
I bought it at a book fair in Canberra, waaay back in another life (in 2003 when I was still at law school), on the recommendation of a person I had previously dated, for about two seconds, before settling into an uneasy ‘friendship’. Anyway, finally reading the book got me thinking about him, and all that type of stuff, and about how several people have asked me about the Island, and what we have in common with each other.
And I suppose it does seem surprising: he doesn’t read, doesn’t like the same movies as me, only listens to Thai pop, and we can rarely have deep and meaningful conversations about, say, Australian politics. But he is unlike anyone else I have ever met, with a completely different background. Endlessly fascinating!
When it came to Mr Book Recommender, on the other hand…we liked all the same bands, both read a lot, both went to the movies all the time, appreciated each other’s dress sense, but when it came down to it, he was a complete ass who treated me, and probably every girl he ever went out with, like shit.
And plus, it’s kind of dull when someone likes all the same stuff as you, you know? Nick Hornby, in his creepy-look-into-men’s-psyches novel High Fidelity, wrote something like "It’s not what the girl is like that’s important, but what she likes.”
I think that’s something of a fallacy. These days, I get more satisfaction out of liking bands that everyone else thinks are 'obscure', because at least I don’t have to get into any arguments about them. Ditto books and films. I’ve long accepted that bands you love are not worth defending from the criticisms of those who probably don’t understand them in the first place.

It was a great book, though, very charming and good for the soul, although it did take me a little while to get my head around in the beginning.

So, this post is dedicated to two obscure authors who only wrote one famous book each, but wrote enough to ensure lasting fame, success and an extended entry in Wikipedia.

Robert M. Persig and Dr Axel Munthe, thanks for clearing my mind and helping me to see better- the highest praise for any book, really.

Asia Vision

2007-04-08T14:25:00.000+10:00

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?

A shift

2007-03-13T22:29:00.000+11:00

Flu-like symptoms
I realised just yesterday that I couldn’t remember the last time I had been rudely awoken by that godforsaken rooster next door, and that made me stop for a bit, because you know what? The rooster is dead. The rooster got bird flu, along with thousands of other fowl throughout the city. Seven of the nine districts in Vientiane had outbreaks in the last couple of months, and two people have died- officially, that is. Of course, rumour has it that people have been dying of it all over the shop in Lao hospitals, and we only got to hear about any of it when one of the patient’s families took a stand and sent her to Thailand for treatment. A 15-year-old girl. She died a couple of weeks later.

So anyway, the Lao government has announced a ban on poultry- every bird in the city will be culled, there will be no more chicken - or eggs!! - on the menu. I guess they figure it’s the only way- maybe it is. But all these people who rely on their chickens to live! Understandably, people have been hiding their chickens and releasing their caged birds- anything to avoid the authorities who, if they ever cough up, will only compensate 60 percent of what they think the birds are worth. So on today’s front page- painstakingly edited last night by yours truly- the government has made another announcement- anyone who doesn’t cooperate with authorities will be regarded as a criminal and promptly arrested.
Rooster or no rooster, it’s all a bloody debacle.

Food for thought
You know there’s been a shift when you realise it’s western food now that makes you sick. Housemate Sophie’s parents were here a couple of weeks ago, and took us to Le Cave des Chateaux, one of the posh French restaurants in the centre of town. Fish, potatoes, brie, creamy sauce, no sleep for me that night. A few nights later, I gave into a week-long craving for lasagne, and again I suffered.
But I can gorge myself on Lao food- the sticky rice that once made me feel so bloated, and all the soup and meat and innards and sauces that go along with it- and feel nothing but sated.

Related is the fact that I have lost a fair bit of weight since I was back in Aus last year. I only know this because I visited a doctor in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago, and pre-consultation, the nurse weighed me. Actually, to be honest, there was a fancy set of scales in the fancy apartment in the fancy hotel where the insurance company had put me up (see pic), so I had already weighed myself the night before.
Inexplicable, but maybe just a sign of slipping into a comfort zone, finally. I always did take my time about things.

Queen of Asia
Anyway, Bangkok: always such a shock to find yourself in the centre of things again. Confusing- massive malls and freeways and hotels and the Skytrain. Is it real? All these shops selling so much stuff. It makes me wonder what goes on behind it all- what people who live there do other than shop. Of course, Bangkok is massive, and edgy- there would be all kinds of things happening every day there- art and movies and music and bars and drinking, etc- but I can’t see them for the shops.
The shops! I spent a happy weekend alone in the city, learning the train system, walking the streets, prowling the department stores and splurging on cheap clothes (I’ll never be able to shop seriously in Aus again, let’s face it), and moisturiser from Boots, and underwear, and mascara. All that stuff that doesn’t cut it over here. Makes you appreciate retail therapy all the more. I bought a dress, a handmade necklace, some tops for work, a Salvatore Ferragamo knock-off handbag, a Toni & Guy haircut. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Oh yeah, and I went to the doctor as well. Rushing back from Thailand in January to the Island’s mother’s bedside, I pinched a nerve in my shoulder, and for more than a month after, my left arm was completely numb. Call me a hypochondriac, but that’s weird, and maybe cause for concern, no? So I went to the doctor, who was slightly more concerned than I would have liked. Anyway, to cut a long story short, before too long, I found myself heading to Bangkok to see a neurologist. After lots of tests, including some intensely unpleasant electric shocks in my arm to test my reflexes, the x-rays showed bruising on the nerve, and I was prescribed a whole pile of things, including muscle relaxants and multi-vitamins.

[Side note- I wrote to my friend Emma Caine in Melbourne recently to tell her about this, because she was the one I was thinking of as I sat in the hospital feeling like a fool. I knew she would have understood. I knew she would be behind me 100 percent.
‘Muscle relaxants!’ she wrote back. ‘My drug of choice!’]

Holy cow
Our house had a party last month. A seriously big party- actually, it was three parties in one night, with three separate themes, and people were allocated their theme on the invitation and the locations were all a secret. It sounds ridiculously over the top, but you come to realise after a while that if you want to throw a party that will actually be remembered, you have to go all out. Anything else will just be some party.
Anyway, I’m not going to go into it, except to say that people did remember it, and still do, and although I didn’t have much to do with the organising, the Island and I did manage to procure a cow- a live, gentle moo-cow to work as a prop for our house's Bollywood theme, and that went down a treat, strangely.

Unchartered territory
Recently, I found some photos I’d forgotten I had of Warm House- from the baci the family threw last year when she was healthy again. My parents were there, and got to see a real live baci in action, which I was glad of. Anyway, I had forgotten how pretty she was back then. I had the photos printed, along with the ones I took of her on New Year’s Eve when all the sons were home, about two weeks before she died. I gave them to the Island’s father, and at first, I thought he was angry with me, for some reason. I thought I’d done the wrong thing. He stared at the photos so hard and didn’t say anything. But I soon realised it was because he too had forgotten how much she had changed over the year, and how thin and ill she was at the end. He was happy with the photos, poring over the baci pic of her wearing a rose-coloured silk top, with her hair all glossy. The family doesn’t have a camera, and so never have the chance to appraise their own appearances. It was nice to give him something to remember her by, from when she wasn’t sick, but smiled all the time instead.

Stubborn child
Cristy and Paul’s baby is well overdue now. We were talking about them last night at dinner, so hopefully our chatter and thoughts might have been carried across the ocean to Canberra to try and coax the little bugger out.
It must be so frustrating for them- I can’t even imagine. More than a week late, now, and poor Cristy’s been doing all sorts of nutty things like cleaning out cupboards and organising files and touching up her thesis even though she’s on maternity leave. I know Cristy. I know what this means. Actually, what am I saying? It’s not nutty at all, what she’s doing. It’s exactly what she does when she’s waiting for something important.
I’m just dying to find out what it’s like- she’s my first close friend to get knocked up. And also- what the hell will they call it? They’re keeping mum about that, so to speak.

So too are my very own brother and sister-in-law, who are five weeks away from popping another. And that one, I'll even be related to!

I feel like I should be back in Aus this month.

Aimless
Anyway, I’ve been getting so intensely frustrated at work that I’ve become aimless. I haven’t even been going out that much- just spending my weekends doing the sorts of things you do to make up for boredom and aimlessness. Or to make up for having regretfully opted out of another Thai shopping trip to Udon Thani last weekend. Had my bike cleaned (just 5000 kip! I love my bike now, more every time I clean it), bought a couple of new sinhs from the market for exactly half what I would have paid this time last year when I knew nothing about how the market system works, read the Bangkok Post in hard copy, ate dinner late on Saturday night on the street outside V-Shop- the Lao branch of the 7-11 world franchise.

Also, not to get all tiresome, but I’d like to point out that tomorrow is mine and the Island’s one-year anniversary.
See, why this despondency? Out I say!

Red wine and steak

2007-02-16T12:14:00.000+11:00

The Island has developed a real taste for red wine since he met me- red wine, steak and blue-vein cheese. It’s strange, because like many Lao people, he hates almost every other type of falang food. My next step is to convince him to lose the notion that red wine is to be drunk chilled, a fallacy created by all restaurants here in a bid to make the wine survive the heat.

Anyway, someone pointed out to me that I have never once used the Island’s mother’s name. Her name was- and believe me, there are tears in my eyes as I type this- Warm House.

His father is sad all the time now. He says he cries at night and thinks about his Warm House non-stop. They met as children and married at 15. Now she’s gone, and he has nothing left to do, with the kids almost all grown, and no job or skills.

We went over there one night last week and took a bottle of French wine- at the Island’s insistence, of course. We realised as soon as we got there that we had forgotten a bottle opener. Not to worry- the Island’s father took to the cork with a large screw, eventually popping it down into the wine. He polished off half the bottle in no time, squinted at the label like a pro, and the declared the French stuff to be much better than the cheap plonk his neighbour had brought to the funeral.

We also took over the photos I had taken of the sister’s wedding, and the father hauled out his big bag of family snapshots and spread them out. Photos from the funeral, hundreds of them. Photos of the children; photos of Warm House on the beach in Thailand; outside the Patuxai monument in Vientiane; nursing the one grandchild; as a 15-year-old in the village where they grew up. Photos from the funeral of the father’s brother- an eminent monk who was president of the American Buddhist Association in San Francisco (there was a police cavalcade and everything). The father put on his reading glasses and pored over them, shaking his head. The wedding photos eventually got all mixed up with the older ones and they all went into the bag together.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day- remember the big night last year? Nothing like last night (roses from the Island, followed by steak and wine, naturally). I’ve well and truly reached the point where I no longer feel compelled to go out and experience everything possible here. Especially, for example, nightclubs. Definitely a case of seen one, seen ‘em all.

Anyway, sorry I seem to have stopped writing as much, but I’ve been a bit under the weather. I’ve decided to blame the hen. She has stopped laying her eggs at our door. It’s our own fault- we decided on a breakfast fry-up last weekend, and just cooked up the whole lot. When the hen arrived for her morning sit-in, there was no point of reference for her anymore, no way for her tiny brain to orient itself, and she stalked off in confusion. While the eggs were sensational, a few days later, I became ill and my work took a turn for the worse. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it bad luck, but life hasn’t been as rosy.

I’ve been reading a great deal. I’ve almost finished Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, an extremely pleasant and inspiring read, albeit marred by the enormousness of the book itself, which has been very difficult to prop up while in bed, which is where I do most of my reading.
Although I’m not much of a TV person, I’ve been watching a lot of David Attenborough on the Discovery Channel, and I’ve found myself feeling soothed and quite nostalgic (even though his familiar hushed and urgent tones have been dubbed over with the voice of an overwrought Thai man who probably isn’t nearly as posh). There’s something very therapeutic about nature shows.

And let’s not forget our duties as members of the Academy. Last weekend, it was Blood Diamond, set in war-torn Sierra Leone. The Lao among our group had difficulty believing it could possibly be a true depiction of life in Africa, because, as usual, they can’t believe that others could be that much worse off than them.

An example: Several people at the newspaper have been on training courses in India, and all have come back absolutely shell-shocked with the horror of it all- the people! The dirt! Shitting in the street! Beggars! Curry and funny accents!
Regardless of the fact that one could be prepared with a simple bit of reading up before one departs, it always staggers me that each and every one of them assumes that the outside world looks like Bangkok.
What they must be teaching in these schools, I have no idea.

I’ve been giving small ‘workshops’ at the newspaper, about writing, about style, about grammar. The staff all keep my handouts and take notes and pay attention, but I know it’s not getting anywhere. It’s well and truly a charade by now. The newspaper- a government organ- is simply not open to change, at least not the kind that I had envisioned. They know it, I know it, and they know that I know it, but we go along pretending I’ve got a legitimate job to do.

There are a million reasons why I’m still here, but I know things aren’t going well and I need a holiday when I find myself continually justifying what I’m doing.

The weekend should sort me out...

Notes on Lao people picked up over the past two weeks

2007-01-25T12:44:00.000+11:00

There’s nothing that Lao people love more than a good bit of slapstick. Sight gags and Charlie Chaplin will send each and every one of them, old or young, into apoplectic fits of giggles. People falling over, being slapped on the bum or shoved is just pure, gold-plated, champagne comedy.

I’ve come to realise here that laziness, or at least the word ‘lazy’, is a multi-faceted, multi-purpose concept. It’s a thought, an action, an emotion, a state of mind, a way of life:
“Why did I do this? Maybe I am lazy.”
“I am lazy to work today.”
“Be careful, or you will be lazy.”
“Today, I am lazy.”

The Lao love to play cards. It’s just the one game- I think it’s actually Vietnamese, but it can go on and on and on for nights and nights. They play with actual money, too. The Island won $100 the other night, although it took him from dusk til dawn.
Unfortunately, as I have pointed out elsewhere on this blog, I loathe cards to distraction, along with all other games. There’s nothing more mind-numbing to me. I can’t see why anyone would voluntarily play cards or board games unless they were holed up in a remote house where there was no TV, where it was raining, and where you’d run out of conversation with all the other people there.
But, cards: everyone here, young and old, loves them.

Postscript
Later in the week, I was sitting in the family living room, peering at a tiny object in the Island’s hand- his mother’s tooth. We flicked through hundreds of photos and watched a DVD of the funeral with his older sister, two older brothers and father. My sister was with me, and with the family we ate fresh, glistening duck’s blood soup- a crimson delicacy!- and watched the past week’s events unfold- again.
[I forgot to mention that bit, didn’t I? A guy with a camera and a professional photographer were on hand throughout to capture each day in minute detail.]
Naturally I stuck out like a retard throughout the whole thing, and not just because of my hair and skin. It had more to do with the perpetually confused look on my face, and the fact that I kept doing things, you know, wrong, drawing gales of mirth from my fellow living room spectators. I even had to watch myself pouring water into the coffin- thankfully The Face was out of the picture- and also giving alms to the monks…with the wrong hand, of course.
There was a lot of laughing during the viewing, strangely, almost as if we had staged the whole thing for our later entertainment.
I did enjoy the bits that I didn’t get to see the first time. The day after the cremation, the family went back to the temple to sift through her remains and pick out bits of bone, teeth and gold, which they put into a pot and carried out on a rowboat to the middle of Mekong.
Before they did that, through, they moved the ashes around into the shape of a person and prayed over it, which looked quite creepy.
They also put a shrine in the temple, and a spirit flag in the temple grounds.
The tooth is now in a matchbox in our room.

Post-post script
On Sunday, I was finally relaxing. Sitting at the Sunset Bar, spending my Sunday evening in the usual way with the usual people, trying to capture the perfect sunset on my camera (see left), my phone suddenly rang. It was the Island. You must come quickly, he said. My sister is getting married in the living room…at this very moment!
Oh for christ’s fucking sake, I thought petulantly, as I made my over there AGAIN. And there they all were- the family, the boyfriend (with whom I share a peculiar bond, as he too was present during the death and funeral), his parents, the village chief and the local Holy Man. The Sister was not, as I had nastily assumed, up the duff. It just happened to be an auspicious day to marry, or something.
It was very fast- a signing ceremony, really, the equivalent of going to the registry. A long, handwritten document read out and signed by the village chief and all present, followed by a raucous baci with lots of whiskey, followed by yet another hefty meal, followed by some very fast-paced drinking which left the blushing bride practically comatose on the couch within an hour, and me practically pouring water down her throat.
As nice as any apparently spontaneous wedding between two people who have known each other for two months, I suppose.

Nobody can stop the music!
This guy in Phnom Penh started selling his downloaded collection of music a couple of years ago, and now runs a full-scale business, with more than 5,000 albums on offer. He’s just opened up a music shop at the Full Moon Café here in Vientiane, which is the answer to my prayers, really.
I used to get all snarky about downloaded music for the obvious, tiresomely righteous reasons, but that was only because I used to hang out with so many musicians who whined so much about never getting enough money/recognition/girls/drugs/happiness. But around the same time that I finally accepted that I never really fit in with that crowd anyway (quite a recent revelation, I’m sorry to say), I also read an interview with Patti Smith who gave such types a dressing down for not getting a job and getting on with it. It made me feel better- go Patti, you old grey lovely punk, you!
And anyway, my friend Patrick and I used to argue about it- he downloaded freely despite being in a band and being a dedicated music-head, and he said it was a dead issue.
He’s right: it’s a dead issue, and I can’t live without new music, every day, all the time.
Make that new and old. Without the benefit of high-speed internet at my fingertips, since the Boom Boom Room opened in Vientiane, I’ve bought at least 20 albums (70 cents each) of all kinds of stuff. Stuff I’d missed the boat on the first time round (Morrissey, Joni Mitchell), stuff for nostalgia’s sake (David Bowie’s greatest hits, my long-lost copy of XO by Elliot Smith, the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack) and surprise new hits (Broken Boy Soldiers by the Raconteurs, the Babyshambles album- why do I even like it? It has nothing to do with my life-long love for Kate Moss, I swear. It’s just grubby and good.)
[Incidentally, Brooke Glorious Brookie did one of her monumentally rare updates recently, with her best of 2006 music list, and I must confess I am humbled. Humbled! I’ve hardly heard of any of it! Well-played, my dear, well-played.]
Even without my usual balance of nerdy obscurities of the sort I usually favour in my downtime (my laptop is already chokkers), I feel almost whole again.

Now all I need is for a branch of Boots to open in Vientiane so that I can get my monthly moisturiser, hair product and mid-priced cosmetics fix without having to cross the border, and I’ll be totally and completely at home.
It’s becoming alarming. I ride around town in the balmy evenings, on my way to dinner/cocktails/movie nights/home, and find myself thinking, like, I could actually live here! As in, for some time! When did this happen?

Speaking of movies- or rather The Movies- Academy season is upon us, and we the Vientiane Academy are once again taking our role VERY seriously indeed, make no mistake.
But before we can sit down to watch the films and ponder our choices, it’s the Aus day reception tonight, and I am NOT going in a sinh- I wear them every day for work! I’ve taken my one and only Black Dress to be cleaned, ready to perform its all-purpose duties once again. It’s a great dress- I had the tailor here copy it from Vogue- and always draws admiring comments, (especially when I say it’s Prada, which is only half a lie).

It's just a day
I never thought it would happen, you know? I never thought I would find myself in the vast, bewildering second-floor jewellery section of Thalat Sao bargaining over a ten-karat gold chain. But then I never thought I would be dating an Asian man either.
It was the Island’s birthday yesterday, and although he swears he turned 24, his birth certificate and passport tell a different story. And that story goes like this: when his family moved from rural Luang Prabang to Vientiane in the early 90s, they suddenly had to apply for birth certificates for all the family members. His parents simply forgot his birthday, and came up with some random date- November 3, 1982. But it was his grandmother- his recently-bereaved, blind, 75-year-old grandmother who remembered the real date- January 24, 1983. As good a date as any, I suppose, but maths has never been a strong point here in Laos. I even had an argument with one of the Island’s brothers the other night, who was adamant that, as he was born in 1977, of course he was only turning 29 this year!
I gave up on that one early on.

The chicken and the egg
A hen has been laying its eggs in a grubby old piece of tarp outside our back door. I got annoyed at first- I hate those fucking chickens- until the Island got excited and told me that having a hen lay its eggs at your door is- you guessed it- lucky.
So, what? Will my misplaced tax return finally turn up? Will I find the perfect hair conditioner at the local supermarket? Will I start sleeping properly like an adult? Will the inspiration hit so that I start writing at last? Is this about me and my luck or not? No, actually. When the Lao talk about luck and luckiness, they mean peace, health, prosperity, success, and winning the lottery. It’s not very subtle.

Ashes to ashes

2007-01-17T21:28:00.000+11:00

Saturday came. The boys shaved each other’s heads in the garden, using soap and pink plastic razors. They laughed and whooped as they checked out their reflections, mainly to hide their devastation at losing all that careful coiffure.

The eyebrows came off as well, in accordance with tradition, leaving a bunch of ghostly aliens rubbing their heads in confusion and rushing to put on baseball caps.

We discovered the source of the Island’s persistent dandruff, after all. Big dry patches across his skull, which I rubbed tenderly with Nivea Body Intensive Milk (available at any minimart).

Good, good boys. Good sons. One of the brothers, the one who lives in Thailand, told me that just before he left to return home on New Year’s Day, his mother told him she was going to die, and begged him to shave his head and be a monk for the funeral.

Meanwhile, inside, as I let half-a-dozen women adjust my white sinh and tie a white rag in my hair, I couldn’t help thinking that a lot of it was just empty tradition, if only because no one seems to ever consider doing it any other way. And also because no one seemed to find it strange or wrong that I should be participating in something that has no connection to my culture.

We all walked, barefoot, to the temple, a long line of girls in white and boys in saffron,
holding a white rope attached to the coffin truck, which had Lao funeral music blaring through tinny speakers.

There were three cremations on that day, and as it happens, they do them all at once. There was a real festival atmosphere in the temple grounds, which were teeming with monks and nuns and hoards of relatives and friends.

[Having watched the family’s men shaving their heads and eyebrows all morning, it was easy to separate the real monks from the grieving surrogates: the bona fide monks had slightly darker heads, a three-day growth on their skulls.]

Being one of the nuns meant I had to go up to the open coffin with the rest of the family to pour coconut water on her face. By then, she had been dead for almost four days, and part of her face had turned black and yellow. Her lower lip, which in life had always exposed her lower teeth when her mouth was open, had sagged on one side, showing her gums, which had also turned yellow.

Now I can’t shake this final image whenever I think of her.

I was one of the last to go up, and the coconuts were all empty. The father, waiting to replace the lid, seemed distraught that I couldn’t perform this ritual. “Child, you have to!” he said, and someone passed me a bottle of perfume, which I sprayed on her dead face. He always calls me ‘child’.

It was all I do not to grimace at the sight of her, but it was a day of following, not thinking. Deep down, I was thinking how gruesome and barbaric it all was- forcing everyone to look at face given so completely over to death- an organic entity rotting away, like an orange left for too long on the kitchen bench.

But then, why is it that our culture feels the need to fuss over the dead, to dress them up and paint their faces to make them look they are sleeping? Surely this is just as barbaric. It's ashes to ashes, as they say- death as the great equaliser.

Then everyone climbed up to place flowers and candles around the coffin and walk all the way around it. This had to be done very fast, with a lot of shoving, because the Lao are afraid of spirits, and this must surely have been the point where her spirit was hovering, ready to be freed.

They set off the fuses one by one, a deafening whistle followed by the festive firecrackers. Once lit, the coffins up on their platforms, tall with canopies and covered with flowers, became raging infernos, forcing the crowd back from the heat.

There were individual touches: the coffin next to ours spewed out bright pink smoke. Ours had a man hurling lollies at the crowd. The third one had a massive flare at the front which, when set off, lit up the whole yard and threatened to burn down the canopy under which we were all standing.

They were all burnt down to nothing within about half and hour.

I went to the house the next day for an early dinner, and found the air had a lifted- everyone was relaxed and cheerful. The oldest sister, who has been frowning for months, laughed uproariously for several minutes at my face when she poured a load of uncooked cow’s brains into a bowl. The middle girl, the one who had cried the most, at the death, the head-shaving and cremation, emerged with freshly washed hair and painted nails, and giggled for hours on the floor with her sister. The father perched on a chair outside the house with a serene look.

On Monday, they took the ashes to be placed in a stupa at the temple. Yesterday, I went to the house at 7am to give alms to the monks, followed by a monster baci where I got more strings around my wrists than ever before- I look down at them and feel that I’m choking in white cotton. Actually, the baci was a joyous affair, with lots of laughing and people throwing rice. It was a celebration, I guess, because her spirit was free, finally. And everyone tied strings to all the family members- I got more than anyone else, which, I discovered over the weekend, was because the family has been telling everyone that I am the Island’s wife, to avoid further explanation. The big wedge of cotton around my wrists takes ages to dry, and they keep trailing on my coffee, but I’m sure as hell not taking them off.

The only foreigner for absolutely miles, and wearing a sinh, no less! There’s been too much attention on me to even consider not doing things properly. I think I’ve paid my dues for the next year- praying endlessly like a Buddhist, dressing up as a nun, watching over the dead, and spending a lot of time with bawdy old women, who sat on the floor for hours, chewing and spitting red betel nut, laughing and chopping vegetables. They have a vicious streak, I discovered, when you dare to beg off the booze and the food.

The Lao love to eat raw meat, despite doctors throughout the country warning against it. I ate so much weird stuff on Friday night that I went home and actually threw it all up. Then I was fine.

Today, a week after she died, it’s finished. The boys’ hair is already starting to grow back, and everyone will get on without their mother- that’s the beauty of a big family.

Since then

2007-01-12T17:25:00.000+11:00

This post is dedicated to the memory of 4000 Island’s mother.

The day after I wrote that last post, she did die, after all. She was 49 years old, and left behind a husband, eight children, one grandchild and her 73-year-old blind mother. She died from kidney failure.

I was at work on Tuesday afternoon when 4000 Islands called, in tears, asking me to come to the house because she had taken a turn for the worse.

Until Wednesday morning, I had never seen a dead body, much less watched someone die.

The air in the house, when I arrived, had thickened with the smells of illness. The family were around her on the floor where they had been sitting and praying for the past couple of days. Even then, I thought they were being hasty. She was still moving around, and asking for water, and saying their names. I thought, even if she is dying, she could linger for days. I didn’t know whether to stay or go. But the Island wanted me to stay. Maybe he wanted me to see.

So I did. I stayed and sat and cried and slept fitfully and ate and watched her die with everyone else.

Every now and again, the father would smooth her forehead and look down at her. “Come on, it’s time to go,” he’d say, as if to a small child. “We’re waiting for you to go. Don’t worry about us. The children are fine. There’s nothing left for you to worry about. It’s time to go.” Every time he said this, the girls started crying again.

I’m an emotional person at the best of times, and it’s very difficult to be among people who are crying and not join in. So I cried pretty much for 12 hours straight, minus the bits when I was sleeping between the sisters on the floor near the bed.

I wondered many times whether I should stay. Surely they didn’t want me there, sharing in their grief? But it wasn’t just me- all sorts of people came and went that night. I tried to explain to 4000 Islands how different it is in our culture- how death is a private thing, and families don’t want others to see their loved ones in this state. All night she was moaning and vomiting and rolling her eyes in an effort to focus on the voices. In Australia, we keep our faces turned away until we are directly confronted by the death of someone close. We don’t stare death in the face like this, watching it unfold for hours on end.

I think she went into a sort of coma at around 9 o’clock, when we were getting dinner ready. She stopped moving or swallowing. But we still ate and watched Arsenal beat Liverpool on TV, and I kept falling asleep.

I woke up again at around 5am, and she was quieter. She had lifted her arms, and seemed to be trying to grab something in the air or make a sign. Her breathing was shallow, and she wasn’t moaning anymore. Everyone gathered- five of the kids, the father, the blind grandmother, me and seven or eight of the father’s card-playing mates. I looked away, outside at the dawn sky. When I looked back, she had stopped breathing.

“Wednesday,” the men were saying. “It’s Wednesday, 6 o’clock.” Everyone started wailing, and prayed at the foot of the bed.

But within five minutes, they had started to clean her, and changed her clothes. They covered her face and kept crying. They took off her jewellery and cut off her baci strings with a knife, an act that seemed more final than that last breath.

The father went out and returned an hour later followed by the coffin on a truck. The exact same coffin I’ve seen many times- wedding-cake-style and trimmed with gold foil- surprisingly flimsy up close.

I couldn’t help being fascinated by all this. They filled the coffin with sawdust, lined it with plastic, blessed it with flowers, and placed her- skin and bones and silk- inside. The coffin guy then put a drip into her, filled with some kind of embalming fluid- two whole bottles of it. They stuffed the coffin with all her clothes and sealed it up.

They ordered flowers and food- vats of it. Vegetables, rice, noodles, herbs, beer, Pepsi. And then the people started coming, and they’re still there.

It’s all familiar now. No one is crying. The coloured fairy lights are flashing tackily. There’s an enlarged portrait of her propped up under all the incense. There are watermelon seed husks everywhere, because seeds are what people like to eat here when they know they’re in for the long haul. I’ve become an expert at cracking them open cleanly. Women I’ve never seen before are all set up in the backyard outside the kitchen putting together massive pots of never-ending food. There are a dozen rented tables in the yard, and everyone is eating, playing cards or watching movies. There were around 60 people there when I left last night. This morning there were only a few, but they were already trickling in. I ate breakfast there before coming into work. The sisters had stopped crying.

On Saturday, she’ll be cremated at the local temple, with all the usual fireworks. The boys will all have to shave their heads and don the saffron robes, which is worrying me to no end. The Island’s entire identity is inextricably linked with his hair.

The photo I’ve put up was taken on New Year’s Eve, when the brother who lives in Thailand (centre) was home. That’s her in the front. Now, look at that hair on those boys- all gone on Saturday. To me, it doesn’t bear thinking about, but the Island can’t understand my distress. It's a completely normal thing for a Buddhist family to do, and if his hair is important to him, then it's all the more symbolic if he shaves it off.

Sacrifices, and the dud holiday

2007-01-12T12:52:00.000+11:00

There comes a time in every young woman’s life where she has to choose between spending the week on a Thai island amid white sand and turquoise water, or flying back to Vientiane to prepare to watch her boyfriend’s mother die. You know?
I guess you don’t, huh.

I can’t help wondering if the debacle of the past five days has been my comeuppance for even considering spending a whole week lying on the beach. I mean, it’s just not something I would normally do. For starters, I’ve never been very good at lying still. And I don’t lead a stressful life- any stress I have is purely self-induced, and I’m too organised to fall under the weight of work. So choosing a tropical holiday isn’t really me. Holidays for me usually have something to do with visiting people, shopping and/or Seeing Another Culture. But sand and snorkelling? No ma’am.

But then, once you’re there for a couple of days, and you start to settle into the environment (as we did, however briefly), swimming with the beautiful Nemo and his friends just metres off the beach and finally tasting the almost-forgotten tang of fish from the ocean, it can be quite bewildering to be suddenly wrenched away from it all. Back on the speedboat to the mainland, waving forlornly at our friends on the shore, getting a bus for two hours to the airport, trying unsuccessfully to argue my way into cheap airfares, taking the expensive ones instead, then two flights back to Vientiane, 12 hours later.

But I really don’t think I had a choice. When 4000 Island’s dad contacted him and advised him to get home quick smart if he wanted one last look at his mum, there was no question of getting home as soon as possible, even if it did cost me an arm and a leg. All I could think about was my own father, and how, many years ago, before I was born, he too was summoned home from overseas for the very same reason, and he didn’t make it in time. He even missed the funeral, something that even today is too painful for him to talk about.

[Her name was Wilma, but everyone called her Willy. She was one of the few women in Australia at the time to have a university degree. She wore tweeds, drove a VW and smoked like a chimney. Everyone says I look the most like her, although, unlike my sisters, I didn’t manage to inherit her generous bosom.]

4000 Islands was a mess anyway, and the night before we left he was wracked by nightmares, in which his mother, standing with a whole lot of people he didn’t know, told him she was already dead. A bad sign- the Lao take dreams and signs very seriously.

[She had asked to be brought home from the hospital because when Lao people die in the hospital, the body has to go straight to the temple, rather than being brought home for the Buddhist rituals. For this reason, families often pretend their dead relatives are still alive, covering their faces with oxygen masks and attaching them to drips, in order to get them out of the hospital and back home.]

Anyway, as it transpired, she was in some kind of hallucinatory state when we finally got home, shouting and screaming and swearing, spitting food back in the faces of her kids who were holding her fragile limbs to the bed and trying to feed her. She was clearly going nuts through fever and hunger. Or, possessed by an evil spirit, depending on which way you look at it. From the point of view of the Island’s family, there was no doubt about what needed to be done.

Now, during this time, I was slouched bitterly in a corner of the room, which, by the way, was filled with relatives, friends and neighbours, who were all just sitting around and waiting for her to die. I watched the family holding her down, shouting at each other and talking about spirits. I wondered how many people in Laos died prematurely because of these whacko beliefs. I thought about white sand and turquoise water and striped fish. I asked the Island to take me home.

He returned home the following morning, exhausted, and told me that at 2am the witch doctor had finally arrived, done his stuff, and by morning, she was eating, remembered everyone’s names and had no memory of the night before.

So what’s a good atheist like me supposed to think, do or say?

Speaking of atheism…
When I said before that I don’t lead a stressful life, I was leaving out the part about work (training non-English speaking journalists at a Communist newspaper), and Christmas.

I came to the conclusion over the festive season that I am a terrible entertainer, at least on the inside. Helping to organise our Christmas Eve party was quite the most stressful thing I had done all year. What with ordering 8 kg of roast pork and bouche Noels (‘from the French bakery Mon Petit Cochon near Simuang Temple, bloody hell!’), procuring six cases of beer with ice (the tuk tuk driver’s brother sorted us out) and trying to persuade one of our male friends to be Santa (“Why me? Is it because you think I’m fat?” “No, it’s because you have a three-day beard and you’re wearing a red t-shirt” “And because I’m fat! Oh yes, let’s all laugh at the fat guy being Santa!” “Ok, ok, you can be the Tequila Elf then.”)

Anyway, what with all the alcohol, it all went so well, with everyone eating cold roast on tables outside, Aus-style, and later a Kris Kringle, with every person taking a shot from the Tequila Elf before receiving a gift. Great fun- and that was only boozy Christmas Eve.

Of course, the Lao don’t celebrate Christmas, but they do get quite in to NYE.
This year’s unfolding wasn’t half bad either, considering how crap last year’s was (see vintage post from that period). The prodigal son from the Island’s family had turned up to see his ailing mum and to see in the New Year with us at the Don Chan Palace Hotel Terrace Bar. What with the Island, his trendy younger brother (with whom my previous interactions had only ever involved him checking his hair in the rear-view mirrors on my scooter) and this new personage, I have never seen such a profusion of hair, jewellery and pink shoelaces in my life.

[I think I’ve mentioned before how acceptable it is for Asian men to be obsessed with their hair and skin, and more power to them, I say. There’s nothing more awesome than not having to feel guilty while I peruse the aisles of Boots at the Bangkok International Airport. About being able to say, with glee, that at least half of the products in my bathroom belong to my boyfriend. About instructing my sisters to bring skin products as a Christmas gift for him, instead of them wracking their brains to think of something more suitable.]

Anyway: stressful. Thank God my sisters are both exceedingly laid-back people, for whom Vientiane just such a novelty.

And, New Years Resolution: update blog more regularly, obviously.

Weather update
I’m back at work now, having decided not to waste my week’s holiday bumming around Vientiane, which I already do plenty of. And, ironically, back on the island, the rain started falling the day we left, and still hasn’t stopped. Our friends were forced to leave a couple of days early, and are now shopping in Bangkok. Some might call that a lucky escape for me and my bank account, which is already hurting from the epic rush home.
And it’s cold in Vientiane. Not cold by Canberra/Melbourne standards, of course, but genuinely chilly, particularly on the evening ride home from work. Enough to leave a dew on your scooter seat. A scarf is now de rigueur, as is the light sweater and nighttime doona (or duvet, you Euro fools). It’s genuinely cold up north, with temperatures dropping to 6 degrees on some mornings. But we haven’t seen rain since October.

I might also add that I spent my one-year anniversary in Lao on at least four different forms of transport on Saturday (boat, bus, plane, tuk tuk). I didn’t even realise until Kate sent me a message from Australia to remind me. Thanks Kate, though how the hell you remembered this I have no idea.
I have also just this minute received an invitation from the Australian Embassy to their Australia Day Bash- remember that? All those months ago? Twelve months to be precise.

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon
My housemate Tom works with Kevin Bacon’s nephew. Make of this what you will, but I am lobbying hard for a meeting so that firstly, the aforementioned six degrees will become just two, and secondly, to convince him to invite the family over for a summer holiday, or something, so that I can meet KB and be separated by just one.
Kevin, this post is dedicated to you.

Hot Coals

2006-12-17T16:03:00.000+11:00

A guy at work, who had been on exchange for the past three months in Canberra, returned to Vientiane on Tuesday, several days before his wife’s second child was due. He arrived on the 8pm flight. At 2am the following morning, the baby was born in the back of the car on the way to the hospital.
Anyway, Lao journalists being Lao journalists, this was the perfect opportunity to abandon the business of newspapers and descend en masse to the house, me included, where we cooed over the baby, ate a hefty meal and played cards.
This post is dedicated to his wife, who was unable to join us as she was busy lying on a bed of hot coals in the backyard, and I mean this very almost literally.
In Laos, a woman who has just given birth must then lie for a certain period on a low bed over a fire. Sometimes she stays there for several weeks, sometimes for nine or ten days, I think it depends on how many children she has already had.
It also doesn’t matter what the weather’s like. Now is a relatively cool period in Vientiane, but imagine how it would feel in July?
Plus, the bed isn’t padded or comfortable. The mother’s not allowed to get up and walk around or sleep in her own bed or bathe her own baby. Instead, relatives bring the baby to her to be fed, stoking up the coals, just in case she looks too comfortable.
I don’t know why they do this, or what it could possibly mean. We’ve asked many people, and received responses ranging from the superstitious (something about cleansing the spirit) to the purely vain (it tightens up the flabby, post-pregnancy flesh).
It’s baffling, and seems to have no logical foundation.
But try telling a Lao person that some of their nutty health-related theories are flawed, and you will get only a blank look. No woman here, no matter how educated or progressive, would consider NOT prostrating herself over a bed of coals during the first weeks of her baby’s life.
I shudder to think what the smoke is doing to the kid’s lungs.
[As an aside, my friend Mel immediately saw the potential of these low beds as a kind of offbeat seating arrangement, and bought up several of them. She fitted them up with cushions and they now serve as terribly funky couches in her living room.]

Commy hacks
More debates in the newsroom. The National Assembly is in the middle of one of its ‘sessions’, and the phonelines are open for concerned citizens to ring up and voice their complaints. Surprisingly many of these are addressed in parliament.
The complaints have ranged from corruption among officials to neighbourhood nuisances regarding late-night clubs. Some have voiced concerned about a multi-million dollar Malaysian investment project that will see a water theme park open up on the heart of Vientiane….in a protected wetlands area. Is this consistent with the government’s commitment to environmental preservation? the people are asking.
And are the traffic police even doing their job properly? Why are so many people still riding without helmets?
At least one of the journos has quite a nose for controversy, and it’s a guessing game each day to try and determine which of his stories will run the following day. The problem is, contrary to the image most people conjure up when they think of censorship, at my paper there seems to be a complete lack of defined policy as to what will or won’t be published.
I thought, for sure, the complaint about the fact that so many government officials drive luxury cars wouldn’t get a mention. Nor the one about retired officials who, having worked hard for 30 years, still don’t have subsidised housing, while young upstarts in the job for three or four years have several houses AND fancy cars already- where is this money coming from?
The story listing all these complaints ran on the front page.
But another story, about buffalo owners in rural Luang Prabang being forced to pay damages to Chinese rubber plantation owners, despite these investors refusing to build fences around their plantations, didn’t run, even though it was riddled with direct quotes from an official saying that buffalos aren’t good for the economy and rubber plantations are, so why are these bloody peasants (who have breeding buffalo for generations) complaining?
Never mind that the locals are yet to see a cent from the plantations, which have also been condemned by environmental NGOs.
Anyway, like I said, it’s a guessing game from day to day.

Also: dead bodies, gore
A young girl tried to kill herself in the middle of Vientiane a couple of weeks ago, drawing quite a crowd. She climbed up an electricity pole, intending to electrocute herself. She didn’t succeed, but she did give herself a nasty electric shock, causing third degree burns and frizzed-up, singed hair.
One of the journos was on hand to capture the event on camera, before hurrying back to the newsroom to record the whole thing in detail: her name, address, high school, possible reasons for wanting to die, and a lovely close-up of her messed-up face, wracked with pain as the rescuers pulled her down.
An argument ensued.
“You cannot, absolutely cannot, run with this story,” I said, without thinking.
Bafflement all round. But why? This is hot news! Great photos! Stupid girl, stopped traffic, the people have a right to know!!
After much debate, I managed to convince them to run a small story, omitting personal details and all mentions of suicide, and absolutely no photo.
The journo is still resentful.
“Sally, the news should be a mirror of society,” he pointed out.
At this breathtakingly ridiculous statement, given where we were (the newsroom of a government-controlled, heavily censored Communist mouthpiece), I had no choice but to abandon any complicated speeches about ethics and cut straight to the heart of things.
“Ekaphone,” I said, “this girl might have done something stupid, but she is still alive. Do you think she wants to see photos of herself all burnt up like this on the front page? And what about her family? Ekaphone, what if this was your sister?”
Boom. Case closed.
I’m almost ashamed, especially as I had to employ that little cliché a few days later, when they tried to run a photo of a motorbike accident victim- dead on the road.
“Somsack, what if that was your brother?” I pointed out, and again, it seemed to shut him up.
I would almost prefer it if they had some counter-argument, but the problem is that they want to run these stories without thinking. I suspect this is also the case in the Thai papers, from which the Lao journos draw much of their inspiration. Thai papers seem to have no qualms about publishing photos of dead bodies or accident victims.
It’s an age-old editorial debate.

Teeth and candles- books and root vegetables
There are only two more weeks left of this year. Amazing, no? Philippa and Caroline are joining me in Vientiane for Christmas, which has placed a strain on my language skills already. That’s because in Laos, the words are in a different order, and every noun comes with a classifier. So I can’t tell someone that I have ‘two younger sisters’, but rather ‘I have younger sibling, two persons, girls’.

So I can’t order ‘two cups of coffee’ but rather ‘coffee, two cups’.
Buying 12 roses? “I’ll take rose 12 [insert classifier specific to flowers, light fittings and nails].”
Or 3 turnips? “Please can I have turnip 3 [insert special classifier for books and root vegetables].”

I know, nuts. How am I supposed to learn all this? After a year, I think I’m improving a bit, but for a relatively rough language, it’s very hard to absorb.
I thought, because I already had another language, it would be easy. But I forgot about how hard it is to memorise stuff. I haven’t had to this since high school, pretty much. Even at uni, my exams were all open-book. And I can’t even remember learning French as a process- I was too young.
The problem is that Lao words mostly bear no relation to English or French words. It’s a pain in the ass.

Booker Schmooker
What else has happened in the last fortnight? Work is really picking up the pace, the Island has a new job, and I’ve been reading a lot. Finally got through Katharine Graham, all 680 pages of it, but I haven’t only been reading that. I brought back a slew of reading materials from home- some Quarterly Essays, Australian Vogue, a music mag, this year’s Booker winner The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Dessai. Yes, and I know I said last year’s Booker winner was one of the best books ever, but Inheritance was brilliant. Really stunning. [Incidentally, only one person I know liked The Sea, and that’s Billy in Melbourne. Typical, as he’s a writer himself.]
In the mood for some classical drama, I’ve now foolishly plunged into Anna Karenina. Up to page 80, with just 720 to go.
I bought a stack of DVDs recently, and marvelled at Helen Mirren playing the Queen in The Queen the other night. Ditto Gretchen Mol in The Notorious Betty Page.
Also, a friend gave me the first two seasons of The OC. That’s, like, 50 hours of TV right there. I decided, after the first two episodes, that I was ready to take the plunge, to jump in and invest my time and emotions in the lives of Marissa, Ryan, Seth and Summer. I’m 20 episodes in now, and practically dying of boredom. If only Mischa Barton could act, you know? Her lack of skills are stealing hours of my life! Enough.
Oh, and I’ve had a few nights out. That’s a photo of me bowling, by the way. I don’t like bowling, but the pic is kinda cool. Last weekend I got terribly drunk and had an awful hangover, and considered making a new year’s resolution to stop drinking.
But I really don’t think that’s feasible, do you?

I love nature

2006-12-05T12:34:00.000+11:00

Last weekend, we drove eight hours south to the Konglor Caves in Borikhamxay province. Partly to counter those accusations I mentioned in the last post.
Anyway, driving through villages and dried-out rice paddies, surrounded by these towering limestone cliffs…there was a lot of not looking away, that’s all I’m saying.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you hear music in your ears (especially if you’ve seen a lot of movies), and makes you imagine living in their shadow, and seeing them every day.
It took us a long time to get to the caves. The road was bad, and sometimes non-existent. We used my friend Tim’s GPS device to get to the river, it was that bad. “You are heading south. You are heading south,” it kept saying.
We ended up paying a villager to take us there.
‘There’ was a surprisingly lovely but somewhat pricey hotel, where we left the car and took a boat 40 minutes up the river to a new resort closer to the caves- simple bungalows, cold water showers, and the most pristine river I’ve seen in ages.
The caves- when I say caves, I mean a river winding four kilometres through a mountain and out the other side, by the way- were pretty spectacular. Massive, pitch-black (and lit up sporadically by the navigators’ headlights), cathedral-like, 100 metres wide and 100 metres high in some parts, filled with sparkling stalagmites and stalagtites…what’s the difference by the way? Which is which?
You have to see these caves now, because in a year or two, the resort will be the new Vang Vieng. I mean it: they’re building a new road to get there this very second, and soon, the water will be murky, the rooms will smell funky and there will be beer bars all along the riverbank. Maybe even in the caves themselves, where the glittering formations will be tarnished with black fingerprints. They say that limestone stains for 1,000 years when you touch it. Imagine.
So we were lucky to see it when we did.

The boats we took chugged down through riverside villages, where kids, or sometimes whole families, lined up on the shore to wave hello and goodbye. They were happy, excited to see us, with our light hair, pale skin and fount of potential funds.
I thought about what it would be like if we were Asian people, winding our way between riverside towns in rural Australia. People there wouldn’t line up to wave and smile. They would be more likely to stare, hostile, or turn away and mutter. They would treat us with suspicion.
I know that without a doubt, and it made me sad.

This post is dedicated to my black Haviaina flip-flop that I left behind in the caves- it slipped off my right foot and floated away into the darkness.

It’s also dedicated to my friends Malikhone and Kek, who, like many Lao girls, made me look once again like a towering amazon in a field of random wildflowers that we came across on the way.

Big story in the past week:
The finalists were announced for the title of Miss Apone Lao, the country’s very own beauty pageant, put on by the Lao Women’s Union.
I was given complimentary tickets to the finals, but I wouldn’t have gone even if I hadn’t been away loving nature. After being photographed with the 18 finalists in our office last week- the Vientiane Times was a major sponsor of the event- I had seen all I wished to see of what is expected of the prototypical Lao woman. As stipulated by the Lao Women’s Union, that is.
Honestly, 18 girls with perfect hairdos, in heals and sinhs, bowing low and barely saying a thing just doesn’t do much for the sisterhood, does it?
I had a bet with an English colleague on who would win. We both liked a girl with honey skin and slightly Indian features- all the boys thought she was ugly because “skin too dark”. Of course, it was the most docile girl with the whitest skin and the roundest face who won.

Two more interesting stories in the paper here this week:
A women’s group is pushing to have marital rape criminalised. The rationale is that having sex with your wife when she doesn’t want to is a form of domestic violence, a fact that should be reflected in the country’s sexual assault laws.
It’s not rocket science.
Or is it? I thought, as I tried, as patiently as I could, to explain to the editor- the editor- that yes, in fact rape is still rape even when the parties are married…
The boys in the office all thought it was tremendous fun, as did the editor, until I pointed out the part in the story about how Laos is a signatory to a certain, you know, international convention that defines rape as such, and that the country is sort of 'lagging' a bit. Strangely, that seemed to shut them up…

The other story, or rather the lead up to the first draft being written, gave me enough of a glimmer of hope for the future of this country’s media, and the people involved, for me to keep doing what I’m doing. For a few hours, at least.
One of the journalists got wind of a group of workers, from an unofficial street-corner labour market, who were so poor that they had actually started selling their blood.
My journo went undercover down at the street corner, and posed as someone wanting to know where he could get some blood. He also spoke to a woman who had paid US$75 for some blood for her cousin, when she discovered the blood bank was empty.
I read his first draft and got really excited. I told him he should take it further- speak to the Red Cross and turn it into a campaign to get more people to donate blood, so that people wouldn’t have to buy blood from strange men on street corners. We had a heated, creative-differences type of argument, of the likes not previously seen by me in a Lao newsroom, and he finally agreed to speak to more people.
Before he could do this, the editor checked the copy and was outraged at the very thought that Vientiane Times could suggest that people were so poor they would sell their body parts, and made him change every mention of ‘selling’ to ‘donating’, and replace any mention of money with some kind of euphemism for ‘a small gift for services rendered’.
What we got was a lame story about random men on random street corners who were so kind-hearted they were giving away their blood.
Welcome to service journalism, Lao-style.

She really is an art nerd!
Anyway, you might have noticed the photo of my painting. I’m liking it more every day- what does everyone think?
I like the apple, especially.
This post is also dedicated again to Pat, whose entire computer was stolen last week by some kind of animal in the night- his computer and many thousands of songs, photos, articles, workplans and words of academic brilliance.
How is he coping??

Art Nerd

2006-11-22T13:14:00.000+11:00

A Lao friend once asked why foreigners liked sunsets so much. Someone told him it was because you don’t get to see it that much when you live in a big city, and here in Vientiane you can see a good sunset every single day.
I was reminded of this when riding to dinner after work this evening, and being unable to look away from the blushing horizon. I’m always like this when confronted with scenes of natural beauty- a blazing blue sky, a rainbow, snow, the beach. Ignoring it, or turning away before I’ve drunk it up thoroughly, seems callous- as though I’ve forgotten what the world is made of, or something.

Anyway, lest you think I’m suddenly going to start using this blog to write about sunsets and stuff, I’d like to use this a segue-way to counter the accusation directed at me over the weekend that I HATE NATURE.
Sure, I don’t particularly enjoy going on long treks, or kayaking, and I certainly don’t like camping. But that’s not nature’s fault- I love nature! I’m just a bit lazy when it comes to, you know, carrying stuff. And there’s something so primitive about sleeping on the ground. Not to mention uncomfortable.
I blame school camps, as I do for many of my dislikes- enforced group activities, board games, campfire singalongs, etc.

Anyway, the steak I ate tonight at Le Vendome was easily the best meal I’ve had since I got back, and should go some way towards boosting my lame immune system, which seems to be still recovering from the ‘bug’ I apparently had in my stomach when I stepped off the plane in Canberra a month ago. The bug that I choose to believe I got from the food on Thai Airways, although it could just as easily have been the ping gai [chicken on a stick!!] I had at the Ban Keun Boat Racing Festival the day before I left.
Our old family doctor said it was anyone’s guess.
The irony! I hadn’t been sick once in Laos, and here I was back home with my parents and unable to partake of any booze with them.

Home sweet home
I’d like to dedicate this post to one of my Melbourne buddies Pat (and Ben and the others at Gorgeous George), who gave me an ‘Art Nerd’ badge and diligently copied no less than 22 albums onto two CDs to renew my severely deprived collection- a gift that keeps on giving!
So, everyone, that’s why I haven’t written for so long- I was in Australia. And when I address you as ‘everyone’, I am actually visualising quite a few people. Because EVERYONE I met up with at home seemed to have read it.
The shame!

So: home. Canberra was colder, of course, weather-wise. My nephews are bigger and, like, able to say stuff- clearly prodigies. James (4) puts his hand on Oliver’s (2) head as they sit and watch TV. Mum and dad have renovated the house, and even though my childhood room NO LONGER EXISTS, the whole thing looks pretty classy. My sisters were both ensconced in exams, reminding me of what late-October-early-November was all about once upon a time.

All my very oldest and best are ironically living back there, too. Brooke, snug but unsure in her mother’s flat in Kingston; the Two Peas Cristy and Paul, currently expecting a third- she’s got so big already! SC, working at DFAT, has even bought his own flat in the ‘burbs; Chris and Heather were right where I left them on the couch in their flat in Kingston.
Comfortable relief mixed with hunched-over paranoia at every corner, in every favourite restaurant, that I might bump into someone…unsavoury, if you know what I mean. The place where you grow up is always full of ghosts, right?

I love Melbourne Part II
Just the way I left it. I drifted around the good parts and stayed away from the waves of loneliness in the cafes on Smith Street where I used to spend Saturdays and Sundays alone with the newspapers.
Instead, I stayed on the other side of the river, with Libby and Billy, newly married. Libby and I propped each other up at breakfast over our impoverished states- both in the name of love. Money replaced with virtue, we reminded each other.
Caught up with all my radiant favourites- Jess, Emily, Annie, who has finally found love in a place she hadn’t looked before.
Nelly, a lawyer again instead of a journalist, still single. She had a date while I was in town. “It won’t work out,” she said. “His surname is Paserella, so if we got married, I’d be Antonella Paserella!”
Ate seafood (fish from the ocean!!) in Fitzroy with the J-Crew; Christy, (soon to be married), and Miki, the only one of us brave enough to move to the country and be a real journo. She’s the one with whom I swapped my red couch before I left last year for an antique garnet ring from the Camberwell Markets. I’m still wearing it, but in the meantime, she took an upholstery course to relieve the country boredom and recovered the couch herself.
And my wonderful and wonderfully-anxious friend Emma Caine, who made me read passages of the book she was halfway through, to assure her that it really was extravagantly overworked and verbose, and, in my opinion, a very good reason to get worked up.
Also Connie (I missed Vince), still the classiest cat-lover I know, and my old work friends.
And an old (boy)friend Sky, who still hasn’t figured out a way to earn a living without working (how could this be?)
And to crown the week, Oli and Schram, and the looks on their faces when I strode, uninvited, unannounced, unexpected, into Schram’s 30th birthday party.
I also made a mercy dash to Wollongong, of all places, to see Kate, and remind her that Laos wasn’t a dream.

So anyway, picture this:
Scene: a random city pub in Melbourne. I’m wearing skinny jeans, a jacket and a scarf. It’s chilly out. I order two gin & tonics and a pint of Carlton, and hand over a $50 note. The bar tender gives me back $30.
Me: Excuse me, I think there’s a mistake. I gave you a $50, and you only gave me $30 change- that can’t be right.
Bar tender: Yeah it is. $6.50 (points to one G&T), $6.50 (points to the other) and $7 (points to the beer). Equals $20.
Me: Seven dollars for a beer???? YOU WHAT???? That’s crazy! That can’t be right!
Bar tender: (stares at me blankly for a second and turns to the next customer)
Me: (turning to my friends) SEVEN DOLLARS!!! A whole CRATE of beer costs less than that in Laos!
My friends’ expressions turn to pity. Not for themselves, for having to pay such exorbitant prices, but me, for having forgotten…

Cut to Wednesday evening two weeks later. I’m sitting in a dim, mellow cocktail bar in Vientiane, drinking red wine and scrutinising a bunch of paintings being unwrapped by the bar’s owner.
All by regional artists, with the proceeds going to a new school in Vang Vieng? Of course I bought one.
I’m still not sure whether it borders on tacky, although it does look pretty good in our living room. But rest assured it will be added to the rest of the stuff I own, mainly in boxes under my parents’ house in Canberra, that I can barely envision ever being able to unpack permanently. Books on shelves, paintings on walls, CDs in stacks, flowers in vases. A pipe dream at this stage.

The other home sweet home
It’s good to be back. To be home, I guess. It’s a lot drier than when I left, and the all-pervasive dust that was in the air when I first arrived in January is has returned. So has the smoky smell. And that bloody rooster next door.
The Island was gratifyingly pleased to see me again, as were all my friends- the characters in this particular chapter of the saga.
But as I said, my immune system, ladies and gentlemen, is down, and I’ve had a filthy head cold. It’s at times like this that words like ‘yoga’ and ‘steamed organic vegetables’ run through my mind, and I make vague resolutions to become a quasi-hippy. But today I think I’m on the mend, especially after that steak.
I’ve got a new Lao teacher, a new office, a new work plan- things are shifting back into focus.

I’ll get back to you once I’ve mastered the names of my new colleagues at Vientiane Times.

Letting go

2006-10-16T00:42:00.000+10:00

Friday was my last day at KPL News, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that it was decided just this week that the new volunteer who is coming to take my place has been pulled out of the job and will now be choosing another job. Ridiculous- and partly my fault. But we all know how much I’ve been whinging about it all of late. There’s no other way- I couldn’t possibly stay there another day.
Anyway, this was all compounded by the very touching ceremony they had for me on Friday- the full baci, a certificate from the Ministry of Information and Culture, gifts, the works. And for what? For someone who has basically abandoned them because I feel I can do something better. No, responding to basic need is no longer enough for Sally. No, I’m apparently too good to be correcting illegible English all day. Which is why I’ve left.
Anyway, they all tied dozens of white strings around my wrists to wish me luck. You’re supposed to leave these on for three days. You can slip them off or untie them if you must, but you can’t, under any circumstances, cut them with scissors, or a knife. I’ve mentioned before in a previous post how compelled one feels here to follow these rituals to the letter, just in case. Usually, it’s not a problem, I leave the strings on for the three days and then take them all off.
But since I got them on Friday, they’ve all been untying themselves and dropping off, one by one, with no help from me.
I think that’s symbolic, don’t you?

Clean living
Anyway, I’ve been sooo earnest of late- going to the gym, eating porridge, trawling through Katharine Graham’s Personal History and going to bed early. It’s good, really, and I sure made up for it over the weekend of debauchery that was last weekend.
I really think it’s about time I rewarded myself- but then I say that and realise that I reward myself constantly. Treats around every corner, here. A new stripey top from the Chinese Market. Finally, a copy of The Devil Wears Prada on DVD. Several hours at the sauna last weekend. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate that Tom brought back from home.
Not to mention HBO- the most dangerous channel ever. Every movie I would never consider paying for in any way but have always sort of wanted to see is on.
[I blame Parul, and old friend I’ve been emailing of late. Parul and I shared an apartment when I lived in Montreal in 2000-2001. Parul, an Indian American with several tattoos, is a few years younger than me and probably one of the most glamorous people I know- a chain-smoking Penelope Cruz-lookalike who could churn out perfect papers three hours before they were due, and pick any old garment off the stinky floor of her stinky room and look jaw-dropping. She used to sleep a lot, and I would get home from classes and perch on the end of her bed smoking cigarettes.
We basically spent the long Quebec winter watching movies. That is, everything we could find, from High Fidelity to Love Story, from Fatal Attraction to Kicking and Screaming. We made friends with the Video Store Guys, who always cancelled our fines.
Anyway, I was already a film buff before that- I was, after all, doing film studies at McGill- but I think that winter just made me hungry for all of them, everything. Happy Gilmore and Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion and Sophie’s Choice.
I think my penchant for high and low came into its own right there.
Parul lives in New York now- of course she got into Columbia. There are many miles between Manhattan and Vientiane.]

There’s a mouse in the house
Continuing with the whacky animal theme, I surprised an enormous mouse late last Friday trying to gnaw its way out of the small downstairs storeroom. It didn’t even really stop when it saw me, and didn’t try to get away, either, stupid mouse.
Still, it probably didn’t deserve to be bludgeoned to death the next morning by the Island ("Not crazy- diligent"), wielding a roll of gladwrap.
But I’m told that’s Lao style.
Also, at the time of writing, there is a black-and-white cat lying outside our gate that is slowly dying, and I don’t know what to do about it.
I hope it’s not avian influenza.

Holy candles and beer
I love a good street festival- there’s something so warming about seeing hoards of people ambling along the roads, eating ice-cream, looking at stalls and just generally enjoying the atmosphere.
It was the end of Buddhist Lent on the weekend- one of the biggest holy days of the year- obviously an excuse to get pissed. The river road was blocked off every evening last week, and traders set up their stalls- metres and metres of crap. There was even a ferris wheel- although it wasn’t mechanised- some poor dudes had to churn it round by hand!
There was also the annual boat-racing festival- something that many people spend months training for, including some of our crew, for the foreign women’s team. Unfortunately, most people get too drunk to actually pay attention, and it’s not like there’s even a schedule or anything. In fact, the girl’s team were supposed to race at 8am, and ended up sitting in the boat for more than three hours, waiting. Lao style.
Regardless, it was a pretty great day. Our resident cover band, Uluvus, played at four separate venues, each show more shambolic than the last. Beer and food was passed and around and shared willy-nilly. The bad weather blown over by the typhoon in Vietnam last week had made everything all muddy- a bit like Woodstock!

One of my work colleagues rang to invite me to her house- immediately. Another Lao trait of giving no notice and making you feel guilty if you don’t go. But I never made it. To make up for it, I braved the driving rain on Monday to her house to share the leftovers.

Anyway, despite the frustration and the guilt, I will miss them but everyone keeps telling me I’ve done the right thing…

Dogs, gibbons and military coups...and no photos!

2006-09-28T11:28:00.000+10:00

All about Eve
Sophie’s sister Eve has been staying this week with her friend Yasmin. In the course of the dinner conversation on their first night, it transpired that Eve and I lived next door to each other for at least a year. Last year, in fact, on the city end of Napier St in Fitzroy. And not only were we living next door, but our rooms, both at the back, directly faced each other, and I saw her probably every second day. When I say saw, what I really mean is that a lot of the time, she would be naked or half-dressed, and I would turn away, irritable at having a nude stranger practically in my room.
Although I didn’t, of course, recognise her in person, as it were, I now remember a surprising number of things. She put her sneakers on the sill every morning and strung up her sports bra across the window. She had a red blanket. She sometimes had a boy in her bed, although I could only ever see feet.
One of her housemates, the one in the bottom front room, was always there, in the front room every morning, on her laptop. Not, as it turned out, writing a book, as I always jealously speculated, but doing uni essays.
I also remember a particularly massive party there one night, to which we weren’t invited, and which kept me up. The next morning, sitting in the sun in the kitchen doorway, I heard her on the phone. “But would you say that was the best party, Patrick, would you say that?” Even in my morning grumpiness, I thought it was funny, and wished I had just gatecrashed.
And now here she was, in our house in Vientiane, Laos, of all places, the same husky voice, the same face (and of course) body, which I knew so well but actually never knew at all.
And of course she is just DYING of embarrassment over all this, especially as the most pervading memory she has of me is that I had an orange sarong on the window, and the fact that I was never, ever there, a thought that occurred to her every time she caught herself walking around naked. Of course, I had always turned away by then.
Thankfully, though, she was not the girl who had loud sex while playing Tori Amos (see one of my posts from last year). In fact, that was another girl, a drama student who lived downstairs.

Melbs
Do I even need to point out what a small bloody world it is? It all got me thinking about Melbourne, more than usual, and about how lonely I was there, in retrospect- single, eating alone, living with strangers. I make it sound more desperate than it really was, but life is just so different now.
I’ve said this a million times before, and I’ll say it again: moving to Vientiane was a thousand times easier than moving to Melbourne.

Jumping ship
I had such a crap week that on Friday, I took the day off and skipped town, catching a songteow 40 minutes out of town to the Vaysana Resort in Ban Keun.
Really, it was the best thing I could have done. We lay by the pool facing the river for literally hours, just reading and, as Eve put it, “picking up some colour”.
It also occurred to us to wonder if we would be lying side-by-side reading if we were boys. We doubted it, somehow.
Anyway, “colour” indeed. I really overdid it in my quest for brown legs. I’m bright red all over, and in grave pain. I don’t expect any of you to have any sympathy, but it really does kill.

Hot and steamy
My delicate lobster legs have meant I have had to forego the sauna this week- a real shame. It’s my latest discovery, even though herbal saunas are a pretty regular part of life here. Ladies and gents alike strip off, put on a sarong and sit in the steam for many minutes at a time.
I just love it. I love sitting still and watching beads of perspiration pop out on my arms. I love feeling like all the crap is being steamed out of my system. I like getting all dehydrated and replenishing with hot tea. I love coming out and the air feeling so cool, even though it’s never cool here.
It’s the best cure for a hangover.

The 'necessary evil'
So anyway, it was a pretty big week last week, not least because of the coup.
It came at a bad time, as most people from my intake were due to go back to Australia, and many people, not including me, were planning a Bangkok shopping extravaganza on the weekend, which had to be cancelled.
Amusingly, many Lao people have been scoffing at the whole thing. We’re supposed to be 20 years behind them, they say, and yet look at us! There’s peace here, no need for tanks in the streets or military intervention. It’s backward, they say, and a bit pathetic.
AT LEAST THEY’RE DOING SOMETHING!!! I feel like screaming back. At least people there are not being forced into apathy and submission, but rather finding practical, if extreme, solutions to the all-round dissatisfaction pervading society.
But no, I would never say that, for fear of getting into another minor argument with someone, which always ends pretty fast when I realise how blinkered those in power are.

Snoopy
The other night, we were awoken by a crashing sound followed by the most tremendous shrieking. I looked out the window and saw that Snoopy, the landlady’s dog next door, had jumped the fence and landed on our washing line. He was completely stuck. It really must have hurt, to land on that piece of wire.
Tom hates that dog, on the basis that when he and Kate first moved into this house, the dog was on Death’s Door and could hardly even wag his tail.
But he’s better now, and a good protector, even if the washing line does serve him right because he has this strange habit of walking up and down the top of the narrow wall each night. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
I wish I’d managed to get a photo that night. He was flailing around and screaming like a girl, but he stopped when he heard us come rounding the corner of the house, and when we arrived on the scene, he was trying to look as dignified and nonchalant as he could, given that his hind legs were strung up on a piece of wire.
Stupid dog. Sophie went round a couple of days later to ask if we could get our washing line fixed, and was met with a knowing, weary nod.
Anyway, it brought to mind our friend Alex, who has been living up in the northern province of Luang Namtha, and loves animals a great deal. At one stage, one of his neighbours acquired a dog, which Alex befriended, and was gratified when other villages started to treat it like a pet as well. The Lao don’t really treat dogs as pets the way we do. Anyway, the dog sort of became part of the family. Then Alex went away for a couple of weeks, and when he came back, the dog had gone. “Where’s the dog?” he asked the owner. “Oh, we ate him the other night,” the owner replied.
Now, we’ve had many discussions about this, in the context of vegetarianism, and in theory, it seems silly to be grossed out by this. Cow, chicken, dog, what diff?
There is a difference, but it’s difficult to pin down what it is.
Anyway, needless to say, I dreamed of dogs after we freed Snoopy ('We saved his life!' said Sophie with a more than a touch of pride). Dreaming of animals is supposed to be good luck, and you're supposed to then go out and buy a lottery ticket.

Monkeys
Speaking of animals, every morning, around 8am, we hear a noise from over at the former President’s compound. It sounds like a house alarm. Sophie always assumed it was the guards diligently checking to make sure the alarm worked every morning. Mean little me always assumed that the guards were accidentally setting it off every morning. Anyway, we had Alex staying with us last week who finally explained what the noise was.
It’s gibbons. Caged gibbons.
Not, as it turns out, a house alarm.

Staying in touch
This is currently my favourite website. I find it comforting, for some reason, to find that so many people are crazy and stupid and obsessed with small things and have filthy mouths and talk about sex a lot.
Also, a friend sent me this link a few weeks ago, which made me laugh, and wonder whether the Prime Minister actually ever does read public submissions, and what he thinks when he sees something like this. I mean, he must agree, surely. He must just thank his lucky stars that most of the population is too dumb, or apathetic, to realise how obvious it all is.
Also, Calvin Trillon, yay! This is his latest piece in last week's New Yorker. So inspiring- makes me realise that almost anything is worth writing about, given the right touch
Get into it...

Hola, khoy llamo xeu Sally

2006-09-18T22:23:00.000+10:00

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!

"Not crazy...diligent."

2006-09-09T16:57:00.000+10:00

That's what The Island said to me other morning when I suggested he was crazy for going to work so early.

Surprise!
It’s me again! I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf and post something every week, so it doesn’t into such a chore- something that sits on my To-Do list for weeks on end, along with “Plan finances, read Katherine Graham’s Personal History, learn to speak Lao better”.
I think because my posts are so disjointed, I give a false impression of life here- that it seems to just swing between messy drunk expat parties and workday frustration. There’s plenty more in between, obviously, so maybe if I post more, I can more accurately record the ebb and flow of this fascinating life I lead.
Shit, other people do it and their lives are way more mundane.

Cocka-doodle-fuckoff
First thing’s first: to the left is a photo of a rooster. It looks very similar to the one that wakes me up every morning, and quite often several times throughout the night, with its psychotic crowing.
It’s like a sick joke- I live in a household of the kind of people who can close their eyes and fall into a deep sleep the second their head hits the pillow. I am not one of those people; among the various traits I have inherited from my father- along with his nose, his tendency to frown when concentrating, and his predisposition to worry about things which, in the middle of the night, a clearly beyond his control (but not, of course, his artistic abilities, another sick joke)- is of course terrible sleeping patterns. I’m what he describes as a ‘fragile sleeper’. I have to read before I turn out the light, I take ages to nod off, I wake up frequently during the night, and I rarely get up in the morning feeling like I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
So isn’t it hilarious that I’ve got my very own rooster to enhance my problem, and one that doesn’t even sound like a bird, but more like some kind of grotesque bird/dog hybrid.
4000 Islands tells me that in the provinces, the really rural, poor parts of the country, where no one has a clock to tell the time, roosters perform that function. Because I’m sure everyone really needs to know that it is 3am, 4am, 5am, and then the passing of every five minutes thereafter.
Anyway, I’ve posted this photo, which I actually took in Luang Prabang, in an effort to dispel the notion anyone might have that roosters are a charming feature of rural life.
They’re not. They’re pure evil. Just look at those beady eyes and withered claws.

Imagine all the people
Here’s something weird that I’d bet you’d never considered: explaining the Beatles to someone who has no idea who they are.
Having dinner a few weeks ago with the Island and my parents at a moderately posh French restaurant in town, an old favourite came on- Let It Be, I think it was. Anyway, Island had never heard of them. Turns out the cool t-shirt I bought for him in Thailand with a line drawing of the fab-four in their hippy days across the front- was just that: a cool t-shirt and nothing more.
We really had to start from the beginning- they started in the ‘60s, they had the same haircuts and wore the same clothes and made girls scream- to the middle years: long hair, lots of drugs, Yellow Submarine and Sergeant Pepper- to the later years: Yoko Ono, the band’s split- to what happened after: one was shot dead by a crazy man for no reason outside his apartment in New York, one was a narrator for a kid’s show about a train called Thomas, one made more music, died of cancer not long ago, one made very bad music with his wife who also died of cancer not long ago- to the latter years: then he married a lady with one leg, and now they are divorcing and hate each other very much.
The narrative really spiralled out of control- there was a lot of ground to cover, and the Island’s eyes had glazed over by the time John Lennon was shot.
These kids have just missed out on so much…

Sa-er
This morning I had the hiccups, or ‘sa-er’ in Lao. I get them quite a lot here. The Island is convinced that his grandmother’s failsafe method is just that: failsafe. [His grandmother is very old and blind- her eyeballs are white and completely clouded over. Every time we visit, she asks the Island to make sure I know that she’s blind.]
Her method involves taking nine (9) sips of water quickly without breathing in between.
What crapola, I always tell him. Bor maen, it’s not true, it doesn’t work, I scoff.
What I will never, ever tell him is that it does work, every time.

The life of an expat
Ok, on that I’m off to the Australia Club to lounge by the pool and start reading Katherine Graham’s Personal History. And, as my friend Chris puts it, ‘watch the peasants farm while I sip G&T’.
The Australia club is located on the banks of the Mekong, and has a smashing pool. And, most charmingly of all, in the strip of land between the pool and the Mekong are several market gardens. You know, crops and things. So you literally can sit by the pool sipping cocktails while the locals do things that are actually useful.
It’s a great place to recover from a hangover, which I course I have.
As an aside, last Sunday, also recovering from a particularly rageful hangover, sifting through the weird and varied reading matter on offer at the Aus club, I came across an old New Yorker- always a pleasure- and inside was a memoir written by awesome American journo Calvin Trillin, about his wife, Alice, who died in 2001.
It was so beautifully written, and so moving, and so inspiring. I am only now learning to accept that to be a writer, you don’t have to be able to write fiction, which has always been my weak point. I wanted to write something while I was over here, and have been racking my brains trying to come up with a good story- not a good sign. But Calvin and Alice were both writers of mainly non-fiction stuff- and so, so good at it.
Time to get cracking.

P.S. Did everyone notice how tall and amazon-like I appear in the photo in the previous post? I know, I’m loving it- I’m usually a midgey, but I tower over many people here!
Even 4000 Islands is only about an inch taller than me.

Honey, honey, it's her!

2006-09-06T22:41:00.000+10:00

Last night we played cards at our landlady’s house next door, until 11pm. For the past five days, their front yard has been filled with people and laughter and music. The driveway is lined with incredibly bright fluorescent lights and people are coming and going all day long.
It wasn’t until we saw the big wedding cake of a coffin being carried out on the back of a truck on Sunday that we realised it was a funeral.
No matter how many times I hear it, I forget that death here is always associated with celebrations- togetherness and new beginnings.
Late on Sunday night, Kate and I were peering out of the kitchen window into their backyard, at the boys playing cards, trying to spot a familiar face, when we realised the shaved head with his back to us was Tom, the astonishingly handsome older son, whose hair I have always admired- one of those cool quiffy ‘dos. Gone. The younger son had done the same thing. This meant a close family member had died- all the male relatives shave their heads when that happens.
We went over straight away- Tom was playing cards with his friends, drinking copious amounts of Pepsi and watching DVDs on the TV set up in the yard. He hadn’t slept for two nights, he told, as his role was to keep vigil over the coffin, and make sure the incense never burned out. It was his uncle who had died- a 38-year-old with a wife and baby adopted just two days before his death- from a nasty case of alcoholism.
So this post is dedicated, firstly, to Tom next door, who has lost his hair and hasn’t slept in four nights. He has also lost a lot of money playing cards.

Okay, okay, I'll do it
This post is also dedicated to Michel and Christine, the French-Canadian couple who accosted me at Sengdara yesterday and basically shamed me into updating this blog quick-smart.
It seems that, six weeks ago, when they were getting ready to move here, the only ‘useful’ material about Vientiane that turned up on their Google searches was yours truly- me and my blog. So helpful, they said, and we worried about you when you had your fall.
They even saw me on the street not long ago and debated whether or not to approach me.
I’m a celebrity! Hilarious. Also, I must look the same as that silly photo I’ve put up on the front page- the one where I discover the camera in my phone for the first time.
Mortifying.

I’m writing this post from the office today, for the simple reason that I can’t seem to achieve anything when I’m at home. There’s always too much going on.
For one thing, I spend my precious hours before work in exactly the same way I have for years: going to the gym, drinking coffee, reading the news. It’s amazing, I just haven’t changed a bit.
And really, as if I could possibly come home and go straight to my laptop and start talking about my day, which has usually been tiresome enough. AS IF I’m not going to do all sorts of other things, like eat dinner, go to a bar, watch DVDs or read.
Basically, what I’m saying is that the reason I haven’t updated in a couple of months is because life is just falling around too fast to gather it all up, like a box of paperclips, the contents of which you’ll find lodged in the carpet or between the floorboards for weeks to come.
So I’ll just gather up a few paperclips for you.

I’ve finished work early today, as I have every day in the past week. I decided that if I can’t teach the staff a single thing, the least I can make them do is write a story each before lunch. Innovative, no? Everyone seems to be happier, although I’m not sure about the new desk arrangements. We are all facing each other at the moment, which means I have to keep my facial expressions under control- not easy when I come across sentences like this:

“Furthermore two sides have exchanged the range issue concerning about the jointly of establishing the various festivals such as the advertisement to disseminate the natural and historical tourism sites of two nations for visitor from domestic and foreign countries.”

Anyway, this new ‘actual work before lunch’ policy came about during a meeting last Tuesday morning. I learnt early on that it is considered offensive and sloppy not to be speak when asked during a meeting, never mind that the meetings are almost always in Lao, and I can’t understand a single word. Or that when it is my turn to speak, I literally say the same thing every time.
But I have learnt, also, that this is the Lao way. That it is perfectly natural to have to tell people the same thing day in day out, to no effect. Make sure you use a person’s surname. Explain an abbreviation the first time around. Convert money into US dollars. Simple things. Easy things. Aren’t they tired of my voice saying the same thing, over and over again?
Apparently not.

[Here’s another good example of the strange way people have here of processing information.
At least a dozen times a day, the phone in my office rings. I can’t answer it because my Lao isn’t good enough, so usually someone else saunters over to pick it up. Here is exactly what happens each time: the phone will ring three times, and then stop. The person moving to answer it will reach the phone about half a second after the last ring. The phone falls silent. The person frowns, looks around, elects to pick up the phone. “’allo? ‘allo? ‘allo?” they will say, puzzled but unfussed. Then they will replace the phone in the receiver and announce, to nobody in particular “I think it’s fax”.
Yes, but you see, exactly. Because the phone is also a fax machine. And the fax picks up after three rings. Always.
ALWAYS you morons!! If you don’t answer before the third ring, it will switch over! It happens at least 12 times a day! Why can’t you get used to this? We never even get faxes anymore! Just emails! Don’t you think that’s weird? DON’T YOU???]

So now, it’s Sally’s turn to speak. Again. To tell them again.
Not about the phone. I tried that, and just couldn’t bring myself to say it again.

The worst of the lot
A woman from the Indochina Memorial Media Foundation in Bangkok named Sarah McLean contacted me last week. Among other things, the organisation runs a training course each year, and she was concerned that none of the KPL journos are ever successful in their applications. She said they know nothing and their English is crap.
I met with her at a coffee shop to talk about what I’m doing, and she brought me a copy of the IMMF training manual. A really good, simple, comprehensive, well-written book that I wish I’d read some time ago, or at least when I first arrived here. I told her this, and she was puzzled. The editor of KPL has a copy, she said, and he has completed the training course.
She also told me that about three years ago, the American Embassy organised to have the book translated into Lao, and planned to launch it to coincide with the opening of the new America Centre in Vientiane. It was all printed and ready to go, but the Ministry of Information and Culture got wind of it and stopped the launch, as the Embassy had failed to get a licence to translate the book into Lao.
Copies of the book have been sitting in boxes at the America Centre ever since, and no one seems remotely concerned about it, least of all my editor.

I asked him why he had never given me the manual. It’s a really useful resource, I said, written specifically for Asian journalists. I could have really used it to help your staff.
Well, it’s at home, he said, with all my other journalism textbooks and training resources from the dozens of workshops and courses I have done all over the world.
Well, why don’t you bring all these books into the office for the other journalists to use? I asked.
Oh, no, they would pick them up and read them and use them, he said.

It’s simple: knowledge here is power, and something you don’t ever share. You just rack up your ‘qualifications’ so as to get a promotion, while exploiting the aid programs of countries like Australia to bring in people like me to deal with the mess.

Anyway, that’s just a hint of what I’m dealing with.
I admit to feeling very sheepish after speaking with this woman, and not just because she reminded me heaps of Penelope Keith from The Good Life. She told me all sorts of things about Vientiane that I should have found out myself by now, had I not been so consumed with frustration and panic that my work is going nowhere.
She also assured me that Laos is by far the worst of the lot when it comes to apathy and persistent, ingrained self-censorship. In Burma, for example, not only are the people educated of mind and fiery of spirit, but journalists actively fight censorship every day. They write, and then get censored.
Here, no one seems aware that journalism has any role beyond reprinting the government’s propaganda. Or rather, they see no point in trying to do it any other way.

It’s things like this that just make the frustration flare up, like a nasty infection.

Most of the time, I feel happy and privileged to be living in this culture, to have adjusted to it as well as I can. My language is picking up, and I’m starting to understand the way people think. I love our neighbours and their crappy taste in music. I love seeing monks everywhere, and that everyone, even young people, have Buddhist philosophies ingrained in them (see Tom-Next-Door, above). I love the fact that we called the kitchen gas supplier at 8pm the other night and he came straight over with a refill. And that when I ran out of petrol on the way to work this morning, the guy at the nearest mechanic siphoned some petrol out of his own bike for me so I wouldn’t have to push my bike to the nearest station.

But putting it all into a political and developmental context is when it all becomes bitter. And people like my editor who should know better, criticise me for not understanding the benefits of the communist political system, accusing me of ignoring the fact that the country is at peace, and the newspapers are not filled with people complaining about their government, the way they are in Australia.
It’s all too complex.

So anyway, apart from actual work, things are pretty good. Like a real Vientiane lady, I’m wearing my sinhs and clacky kitten heels ($3.50 from Lao ITECC, that bastion of glittering commerce) to work every day.
I’m going out too much and spending too much money. It poured with rain this afternoon and flooded the road outside work, right up to the front door.
Tonight, I’m enjoying a relatively low-profile evening after a week or two of constant socialising. People are coming and going, celebrating birthdays, moving house. New bands are playing. For the first time in my life, I am rarely bored.
The trouble is, the very nature of place like Vientiane very almost defeats the purpose of going out in the first place. I remember, back in Melbs, which seems so long ago now, I used to go out usually to a) meet new people, or b) catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in a while. Both are rarely possible here. Sophie says this must be what it’s like to live in a country town. And, like Tom said, we go to parties where the same food is served up, the same band plays, and you leave at the same time as the last one. It’s settled: we have officially become Lao.

I do get sad about people leaving, but you get used to that as well. Everything is so small and sped up here, it’s easy to form intense friendships, lasting several months, where you spend inordinate amounts of time with the same few people. Then suddenly, one or two or all of them are gone.

I’m gonna have to get used to it, because I’ve just signed on to stay another year. I’m defecting to the Other Paper across the street, and I no longer feel guilty about it, even. The project is for two years, ostensibly, but god knows how long I’ll *actually* last.

Jobs keep coming up, too- English-speaking journos are so hot right now. In Asia, that is. In Melbourne I just didn’t cut it. But, fun and love and parties aside, I really do feel like giving it another shot. I’m only just getting used to the language, and I think I’ll be more productive across the road. I just have a feeling this is where it’s meant to be for me, right now.

I didn’t feel like that by the time I left Canberra, nor when I left Melbourne at the end of last year. I felt I was being pushed out. Here, I feel compelled to stay awhile.

The Holiday

2006-09-06T12:40:00.000+10:00

My parents appeared, magically and surreally, in Vientiane last month, and stayed for three weeks- quite a long time, actually. We went on an odyssey, up north and down south, to see all the things I've been wanting to see since I arrived.

A new acquaintance was surprised recently by my blunt admission that I have never and will never move across any vast distances carrying a backpack- on my back! Like, no way. It’s so heavy, and uncomfortable, and what about when it’s hot and I’m wearing a singlet and the backpack straps rub uncomfortably?
And what if I need something that’s right on the bottom of the pack? What, I have to unpack it then? What a drag!
It’s just not going to happen.
And furthermore, it’s not like I’m the only person in the world to admit this.
And also, why is it that so many backpackers dress so badly and seem to have forsaken showers in the name of- what? Enlightenment?

Now, you won’t see MY parents carrying around backpacks. Oh no- it’s all cocktails before dinner, hired drivers and nice hotels. With my own room, too. My parents were every bit as averse to sharing a room with me as I was with them- hooray!

Giving alms
Mum was completely entranced when she woke up early one morning in time to witness the monks taking alms from the ladies on the street. It’s true, it is quite an enchantment the first time you see it. Older ladies (and sometimes men) kneel on the road with their sticky rice baskets and bowls of soup, and a row of monks file past, their bare feet padding silently on the pavement. Occasionally they will chant, if one of the ladies needs a blessing, but usually the whole thing is completely silent. This happens all over the country every morning, including outside our house. [It even shows up quite regularly as a plot device on the Thai soap operas.] The other morning, Kate and I left the house for an early-morning walk, and busted one of the young novices slouching for a chat with one of the ladies. He straightened up and began chanting as soon as he saw us.

Bombsites
Xienghouang province was good, but the town of Phonesavanh is a dive. But it is still half-built, and it did rain a lot.
We hired a driver to take us there through the mountains. On the way we stopped for lunch and a group of very young, very poor children hovered shyly. One of them couldn’t have been more than 8, and was carrying an infant in a sling on his hip. He flinched when I tried to speak to him- it took me a while to work out that he was Hmong and didn’t speak Lao. I bought him a packet of chips, which he snatched and ran off. But he came back a few minutes later, and I realised he didn’t know how to open them.

This is the most heavily-bombed area of Laos. While Mum was busy wondering about women who weave, and where the monks get their food (I told her it was the ladies on the street, and she didn’t believe me until a monk actually told her), Dad was completely caught up by all the war history everywhere we looked. Empty bombshells propping up houses or used as flowerpots. A guy making spoons out of discarded casings. Bullet holes and massive bomb craters in the Plain of Jars. Lots of them are fishponds now.

I was really creeped out by the Hmong villagers, who live in windowless wooden houses. They are animists, and believe in different spirits. Our tour guide took us to one of the villages, one of the poorest, quietest, strangest places I’ve ever seen. The Hmong dress differently, have a different language, and live in darkness. They have fires inside their houses, which smokes their food and blackens the walls. They also grow opium and pot in vast quantities.

Our guide sure came up with the goods, telling us all about the CIA and the Secret War, and about Madeleine Colani, the French archaeologist who spent three years studying the Plain of Jars in the 1930s. She walked there from Vietnam, with the help of 50 slaves a day, who kept running away. He also showed us how to distinguish between the different ethnic groups. The Lao carry their goods across their shoulders on a stick. The Kamu hang baskets from a strap on their heads. The Hmong have bamboo backpacks.

Down south
Paxse: I dig it. A city on the brink- you heard it here first. Good markets, nice riverside restaurants. Plus, I really like the Pakxe Hotel, where we ended up staying for four nights. Large and stately- I’ve always had a thing for faded glory: there are four clocks in the lobby, showing the time in London, New York, Tokyo and Pakxe. I found this touching.

Wat Phou, Siphandone, Boliven Plateau, the coffee plantations, ancient temples, rain. And back to the Pakxe Hotel each night. It was ace. Our tour guide spoke no English, giving me a chance to really put my lame Lao to the test. I didn’t fail. In fact, I’d give myself a Credit, true to form. Dad drew a picture of the guide near the Boliven Plateau, and he was so pleased he didn’t know what to say.

We visited more villages- completely different to those we saw up north. Here, the Katung arrange their houses in a rough circle, with a raised hut in the centre for the sacrificial killing of a buffalo each year- also not Buddhist.

Majestic, magnificent, breathtaking, etc etc etc
We flew to Siem Reap in Cambodia for three days, and were shocked by the rampant tourism- hundreds of massive, MASSIVE hotels in a relatively small city. And children everywhere with frightenly good English demanding that tourists buy their postcards and bracelets.
I’m not going to go into describing Angkor Wat and its surrounds. Any good guidebook will describe it well enough, and it meets all expectations. Mum lucked out with the new Aussie-run guesthouse she chose over the Internet. The owners of the Villa Siem Reap (it's purple!), Fiona and Anthony, know exactly how to deal with people like us who are only in town for a couple of days and don’t know where to start. They give you a driver, a guide and a packed lunch, and send you off with strict instructions.
They advised us to get to a certain temple by 6am the next morning, so as to avoid the tourist hoards. But we weren’t too early for an upscale fashion shoot, featuring one of the oddest-looking woman I’ve ever seen in the flesh- a model, of course. Really, it did look strange.
Our guide, as a child in the '70s, had been forced into hard labour by the Khmer Rouge, away from his family in the jungle. He told us all about it. In fact, he couldn't talking about it, and inserted side stories into all his commentary on the ruins we were looking at.
He said that his children don't believe what he tells them about what the Khmer Rouge did. He said he remembers it like it was last week. I think he was worried that if he didn't talk about it to everyone he met, everyone would forget what had happened, especially when surrounded by all that rampant commercialism and all those five-star hotels.

I had forgotten what it was like to me in a major tourist destination, and it was pretty gruesome. It wasn’t even the high season, but there were so many people. And so many idiot-looking girls in mini-skirts and heels, clambering over the ruins like tools. Can you tell me why they would do this? I mean, I know I'm not always the most practical person when it comes to clothes- I don't, for example, own anything made of polar-fleece- but there are signs, in several languages, at the main gates to Angkor Wat advising people that bare shoulders and knees are inappropriate for what is clearly a sacred site. And yet there were girls in hotpants. I blame that slapper Victoria Beckham for getting 'snapped' by the paparrazzi walking around in hotpants on the street.

Thanks, parentals
Anyway, the holiday was ace, and much needed, and renewed my love of Laos, which had been flagging somewhat. It’s always good to see something you’re used to through new eyes, and mum and dad were in fine form. Mum found out lots more about people than I usually do- because she does love to bond. Dad grappled with the currency, and took some great photos. Most of these are his.

Love in Vientiane...and other stories

2006-06-30T21:19:00.000+10:00

Ok, it’s time to reclaim my sense of discipline. Sure, I might spend all day in front of a computer, in conditions that hardly inspire me to keep working when I get home. But that’s nothing compared to the tyranny of…my conscience.

Cracking up
I’ve been going through a rough patch. Coming up to the six-month mark, and I’ve finally cracked the shits. I’m losing patience and have stopped finding things funny in the office, a state of affairs that spells doom for me.
I also haven’t had a holiday yet, which is ridiculous. I was more or less ordered by my supervisor to take the day off today. But my filthy mood has been so palpable in the office that when I said I wouldn’t be coming in today, the office heart skipped a beat and the editor looked at me with an expression of resignation. “Will you ever come back?” he asked, probably rhetorically.

I’ll go back, but to a lost cause.
My office is basically a microcosm of Lao society. Filled with lovely and generous people, but under-resourced, dysfunctional, governed by misguided communist philosophies, too heavily reliant on foreign aid and basically just steeped in incompetence. Every single day, I marvel at the notion that someone must have thought this or that innovation was a good idea.
I also tear my hair out day after day trying to explain the concept of an acronym, the difference between a comma and a point in numbers, and the reason why its important to spell someone’s name, not only correctly, but also consistently, the same way in each paragraph.
But there’s no point in getting frustrated, is there?
I am sponsoring 4,000 Islands at an English college. He had a test the other day on countries and capital cities and languages, and got almost every single answer wrong, as did everyone in the class.
Puzzled as to how he could not know the capital of Italy, Kate and I drilled poor 4000 Islands the other night about what the hell he actually learned in school. What he told us horrified us, frankly, but explained a lot. Lao History (there was a war, but then the country became free. Today we are On The Road to Socialism), Lao Geography (North, South, Mountains, plains, wet and dry seasons etc), the Lao alphabet, 2 weeks of English, and basic physics and chemistry. There might as well not be any other country, culture or language.
I can't help wondering how much worse it was here before television and the Internet came along.

I feel like I’ve lost heart. So forgive me if the all round ‘tone’ of this blog has suddenly shifted, and is no longer chirpy and naïve and fun-loving as it was when I first arrived here.
But still, a thousand things keep happening, almost every day, that would be perfect for this blog, and I’ve just been letting them go by, unrecorded. It’s a travesty, a crime.
I’ll just have to do it in snapshot form, again.

Ashes to ashes, rocket fuse to coffin doused in petrol
I went to a cremation the other day- my first.
The big wedding cake coffin was paraded through the streets behind a long procession of monks and family members dressed in white. It was then set down in the grounds of a temple and painstakingly dismantled, and the lid was wrenched open so that the family could gather round to check that the deceased (a lady of 90) was, in fact, dead. They even poured coconut water on her face to make sure. Some of them sobbed in despair- dead, even after three days in there!
Then the whole thing was put back together and the long funeral rites were chanted. During this time I, along with my office and several dozen other guests, sat around chatting, drinking cold beverages from an ice chest.
Then, the piece de resistance: the coffin was doused in petrol, and the dead lady’s things were placed all around it. A long wire was attached to the top of the coffin, a rocket fuse was lit with sailed through the air and hit the coffin with a massive explosion, setting off all the fireworks and sparklers that had been placed earlier on it earlier.
The whole thing just really freaked me out, but I was reassured that an identical procedure is carried out at each and every funeral. Young or old- the coconut water is poured, the fireworks go off, and everyone leaves as quickly as possible to escape the smell of burning flesh.

Sweet communism
Not only are funerals all identical, like weddings, bacis and other rituals, but also every one of them is meticulously documented through photographs and video footage.
Someone put a slideshow of this particular funeral on one of the computers at work. As I watched, repulsed, as the images flashed up of the coffin lid being ripped off, and a poor young monk captured reeling in horror with his hands over his face at the sight of the body, I wondered aloud why the hell you would want to photograph such an event.
No one understands why we don’t document funerals in a similar way in Australia. “How else will you remember?” they asked me.
Well, I guess because every one is different. People speak, say things about the person who has died. Maybe the coffin is pine, or oak. Some people are buried. Some funerals, like my grandfather’s in 1998, are completely non-religious.
Here, there is no concept whatsoever of individuality. No question of a bride choosing a standout dress, or a party being an innovation. No, every dress is the same, every coffin a carbon copy of the next, every painfully loud songlist a standard.
And it’s not in the Lao character to question why this might be.
I blame communism, obviously
So this post is also dedicated to the newly ‘elected’ President of Laos, Mr Choummaly Saysone, whose god forsaken name I find myself typing and retyping about 50 times a day, at least.
Thankyou, Mr Choummaly, for contributing to this never-ending cycle of sameness. It means, basically, that I don’t need to go to any more weddings, funerals, death offerings or bacis. Been there, done that. So thanks, I guess.
Except, the fireworks on the coffin were kind of cool.

‘Threatened Species’
Anyway, speaking of standout parties, we had a cracking one at our house not long after my last post. Everyone was there, and everyone agreed it was the best party ever, which is ridiculous- we didn’t even have a jumping castle! We did, however, have catering, live music and 20 crates of beer. And at least 100 people, Lao and foreigners. And security. And, god help us, a theme.
The theme was “Threatened Species”. Sophie put her hair in curlers and was a housewife. Kate put gold foil on her front tooth and was Sporty Spice. Tom put a green bucket with the bottom cut off around his neck, and was an opium poppy. I scrawled ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ on a t-shirt and was Britpop. 4,000 Islands drew the Lao letter ‘R’ on his t-shirt- a letter than was banned after the Revolution, but is slowly making its way back into common parlance. Paris Hilton was there, as was Courtney Love, Keith Richards, Whitney Houston, a straight cowboy and an Al Quaeda terrorist.
The village chief had warned, in the days leading up to it, that the party had to be over by 11.30pm. By 11pm, the President’s guards, who we had paid $10 to watch the motorbikes, we hovering nervously at the gates. Just five more minutes, we kept saying, thrusting bottles of beer at them willy nilly. By midnight, they’d had enough beer. “Eem laew,” they said, significantly. "We're full."
“Five more…dollars?” we begged, passing over three more beers. Suddenly they weren’t so full.
Anyway, the party still ended abruptly.
The whole thing cost just under $400. And the next day, we got our maid to come and clean up.
Plus, the rains have started. I think we had the last outdoor party of the season. Ha!

The Island
One of the most pressing questions I have been asked in the past couple of months is what I call 4,000 Islands for short. The answer to that is…The Island. Sounds enigmatic, no? When really it’s just because the derivative of most Lao names comes from the last syllable.
Another particularly pressing question was put to me just last week by The Island’s 6-year old nephew, Christmas. (Because he was born on Christmas Day, silly!)
“Do you think Ronaldino is ugly?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Very ugly indeed.”
“And how about David Beckham- is he handsome?”
“Yes, although less and less so.”
“But he can still play, no?”
“Yes. Yes he can.”
A very serious boy, that Christmas, but I feel I bonded with him at that moment. I have also bonded with the Island’s sisters, who love to sit and compare skin tones with me.

"On Monday Night it became apparent why call soccer 'The World Game', because it, like the world, is cruel and unfair, with the end often determinede by a terrible mistake."
That's from an email sent around last Tuesday morning by James, a fellow youth ambassador who, during his quiet moments at work, has been running an elaborate World Cup tipping competition.
You might also have guessed that the Lao are completely obsessed with the Cup. Most barrack for Brazil, and some for ‘Yerrman’ (Germany). No one cares about Australia in the least.
I’ve been getting quite down with the Cup this year, and I’ve been especially enjoying the commentary in the Guardian, especially the daily G2 segment called “The Ethical World Cup”, which tells you who to barrack for based on ethics and your own conscience- eg Italy, not Aus, as Italy recently ousted its conservative redneck government, while Australia has yet to do so.
I especially enjoyed this gem.

Down with royalists
What I haven't been enjoying of late is that newspaper I once loved so much, The Bangkok Post, which gets a very dishonourable mention this time because of its lame-arse pandering to the royal family over the past month. It’s something like the 60th anniversary of the King of Thailand’s ascendancy to the throne, and not a day has gone by without some pathetic story about how much the country loves the king. “I love the King t-shirts a sellout! Crowds flock to buy photos of the jubilee!”
I thought the BP would be more cynical, for some reason.

Break it down
On a lighter note, we went to a breakdancing competition recently. The kids were great! Many were asking where the hell Lao kids learn to breakdance. We have the answer: at the bottom of our street every evening. On the hard, bare road with the their hard, bare hands.

Revlon True Colour
I forgot to mention, in my list of Highly Visible Products last time, Revlon. There are several entire shops devoted to Revlon here, which has been ‘developing its products for the Asian market’. Which means only one thing, of course: bleach.
Also: dentists. There are SO MANY dentists in Vientiane, all signified by a sign bearing a great big comical tooth, with a red bit in the middle. One on every street, I swear. Ironic, really, because there is absolutely no way IN HELL that I would ever set foot inside a dentist’s surgery in Laos.
Same goes for hospitals, although I did visit one recently. Just when I thought nothing more could shock me here…
I know health care here is substandard, that doctors are not properly trained, that hygiene is not a priority. Why else would we all have been issued with our own set of syringes upon signing our AYAD contracts in Canberra last September?
I know all that. It’s just that I thought a hospital would at least have fans, sheets on the beds, doctors and nurses walking around, water coolers, even, you know, natural light?
No. The orphanage in Annie was the first thing that came into my mind. That and the fact that a few dozen sick, emaciated eyes were staring at me curiously, and there didn’t seem to be any doctors anywhere.

Ok, that's it. I'll try to update more regularly, although at this rate it could all depend on how many more times I have a mental collapse and take a day off.

What Sarrie is reading and listening to at this moment

2006-06-30T20:11:00.000+10:00

This post is dedicated to the writer Patricia Highsmith, in whose biography, Beautiful Shadow- A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson, I am currently immersed. My friend Annie gave it to me two Christmases ago, and I’ve only just got around to reading it.
There’s nothing I love more than a good biography, especially one about a writer. PH has a special place in my heart, because I wrote my honours thesis on her in 2001. Or rather, on a series of films based on her work. Back then, she had only been dead for six years, and there wasn’t much written about her, which made discussing her work both difficult and strangely liberating.
There was one copy of a book about her written work, strangely enough, in the military library at Duntroon in Canberra. Obviously, I did not hold a membership in this library, so I spent many an afternoon there, pouring over this book among the heavy tomes on warfare and, like, weaponry and stuff.
Anyway, it’s all coming back to me, reading this biography, which is only two years old. I’m actually terribly glad it had not been written while I was struggling through my thesis, because I would have just had to give up right there. The book is that good.
Plus, PH was one crazy messed-up lady. I would have felt pathetic and presumptuous, not to mention a little afraid, analysing her work.
As it was, the semester I spend writing that thesis remains one of my happiest academic memories. There were two albums I played over and over again in that time, as I was churning out 500 words a day. One of them was called A Camp, by Nina Persson, the lead singer of the band the Cardigans. I am listening to it right now to get me inspired.
PH was very disciplined when she was writing, which has inspired me in the past week. But she was also crazy.
Maybe that's what you need to be a writer- batshit crazy.
When she died in 1995, she left a vast archive of personal papers- diaries, letters, manuscripts- that nobody had ever seen before. She wrote all the time, everyday, stuff she never expected anyone to read, at least not while she was alive.
Maybe this is my problem- I haven’t kept a diary since I was a teenager, because I can’t bear to write stuff that no one will read. I write with someone looking over my shoulder constantly. I have a pretty organised mind- I no longer need to analyse myself on paper.
Whereas PH was constantly asking Who Am I? Her work was an existentialist dream of self-awareness and nihilism.
And while Who Am I? is a question is rarely feel the need to ask myself anymore, I recognised her themes pretty quickly, and wrote about her work in exactly those terms, and dammit, I got a High Distinction for my efforts.

4,000 Islands

2006-05-10T01:24:00.000+10:00

Wow, the pressure. Thanks Phor lae Mae (Mum and Dad) for telling all your mates about this blog. Now they all write and ask why I haven’t updated. And so do my friends. I just can’t handle it anymore. I’m fine everyone, I swear. Just fine.

Thanks, by the way, to all who wrote to me when they saw my poor bruised face below. I have recovered quite well, except for a small scar as though someone has buried their fingernail into my cheekbone during a particularly nasty catfight. Those bastards.

I suppose I’ve just been busy, which is why I haven’t updated in over a month- atrocious!
I have been here just over four months now, which is crazy. The three month mark was celebrated on my 27th birthday in April, by which time my scars had almost healed.

So I’m thinking of becoming a Buddhist…
I have a Lao boyfriend now, whose name is 4,000 Islands, and this post is dedicated to him. The rest is irrelevant- I only bring him up because people have been asking, and also because he relates to the story I am about to tell, so gather close everyone.

We visited his parents recently at their makeshift house under corrugated iron where their old house once stood. They tore it down then ran out of money- a classic Lao tale.
Anyway, his mother has been sick. "Unspecified abdominal problems", which doesn’t surprise me given she’s had eight kids. She has been to the doctor and to hospital, been given medication, and the pain hadn’t gone away. She was pale, losing weight and generally unwell.
On the night I went there, she and two of the daughters prepared a tray with soup, some of the grapes that I had brought, some sticky rice and a whole cooked chicken.
Then she and the father and some neighbours sat around with scarves or towels hanging over their left shoulders- a Buddhist custom- and began rocking and mumbling and chanting, and some of them took balls of rice and touched them on her neck and body, looking to the sky and chanting some more.
I asked 4000 Islands later what it was all about and he sighed and explained that his father had been to a witch doctor, who read some cards and announced that the mother’s dead father had asked for some chicken, which is what the chanting was all about.
I mean really, the woman probably needs a hysterectomy or something. I didn’t know what to make of it.
Anyway, I don’t want to bore you with my thoughts on all this, except to say we visited again a week later, and she was glowing with good health and was feeling much better.
Isn’t that annoying?
It’s quite annoying, actually, for an avowed atheist like me.
It means there might actually be something to this whole “faith” thing.

Spring clean, visit nine wats and beg your parents for forgiveness
Mind you, I shouldn’t talk, given how superstitious I’ve become in the past few months. There was the whole snake thing, and then my Lao teacher Phitsamai told me how a monk came to her in a dream and told her to buy a lottery ticket and 2 of the 3 numbers he told her turned out to be right.
A lot of it has to do with ‘cultural sensitivity’, and not wanting to ruin things by accident. So right from the start, I’ve found myself adhering to Buddhist custom to the very letter. We are told not to cut the baci strings off our wrists for at least three days after we receive them, and I never have, not once. I have bowed and prayed with everyone else at all the death-related ceremonies I’ve been to, and I was careful to take my boss seriously when a witch doctor told him his brother, who was on life support, had a 70 percent chance of survival, even though the doctors had said there was no hope. The brother died, but that’s not the point.
Kate and I have decided that this is the reason why things have gone so well for us both this year, which is why we celebrated Pi Mai- Lao New Year, a few weeks ago, again to the letter, which was actually kind of fun, although I have to say, there comes a time when, if you’ve seen one temple, you’ve seen them all.

“Wicked”
This post is also dedicated to all the backpacker tools swarming the streets of Luang Prabang over New Year.
Not long after I got back from Luang Prabang, I was going to tell you all about Pi Mai, and how everyone throws water on you everywhere you go, and how we climbed the 300 steps to Wat Phousi with hundreds of locals who left balls of rice and chocolate bars everywhere as offerings, and how the street kids just followed everyone and collected the chocolate bars as you put them down and then sold them at the bottom of the steps again at a profit, and then I realised I was sounding like my own worst enemy: the British backpacker.
So you know what? I’m just going to post a selection of photos, so that you can look at them and say “wicked” a lot, in your own time.
Honestly. So many things I love have been destroyed by the mutual love of fools: the Shins, Napoleon Dynamite, Pi Mai Lao.
Then again, I’m probably just miffed at feeling like a tourist in Laos, which of course I was up in LP. I kept wanting to explain to restaurant staff and even people on the street that no, in fact I was not a tourist, I LIVE HERE…

Anyway, about the photos. The Boys in Black were prowling the streets of Luang Prabang, and despite their age (young), I actually found them quite fearful.
There's also some from the Rocket Festival at a nearby village this week. All very phallic. Perhaps I'll describe it in a later post, although I fear it may be more of the "wicked" variety.

The Lao Soft Drink Company
This post will also be dedicated to the Lao Soft Drink Company, aka Pepsi.
It's funny, there are many random products that seem to have taken Lao by storm, for no apparent reason. The main ones I have noticed are:
-Ovaltine
-Strepsils
-Ponds facial care, although here most moisturisers, or “skin milk”, have bleach because “dark skin not beautiful”
-Streets Icecream
-Pepsi, which is a major sponsor of many many sporting events and community projects throughout the country.

Why, I wonder?

Ngam Lai
Now, I know that you will all be on my side when I insist that I am not being conceited when I tell you that I am actually considered quite beautiful here. There, I’ve said it for posterity, because I very much doubt I will ever be in a position to utter those words again.
I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about my hair (not black), eyes (also not black), skin (lately dangerously dark from the daed ork, or sunshine, but still relatively light) and figure (not emaciated) that makes the boys sit up and take notice. Honestly, it is absolutely stock standard for otherwise cool-as-ice boys to watch me as I go past and say “ngam lai’ to each other, which means “very beautiful”.
Mind you, I'm no Kate, who has pale skin, freckles and white-blond hair- she's practically a circus freak!
Some days it can get to you, being stared at openly wherever you go. But because the attention is rarely sleazy, the way it would be back home, it’s actually quite refreshing. Girls are just fascinated, rather than bitchy or judgmental, and boys never wolf-whistle or make immature frat-boy comments about your breasts.
Actually, the boys here are quite vain and girly, almost as much as the girls. Why, 4,000 Islands himself has almost as many beauty products as I do, and most of them mention “foam”, “pores” and “skin soft” somewhere.

Weather update: daed ork, fon tok
Or, the sun shines and the rain falls. There have been quite a few storms lately, but the sun dries it all up. Soon, though, the rain will fall faster, the sun won’t be able to catch up, the holes will fill with water and the streets will be flooded. And the storms will cause electrical surges, the lights will flicker on and off and the water will switch off for hours on end. Damn this country.

Which reminds me of something funny. We had our garden ‘landscaped’ the other week. There’s an Australian man living here who has set up a landscaping business, and only employs boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. We have hired them to tend to the garden each week. Last week, one of the boys accidentally cut our water mains with a whipper-snipper, causing water to gush out for hours and flood the lawn. I’m not sure how it happened, but I suspect that, like many people here, is was just singing to himself and got into a bit of a trance. Anyway, it was so ridiculous that he just giggled helplessly, and so did everyone else, including the boss. In the end, they had to call urban services who had to cut off the village water supply while they fixed the pipe.

I hope the President of Laos wasn’t at home- he lives right across the road. It’s convenient actually, because his protection guards all live in barracks just near our house. There are about thirty of them living in this dormitory, all young men from Phongsaly, a poverty-stricken northern province. They have a different dialect up there, which is why I can never understand a single goddamn word they say to me, even though I have been learning Lao for four months now.
Kate and I discovered this during Pi Mai, just before we flew up north, when we took them a crate of beer as a goodwill gesture and still couldn’t understand them. Like most coppers here, they play volleyball a lot.
Anyway, we like to think that the President would be terribly, you know, embarrassed, if we were to get broken into like most of the other Aussie volunteers have, being so close to his house. We also like to think that the Boys from Phongsaly are watching over our house to ensure that such embarrassment does not ensue.
If you know what I’m saying.

Anyway, those boys are yet another shining example of the government’s approach to poverty reduction- take fit young men from their hometown, bring them to the Capital and train them as cops.
Like the desperately desolate roadside villages in the mountains up north. Here’s how it works: according to the government’s Poverty Eradication Strategy, everyone must be well-fed and able to generate an income, but must also be literate and have access to education. There doesn't seem to be any particular priority among these criteria, which is why many communities up in the mountains, who have no electricity and no schools, are shifted against their will further down and plonked smack next the main road that cuts through the mountains, where they just sit all day long, metres away from the passing traffic, with absolutely nothing to do. But dammit, at least they have televisions and the kids can go to school.

Anyway, that's enough from me. The pic of 4,000 Islands will only be up for a limited time to 'protect his privacy' as it were, so drink deep of his image while you can...

“I ran a marathon the other day...”

2006-04-05T01:24:00.000+10:00

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.

Sorng deuan

2006-03-10T02:24:00.000+11:00

Sorng deuan, two months already. And I've only read three books.

Another long hiatus. Thing is, I’ve lost confidence as I gradually realise how many people read this thing, even just occasionally. I’m deliberately toning down my filthy mouth, feeling cold at the thought of my grandparents logging on every now and again.
I’m not joking- my grandfather was surfing the net practically before it was even invented- he sends me text messages on my birthday!

Anyway, I’ll try and shake off the feeling of people watching me and tell you what’s been going on:

Not that much but the days are packed as usual. Thing is, you never plan your weeks with lists of activities- things just fall into place. A couple of weeks ago, I had breakfast in town with some of my crew, and then spent a couple of hours in a salon getting a pedicure. Then I went home and we decided to go and check out a meditation session at a nearby temple. Then I went and met up with someone from the office and we rode over to someone’s house for another death offering ceremony. This time I took flowers. Then I went with some friends to literally the most expensive restaurant in town. It killed me to hand over that $20 for soup and main. Especially, especially when Kate and Tom and I found a great French restaurant near Patuxai the other week where you can get a steak for $4.

Vientiane gets its very own beach from December to April, when the river goes down and the sandbar across the middle between Laos and Thailand dries out. A sandy bridge appeared one dear, and now people all over town flock down to the sand. We played beach cricket there one weekend, to the complete bewilderment of onlookers.

A nighttime sacrifice
I went out of town last weekend. A bunch of us hired fancy motorbikes and rode out to a village where we stayed at a resort. We had dinner at a floating restaurant.
It was a picturesque scene- in the balmy dusk, a group of young people on the riverbank, a pretty brown cow tethered nearby. We chatted about politics- John Howard, ten years, is it worth going home ever, blah blah blah- about music- there have been no new revolutions in music since punk, not Britpop, not the Strokes, not techno, blah blah blah.

But our over-articulate, over-educated, completely pointless babble was cut short. Suddenly, the young people got up and calmly slashed the cow’s throat. The cow fell to the ground, twitching and gushing blood. The boys waited for it to die, and we watched, horrified, as they cut it a second time to finish it off. It seemed to take forever, it’s poor legs thrashing around uselessly. Then they scraped off the cow’s hair with a spoon- a spoon!!- before covering the whole thing with hay and setting fire to it.

We asked someone, and apparently this is normal. It burns easier when the hair has been scraped off. And better to do it after the sun goes down. Or something.

Caged up
We also went to a zoo. Not just any zoo- the dingiest, most depressing zoo in the whole of South East Asia. About thirty enormous, dopey crocodiles in a bright green pond. Two enormous elephants chained by their ankles in a pen not much bigger than them. A lone hippopotamus standing there with its mouth open, waiting to be fed.
And the kangaroos. “Donated by the Australian Government”, the sign said. One of them limped over to the fence, and stared straight at us. I’m in hell, his eyes said. It's like a zoo in here. Take me back to the bush!
We just stared back- what else could we do? The kangaroo understood this and limped away, painfully, on long, bony feet.

Eat- for health!!
I was sick the week before last. Flu-like symptoms, but it just wasn’t convenient to go to the clinic. Besides all the work I have to do, I really don’t have time to be carted off to Thailand in the back of an ambulance, which is what would have happened.
But work is practically a built-in clinic anyway:
Take these four different brands- probably fake- paracetamol! Get away from the air-conditioner, and don’t under any circumstances drink cold water!
Eat! For health! Eat together, for solidarity! Eat this, it’s tongue! Of cow! They all poked their tongues out and crossed their eyes to make a point. And then the piece de resistance- egg…of ant! A delicacy in these parts!
And above all, please don’t get sick, we need you here!
I stumbled home with their helpful advice ringing in my ears, and slept for 15 hours straight. I woke up feeling better than before I was sick.

One for the ladies
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, a huge deal here, bizarrely. Khamtay Siphandone, the President of Laos, has declared it a public holiday…for women only.
I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous- everyone knows the world would fall apart if we all took a holiday and stayed at home. Anyway, obviously the news doesn’t stop just because of International Women’s Day, so I don’t foresee a day off tomorrow. We did all get taken out for lunch today, however, and much beer was drunk.

Party Time
Also, in case you’re interested, if you ever get invited to a party in Laos, of any kind for any occasion, this is precisely what you can expect:
• Acres of plastic tables and red and blue plastic chairs.
• An immense set of speakers, with incredibly loud karaoke music pumping through literally at full volume, or, if the hosts are on the ‘wealthy’ side, a band, with someone to sing the karaoke hits just like the recorded version.
• All the girls in the usual skirts and the boys in whatever they want.
• A room set up for paying respects to the host- complete with a village Buddhist elder to chant stuff. You tie a white string around the host’s wrist and/or guest of honour’s wrist, and wish them health, prosperity and, if he or she is single, love. Or if he or she is childless, fertility. Then you get passed a shot of Johnnie Walker, from a glass that has already been passed around to dozens of people, which you have literally no choice but to drink. [I had never drunk whiskey in my life before I arrived here- I’m sure I’ve had the equivalent of a bottle by now].
• A big table full of always exactly the same food- noodles, papaya salad, spicy laap, coconut soup, pork, liver.
• More beer than you could ever drink.
• Absolutely ear-shattering music...and then, the dancing. The ladies stand almost still and move their hands in a particular way and barely smile. Sometimes they will do a line dance, perhaps one of the funniest things you’ll ever see.
• And all the while, it’s highly likely that you will be the only white person there and everyone will stare openly at you and you’ll feel completely out of place. But don’t worry- if you eat the food and wear the skirt and drink the whiskey, everyone there will love you. Love you!

That’s one thing I’ve realised pretty quickly- you can’t overestimate how important it is to people if you eat their food and enjoy it. We found ourselves in a village during a religious festival one the weekend, which people were celebrating in their houses. We were ushered in by near strangers, and fed over and over. Imagine having special food needs!

And the Oscar goes to...
Finally, to finish this mammouth, guilt-born post, I just want to assure everyone at home who knows and loves me that I have by no means lost touch with pop culture. By no means. I’ve even been watching a lot of films- most anything is available in Vientiane’s Chinatown for a mere $1.50 a pop. Many of the new releases open with the message “For your consideration”- obviously pirated Academy copies. And if any of you are in any doubt as to whether or not we are taking our role as Academy representatives for the Lao PDR, hear this now: every single one of my Oscar predictions proved correct, even my assertion that the Gay Cowboys would be too much for the US this year. Correct.
And yes, I immediately went on to the Internet to check out the picture galleries of all the dresses. Reese Witherspoon's dress was atrocious, but unlike my fellow Lao reps, I quite liked Keira Knightley's makeup.
Good day to you.

Xook Xan Van Valentine!

2006-02-16T02:35:00.000+11:00

I never would have guessed that Valentine’s Day would be the biggest day of the year for Lao youth, but last night the streets of Vientiane were busier than any of us have ever seen, even those who've been here for six months or more. Street vendors on every corner were selling red roses for 5000 kip (50 cents) each all day long, and everyone at work gave me lollies, chocolate, flowers and just all round general love.
In the evening, we rode out to the Spirit House, our favourite upmarket cocktail bar on the banks of the Mekong, dodging millions of motorbikes and people walking hand-in-hand all the way.
Cocktails were half price. Later, we went to Mina, one of the biggest Lao nightclubs in town, where miniskirts abounded and the crap music was turned up as loud as possible. It could have been anywhere in the world, except that everyone in the room was Lao.

Eagle beavers

2006-02-16T01:43:00.000+11:00

Just a quiet evening at home tonight, the first in ages. I've been to the gym, and am about to sit down and read yesterday's Bangkok Post. Phimphone, the owner of the minimart near my work, puts a copy aside for me each day and never lets me forget.
You should see Sengdara, the gym I go to here. It's a great, big, searingly modern building with a green glass dome that looks completely out of place in my neighbourhood, or, indeed, anywhere in this sleepy riverside city. Despite the hefty membership fees ($220 for the year), a lot of the equipment breaks down and no one fixes it, and often, in the early morning, you have to ask the staff very kindly to put the lights on. Also, they don't like switching on the fans, although apparently this is because you don't lose weight unless you are pouring with sweat.
[Related: The Lao also believe that drinking iced water makes you catch a cold, and drinking hot water will cure you. It's simple, really.]
Anyway, the staff at the front desk are all young and hip, but there's also an army of cleaners in grey tops everywhere you look, which you get used to after a while.
It's a great gym.
Plus, plus, you can get a massage anytime for only $3.
I'll admit it- I've been getting them once a week...

Anyway, today's post is dedicated to Sengthong, another of the younger journalists at work, who submitted a story to me today with that headline. What is an eagle beaver? I wondered, for at least several minutes. Finally I asked him. “You know, when you work really hard,” he answered, looking all uncertain and frowning, because he knew he’d written the wrong thing.
Eager beaver. Gotcha.

Oi oi oi Part II
Last week, I uttered words I never imagined I would hear myself say, and those words were: “Yes, of course I will see you tomorrow night at the Laos v Australia Under-17 Asia Cup soccer match”.
So we went that night, and screamed abuse at the poor little tackers on the field for not scoring a single goal, and again two nights later when we beat Indonesia 3-1. Anyway, the Lao soccer crowd was remarkably subdued, although maybe it was just that we were behaving like hooligans…
In case you’re interested, which I wasn’t by the third match, Laos pulverised Indonesia 6-0, and thus qualified for the finals. We didn't. But we've never been good at soccer, and playing Asia rather than South America doesn't change that.
Whatever. It was a big deal at the paper. The whole office taught me to yell “Australie- Sou Sou Sou!” which hopefully is equivalent to "Go Go Go!" because we were yelling it for the whole match.

Weather Update:
It finally rained on the weekend, a gentle rain washing away all that dust that sticks to your clothes and filling up all the holes in the roads and the caved-in pavements. It was awesome- an excuse to put on jeans and long sleeves and ride around in the rain.
I’m convinced that one of these days I’m going to fall down one of those holes.
And today it was boiling hot again.
I'm dreading April.

Funeral
There’s nothing my office loves more than to teach me all about Lao culture. The editor’s mother-in-law passed away last week. He was thrilled, actually, as was everyone else in the office, because it meant they got to show me what happens over here when someone dies.
On Friday, the whole office, in their tireless dedication to breaking the news and, you know, getting the story out there, dropped everything and drove out to the editor’s house to pay their respects to the dead, offer up a prayer and, most importantly, sit down to a hefty meal.
The coffin was the most elaborately decorated thing I’ve ever seen, complete with flashing coloured fairy lights and everything. We all gathered around it, and bowed our heads while one of the journalists said something respectful, and the widower responded. Then a silver bowl was passed around and everyone put money in.
[Actually, earlier in the week, I think I made a big faux-pas when the office took up a collection for the massive wreath. I put in 20,000 kip, which is about $2, and everyone raised their eyebrows and murmured to each other in Laos, and then when I checked the list later, I realised that everyone else had put in between 5000-10,000 kip, and I felt all embarrassed, like I'd deliberately been ostentatious, but how was I to know??]
Anyway, death for Buddhists is traditionally a happy occasion, a festive event, hence the flashing lights and great big meal. But I looked up during the prayers and the dead woman’s sister was crying a bit.
And, just for the record, yes, okay, I took photos while I was in there. But someone from the office was filming the whole thing! They film everything. They have a camera fetish. No one batted an eyelid. Okay?

Related to this is the fact that I’ve been scouting for the perfect monk shots all week, but I never seem to have my camera out at the right time. There was a monk checking his email in the Internet café below my work the other day, and another in the supermarket looking at peanut butter. I’ve seen a couple on motorbikes as well, which is hilarious.

A lot of them are just kids whose families are too poor to look after them. A temple is the equivalent of being sent away to a boarding school or a foster family, and often the boy’s families get money or land for their contribution. I’ve been gathering information on this from the boys at work, a couple of whom have done their obligatory one week stint already.

Related even further to this is that my Lao is coming along oh-so-slowly, although some people, (namely everyone in the office who think the sun shines out of my arse anyway), seem to think I'm doing ok. I'm having two lessons with Phitsamai a week, and I learn something new each time.

Chao ar gnu chack pee? (How old are you?)
Khoy ar gnu sao hoc pee. (I am 26 years old.)

I've learnt numbers, days, timeframes (years, months, days, hours, minutes) and kitchenware (knife: meed, fork: sorm etc), and I can also tell the time, although sometimes it takes me a while.
Lao is too simple to be easy. There are only three verb tenses, and very few connectors between words. No "a" or "the" or "I would have done it had I been there" type of thing. Sensible really. And that's why English is an absolute nightmare for my workmates.

Anyway, I'd like to really learn it, mainly because I'd like to live here for a while and understand what's going on. Unlike in, say, France, the locals love hearing you speak their language, however haltingly, and will wait patiently while you struggle to ask for a glass ("chork") or some water ("nam"). Just as they love it when the girls wear sins.

On that note, I've got to go and study. I just love it when Phitsamai says "geng lai!" which means "very good". Also, I've got to read the newspaper so that I can take it into the office tomorrow, where the journalists will all pounce on it. Paying $1.20 for the paper each day is completely unthinkable for them, which is why I'm buying the office a subscription.

Meu eun maen van chan

2006-02-06T04:04:00.000+11:00

Yesterday morning, I woke up and could have sworn it was raining outside. But no, it was just the breeze in the tall palm trees outside my window.
It’s funny, when I first moved to Melbourne, I thought I’d never get used to the weather constantly changing. Sunny and hot in the morning, grey and drizzly by early evening. Since I’ve arrived in Vientiane, there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky, and it’s mostly been hot, with a few ‘chilly’ nights thrown in last week. And I’m just expecting rain every night.

Also, I’m still noticing the smell here. It’s not like anywhere else I’ve been. A mixture of sewerage, smoke from burning rubbish, petrol, and all kinds of food, like rice and fish. It's life, unhidden, right there in the air for everyone to breathe in together.

Tonight we rode to a bar on the edge of the rice fields, where we sat and drank Beer Lao. I'm not usually a beer drinker, but there's something about it here. It's 5% alcohol, but goes down like water. Amazing. Not to mention dangerous.
Anyway, although the bar was only about ten minutes from our house, we knew we were, relatively speaking, far from home, because the menu was completely in Lao, meaning off the beaten track for tourists.
But we're not tourists, and the people at the bar could tell.
We tried to ask for peanuts, and even drew a picture, but it's one word none of us know. They brought us chips instead.
On the way home, in the dusk, a group of kids were breakdancing on the road at the bottom of our street. They called out to us to join them. Wish I'd brought a camera.
The Lao are very friendly, and groups sitting outside their houses drinking beer in the evening will often call out to us to come and join them.
Related to this is the fact that it's unusual here to eat alone, something I normally do quite regularly. At work, I have to lie, sometimes, and say I'm meeting a friend for lunch, or something.

We're rich, they're poor
Housemate Tom busted his leg playing soccer on Friday night, while Kate and I were drinking cosmopolitans with the crew for happy hour at Sticky Fingers, the most Aussie/Western-style bar in town, as we do every Friday night. When we rang Tom to see where he was, he had drunk so much to numb the pain that he couldn’t name the bar he was at.
The next day, he couldn’t walk and the Australian clinic was closed, so Kate took him to a Japanese-run X-Ray clinic that was listed in the Lonely Planet. The X-ray pics showed a flawless, unbroken bone. When they went to pay, Kate whispered to him not to pay more than US$30. Deep down, they both thought it would be more like $50.
It cost $4.
Tom is convinced his sperm count will now be permanently lowered from the dodgy machine, but at least his leg isn’t broken.
I am constantly baffled by the way the economy in this country works. A couple of months ago, in Melbourne, I could barely afford to pay my mobile bill. Now, suddenly, we are the richest people in town, eating out every night, having clothes tailormade, comparing manicures. We have a maid who comes twice a week and does the dishes and cleans the bathroom. She gets $15 a month from us, which is more than most, apparently.
It's kind of sickening. I can't work out what the locals think of us, if they think about it at all. I know westerners get charged more for things like tuk tuk rides and fabric at the markets. But how do the locals make ends meet? Who eats all those acres of food in the markets? Who buys pancakes from the lonely street vendors late at night?

A couple of people (namely Patrick) has whinged that I haven't put any touristy photos of temples or street vendors up yet.
Oh alright. I'll take some in my lunch hour tomorrow, take my mind off work. I mean, there's a watt on every corner, and young saucey monks in saffron robes all over the place.

Anyway, I must go to bed because I need to practice my Lao. Meu eun maen van chan- tomorrow is Monday, and my teacher, Phitsumai, won't be happy with me if I don't practice. Her brow will darken.

The Clue of the Buddha

2006-01-30T01:49:00.000+11:00

"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.

Settling in

2006-01-14T21:48:00.000+11:00

“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?