Walking in Vientiane

Today I walked. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog as I don’t currently have a car, motor bike, or bicycle available as a means of transportation. Therefore, my only recourse is my legs. I walked to work this morning under a cloudy sky (but no rain!). It was a lovely walk, just a quick five minute jaunt, walking down the road with my iPod plugged in, enjoying a little peaceful time to myself. One of the hardest things about traveling and working in this sort of environment is the complete lack of alone time. In the past year I have gotten very used to living alone and I have found that I value time to myself (although I did have an inkling I liked alone time before – my undergraduate roommates yelling “antisocial” outside my door for five years might have been a clue…). This is not to say I always want to be a hermit; just that I like to have moments where I am completely alone, able to do what only I want to do. That five minute walk and the fifteen minutes I had in the office before anyone else arrived gave me a brief taste of the aloneness that I have been craving and I think I will make it a daily occurrence.

Work was good today, filled with more introductory reading material and some fun times with the Laos law students helping us with translations. A little before noon, Chinda came to me and offered to have the VFI driver take me to the Morning Market, located at the center of Vientiane, to buy a cell phone. I have mentioned this fact once before, but it is such an oddity that it needs to be mentioned again, as it is so strange. The Lao people detest walking. I’m not sure why, but everyone in Laos thinks that walking is a huge trial of life and when they see a distance of even 500 feet it is seen as an insurmountable distance and calculations are quickly made about how best to drive closer so as to minimize walking. It is amazing. When I asked how far the Morning Market was from our house and the office I was told it was too far to walk and that we must drive. The truth of the matter is Morning Market is located a quick 20 minutes away by foot (and that is at a leisurely pace).

As this was our first trip and we were taking our lunch break to go, we drove downtown in the VFI car. We dropped the boys off at a motor bike rental shop first and then headed over to the Morning Market Mall to find me a cell phone. I had to repurchase the detestable cell phone (it’s really not that bad, but I hate it now because it deliberately got lost) that jumped out of my pocket in a bid for freedom from its incompetent handler on the bus during the first leg of our trip to Laos. I purchased the same cell phone I was given by BABSEA so that I can hand the new one over at the end of my internship and won’t have to pay a fine for losing the old one. Stupid cell phones; it would just be so much easier to travel without one. On that note, the communications network in Laos sucks. I don’t mean that in the way that people in America often mean it, as in: reception is spotty and that sucks. Here…it is truly awful. There are quite a few different communication networks you can use (aka different companies you can purchase your sim card from) and they are all terrible. They drop calls, randomly block calls at different times of the day, randomly allow or block text messaging, and charge exorbitant prices for out of country calls. I have never heard of such a terrible system and it makes me long for those good old days when I was in Chiang Mai. *sigh*

Anyway, I purchased my new cell phone and map of downtown Vientiane, which was greatly needed. The people here, even people who have lived in the city their entire lives, do not know street names, where shops are located, or the names of businesses. It’s amazing. We are being introduced to roads as “Spring Roll Road” (the road where we ate spring rolls for lunch the other day – delicious, by the way, and Vietnamese) and “That Other Main Road You Just Can’t Miss.” This certainly makes it hard to get recommendations of where to go and how to get around the city. Somehow I just can’t seem to follow the directions: “You know that road off where you live and your turn at that other first main road, or it might be the second, but then you walk down a ways and you look to see if this is out front.” For some reason these directions are wholly ineffective for actually getting us anywhere and we insisted, therefore, that we get a map of the city so we could find our own way around. I purchased a great map for 25, 000 kip (Isn’t that a ridiculous number? It’s actually only around $3.), so I will be able to find my way around the city from now on. After we had bought my phone and map, it was time to eat lunch and we decided to go ahead and eat in the mall food court located upstairs.

When I say we were at a Mall, I don’t mean a traditional American mall or even the Central Mall in Chiang Mai. Laos only recently opened its’ borders to outsiders about ten years ago and since that time has remained hesitant about allowing other countries’ chain corporations into the country. Thus, I am living in one of the few countries in the world without a single McDonalds! Isn’t that incredible? All the small shops (which are actually more like stalls) in the Mall are owned and operated by local business people and not part of a larger chain. While there are some chain companies in Laos, they are mostly owned by Lao people and are Laos chains. Recently, Laos has started to allow some foreign chain corporations into the country and downtown the first KFC has now being built and should open sometime this summer. The capital is still dotted with mini marts and small corner markets with no 7/11 in sight. A pristine environment in that regard.

Food courts in this country are very interesting. I’ve eaten at two so far (which makes me an expert, of course) and have found them to be very different from the food courts in the States. Food courts here do not consist of chain restaurants as our food courts do. At home, when you walk into a food court, you generally have a pretty good idea of what sort of places you are going to be looking at (Panda Express anyone?), but here, the food court will be filled with stalls with every type of Asian cuisine, each one stall making three or four dishes. When you first enter the food area, you trade your money for food coupons, which you will use to pay the vendor. Any leftover coupons can be exchanged back for money as you leave. The food in these places is delicious and made to order while you watch. You order your food (usually by pointing to a picture), stand in front of the stall, and pick up your food in just a couple minutes. It is an extraordinarily beautiful system and I am loving it! Today I ordered fried rice and fried chicken. It was quite tasty and very reasonably priced (I think I ate for $1.15).

My afternoon of work was very productive and fun and went by quite quickly. After work, we headed to the house to drop off our computers and change into non-work clothing. The four of us girls then set off to downtown Vientiane on foot to rent some bicycles for the next two months. As I mentioned in a previous post, Vientiane is not a city you can walk. To really be mobile in this city, and see everything you want to see, you must have some higher form of transportation than simply your legs. As renting a car is not a very economical or practical option for us, we decided to rent bicycles instead (I am not getting on a motor bike in a culture that believes allowing a baby to hang off the end of one is acceptable; that practice leads to death and destruction). Renting a bicycle should be fairly cheap in Laos and we set off looking for a shop Talia had told us about earlier in the day.

The walk into downtown Vientiane was gorgeous. It was still light out and the city was awash in the red-orange glow of the setting sun by the time we reached the center of town. The road off which our house rests is a main thoroughfare of Vientiane, and by simply following that road toward the left, we are able to quickly and easily reach the Morning Market and the center of town. The walk to the Morning Market took about 20 minutes at a comfortable pace and soon we were at the main road of the city which has the Presidential Palace on one end and Patu Xay at the other. The Presidential Palace sits along the Mekong River and is surrounded by tall gates and ornate fences. It looks similar to any capital building in the US or whatever you would imagine a “Presidential Palace” to look like. Grand, but not overwhelming. The Patu Xay, on the other hand, is quite an impressive structure. It looks like a direct replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, not a surprising fact I suppose, as the French were the colonists in Laos (thank you, Frenchies for teaching the drive on the right side of the road!) and had a huge influence on Laos architecture. The Patu Xay has a funny story. Evidently the US donated a great deal of cement and money to Laos in the 1960s for a new airport runway. Laos gratefully took the money and used it to build their “Arc” instead. :) Rather than improve their infrastructure through the building of an airport, Laos decided a better use for the money and materials was building a large structure in the center of town to celebrate and commemorate people who died during prerevolutionary wars in the country. You’ve got to love the Laos mindset.

In any event, when standing in the middle of this main road you can see the Presidential Palace to your left and Patu Xay at the other end on your right. It is a beautiful sight to see and in a city where the true treasures are often hidden (for example, unlike in Chiang Mai where the Wats are proudly displayed for everyone to see, the Wats in Vientiane are hidden behind high walls and trees alongside the roads), it is truly impressive to see two of the grandest sights facing each other down a long, straight road. Following the haphazard directions provided by Talia, we began our walk toward Patu Xay, keeping an eye out for the promised bike shop. Well, we walked all the way to the Arc and found zilch.

Defeated and dejected (we still had the entire walk home left now, you see, which we had not counted on previously as we were so sure we would be riding back on our bicycles) we began to trudge back home, sure Talia had simply messed up the directions. On our way back, however, during a random glance towards the buildings we were walking beside, I noticed a handwritten sign on a wall proclaiming, “Bicycles For Rent.” At this point it was 7 pm and almost completely dark out and we had noticed that as dusk fell on the city everything except the restaurants were closing down. It seems that every business in Vientiane keeps 9-5 hours and doesn’t worry about the fact that most of their clientele keeps similar hours and that their schedules, therefore, conflict. It seems that in Laos, you must find a way to do your shopping during your working hours or live without. Armed with this new information, we called Talia and were told it would be no problem to have the driver take us to the shop during our lunch break tomorrow so that we could rent our bikes and become part of the mobile force of Vientiane (and stop horrifying the locals by actually using our legs to walk to get around).

We inadvertently meandered our way through the city to get home, intending during our walk to find the Riverfront District, but one wrong assumption on a left or right turn sent us back toward our house, just missing the area of town where we ate dinner on our first night. We called the boys to change our plans about our eating arrangements and set off for a café located a quick 15 minute walk from our house, called Joma. It is an excellent café, if a little expensive, but truly superior as it offers free internet access to customers. I suspect that each weekend will find us migrating to this café in search of some good pastries and WiFi access. Dinner was Western and delicious (I ate a BLT that was actually quite good). After dinner Zenia and I headed home while the others headed out to drink at some bars at the other end of town. While I want to explore the local night life here (although I’ve been told it is similar to the Thai nightlife, which involves standing around a table drinking whiskey and soda, feeling awkward), I don’t want to start a bad habit of drinking during the week and Zenia agreed, so we opted out of the drinking experience tonight. Therefore, I came home and enjoyed a couple hours of quite relaxation before bed and another day of work and fun tomorrow.

Some Extra Notes:
1. My blog posts will most likely be updated at night (for you) now as I don’t have access to the internet until I go to work in the morning.
2. I miss my internet and wish it would come back. :(
3. I need to look cool and have more followers for my blog. If you aren’t a follower yet and have a gmail, yahoo, or hotmail account (I think), sign up to be a follower and make me look good!