Vientiane, Laos

We were writing the last post while still in Vientiane, so here is the rest of the city. We arrived and spent a while walking around the city with our full backpacker garb (big backpack on back, small backpack on front, guide book in hand) because all of the hotels and guesthouses were full or super expensive. We finally found a hole in the wall place that looked like it might fall down at any moment but we took what we could get. We then wandered around the city checking things out, the usual get to a new city routine. Mike desperately needed a haircut and we found a place that would do it for pretty cheap. I got a pedicure while he got his hair cut and it was a great deal until we got out of the shop, which is when we realized that his hair was shorter in places and longer in others; in some places there was a difference of over an inch right next to one another! It could be that the person cutting his hair was a boy dressed like a girl with a long side ponytail and short cutoff jeans on or it could be that "she" spent about 35 minutes cutting with the clippers before ever touching the scissors or it could even be that later we saw her standing on a corner for over an hour wearing even less than before and a lot more makeup... I am not sure what happened but it may well be one of the worst hair cuts I have ever seen. Not that I'm saying that skimpy-clad, cross-dressing, clipper-obsessed prostitutes can't cut hair. She even cut Mike some bangs across his forehead that were angled, about 1/4 inch long on one side and as long as an inch on the other. We should have taken a picture of his new bangs but didn't think about it. We promptly went back to the hotel room and used the only "scissors" we had available which are about 3 inches long, very dull after 4 months of use, and probably only supposed to be used for eyebrows and nose hairs. I spent the next 15-20 minutes laughing and trying to get his hair to not look quite so much like a 4 year old had cut it. Poor Mike. My pedicure, however, was great for $5 and took just as long as Mike's haircut from hell.

The next day we saw the Laos version of the Arc d'Triomph and then took a long, dusty bus ride to Buddha park. The park was beautiful with a conglomeration of Buddhist and Hindu statues surrounded by green vegetation and lovely flowers. That night we had burgers and fries for dinner! It was so good after so much noodle soup!

Next morning, we rented bicycles and rode out to the national monument of Laos which is a stupa (Buddhist spire) covered in gold paint and surround by wats (temples). We ate noodle soup for lunch and then rode to another wat with over 2300 statues of the Buddha in it and after, to the Laos National History Museum. After the museum we went to the Food Festival, which happened to be going on while we were in town. It was quite small but we decided to get dinner here after seeing some live crawdads being grilled. They pulled them out of the tank and threw them directly in a cooler of ice for a few minutes. This must stun them just enough so they don't fight or jump off the grill. They are then tossed onto the grill and then onto a plate. Neither of us has much experience with eating crawdads but we have peeled and eaten shrimp and thought it can't be that different. So, off we went with our plate piled high with fresh seafood. We dug right in and they were pretty good, a little bland but not bad, even though they were a lot of work to peel. I tried to peel another one and somehow squeezed out all of its intestines onto my hands. That was it, I was done, my stomach was still a bit queasy from a few weeks back and this was all it took. Mike kept at it, though, like the champ that he is, even after coming across female crawdads that had all of their red-orange eggs attached to their legs. Ewwwww!!!!! After this, we had ice cream cones and then a couple of beer Laos to top off our time in Laos.

Click HERE for Vientiane photos.