Insert Clever Title Here

Life is good...its reasonably cool here, only supposed to get up to 92 today! (104 the other day) This morning was beautiful, slightly overcast and with a nice breeze. Great to be walking around staying out of the sun for a little bit. The day usually starts off kinda cool, and gets hotter and hotter as the day goes on, which is also what usually happens in my room. By dinnertime, its as hot in my room as it outside, and even though it cools down at night, I can't open either of my doors because the mosquitoes will flock inside. So its still pretty warm when I get to bed, but usually has cooled off a little by the time I wake up. And I'll usually stumble out of bed, open my balcony door to let some cool air in and then go back to sleep. But supposedly it gets hotter in April, so I'll keep you updated. :)

Went bowling the other night, it was pretty excellent and the first time I had been since high school. Had a bad first half of the first game due to rust, and a bad 2nd half of the 3rd game due to fatigue and rapidly dwindling lack of interest, but the rest I actually did OK. Bowled a 146 in the 2nd game, I didn't know I had it in me! But it was fun, they had galaxy bowling going on, so the place was dark and everything was in neon. Interesting experience throwing glowing bowling balls while listening to American pop music in the middle of Thailand. But lots of fun. (Though it was a struggle to refrain from yelling Big Lebowski quotes the entire time... "Over the line!") Also, the bowling alley was on the top floor of this big mall, and since we went around 9, the mall was shut down, which lead to a little exploration to find this place. I was walking with my friends Lex and Adam, and we made our way through a maze of dark hallways and run down rooms, only to come upon a modern looking bowling alley in the middle of nowhere. They also had an ice arena up there, and though there wasn't ice on it at the moment, we all agreed that once they do, we are heading up there to just lay down on the ice for a little slice of home. Also, while I wear dark socks and nice shoes for all things work related, bowling was the first time I had put on a pair of white socks since I've been here. And yes this means I have not participated in any sort of working out or cardio activity since I've been here. Though Lex said she saw a bball court with people on it, so hopefully I will finally get to play some basketball. I have seen a few courts around here, but never anyone playing on them, so hopefully soon. And Lex played so she said we could at least go shoot around if we can't find any games.)

Overall, life is good. It's weird the things I miss. I ran out of qtips the other day and it was driving me crazy! How am I supposed to dry and clean my ears after my shower? I have been doing it for so many years that suddenly when you can't, its kind of shocking. But my dad is sending me some soon, so I just have to hold out a little longer. Just weird that I can't find something like that here ya know? OK, I'm in a rambling mood, so I'm going to stop myself before I get into my workout regimen with my TV (not watching, using as a weight), my mutual understanding with the geckos, or my jobs doing manual labor for the family that owns my guesthouse. Those will have to wait for another day!

TPWWLT - MGMT - 'Kids'

Laos Pictures!

A nice mix of most of the stuff we saw. Sorry I got a little statue crazy, but they were pretty fascinating. Click the link below and enjoy!

Laos Pictures

Laos Rider

Part 4 - The Visa

OK, so what about the Visa (capital 'V'), the reason we went to Laos in the first place? Well, Tuesday morning we woke up early, walked across the street and got in line outside the Thai embassy around 7:00 am. We were probably about 50th in line, and it was interesting seeing the businesses that had sprouted up specifically catering to visa applicants. We came prepared with pictures, and our guesthouse owner gave us some application forms as we were walking out the door, so we were pretty much set. But picture taking and developing, forms, help filling out forms, people to wait in line for you, snacks...all available for all those waiting in line watching the sun come up. We were probably about 50th in line, but with people cutting and sliding in right when the doors opened at 8:30, we ended up being 115 and 116th in line. They gave us little plastic cards with our numbers on them as we walked in, and we grabbed a seat. They called up about ten people at a time and after about an hour they got to us. We walked up, turned in our passport, our application forms, two pictures and copies of everything. Got a receipt and were out of there by 9:30 to head back to sleep. It was really a very well run process.

Well, for as well run as the morning handing-in process was, the afternoon picking-up process was just the opposite. We had to wait till the following day to come pick up our passports. They opened the gate at 1, so we figured we would head over there around noon to get in line. We were much closer to the front than we had been in the morning, probably about 20th in line. However, it was also the middle of the day and we were standing in the sun in 105 degree weather, so it was much more miserable. When the gates finally opened, instead of an orderly line and numbered cards like the previous morning, there was a mad rush to get in, mostly from people who had just strolled up. When you have been standing in line in the hot sun for an hour and three German dudes stroll right up and butt in front of you, I will admit there was some anger that started to rise. And when we all moved en mass towards the building where we needed to get inside to pick them up, and we are bunched on the steps to get inside, and people are pushing from behind despite the fact there was nowhere to go, and the guy who worked there just kept screaming at us to form two lines when no one was moving, and I estimated that I was probably 150th in line...well, thats when I sought help. I pulled out my ipod, turned on Jim Gaffigan and let the dulcet sounds of Hooooot Pocket calm me down.

Anyways, I'm slowing inching up to the front of the line. It gets to the person two ahead of me, and as he gets his passport back, he eagerly flips it open to see if he got the double entry visa. I can see from the disappointed look that flashes on his face that he was denied. Like we talked about in the first Laos post, the double entry visa means I have 6 months in Thailand instead of just 3. It means I can wait 180 days till I have to do this again, instead of just 90. It will cut my expenses and my necessary traveling and overnight bus rides in half. No one really understands why some people get a double entry and some only get a single. It is merely up to the whims of the Embassy staff on that particular day. Some people advise going on certain days, or certain times of the month, or writing certain things on your application...but no one is really sure. So after an hour in the blazing head, another hour fuming over all the people who cut in front of me and the people elbowing me from behind, I step up to the window, hand the lady my receipt and wait patiently as she searches for my passport. She finally spots it, hands it back without acknowledging my smile or thanks, and I step away from the window. I frantically page through looking for my visa...my eyes find it and track quickly across to the correct box...'Number of Entries'....2!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! Success! All the anger and annoyance of the last three hours vanishes in a puff of happiness. I find Julia, see that she got the double entry as well, and we happily begin the journey home. Until next time Laos...

(Though on 2nd though, maybe I'll try Hanoi...I mean how many people can say they spent a weekend in Vietnam? :) )

TPWWLT - Frank Sinatra - 'My Way'

PS - Stayed at my place for another month. It's good though, everyone around here knows me by now so I don't even have to order when I go to certain places, I just show up! But you can still send me stuff if you would like. I would, as they say, not be mad.

How Laos Can You Go?

Part 3 - The City

This post will be a little different than the first two. We saw enough in our two days walking around that going through everything I saw would make this post even longer than the 9000 words I usually type. Plus, I wanted to tell you about the visa and the journey so you could kind of understand both the complexity of the former and the monotony/asininity of the latter. I think both show an insight into the visa process in particular and the culture of SE Asia in general. Whereas today I just want to give you some of my base impressions of Vientiane and Laos. (Also, over the course of the trip, I thought like 7 times that I needed a notebook to jot something down. I would see something and immediately think of how it would be interesting a blog post and how I could write about it. I think I need more followers to have an attitude like that. Like...100,000 more. :) )

The capital of Laos in the city of Vientiane, located along the mighty Mekong river. Julia told me that it was called 'the largest village in Asia' and the nickname seemed pretty appropriate. A sleepy town, where most things seemed to be closed by 11 and certainly none of of the high rises of Bangkok, or even the 20 story hotel's or apartment buildings of Chiang Mai. A more touristy area along the river, about a 30 min walk from the embassy and where we were staying. Most of the guesthouses and restaurants were located around here, and there was even a little market set up at night.

The first night we were walking through a wide park admiring what the locals call the Patuxay, a huge monument resembling the Arc de Triumph. It was actually built to celebrate independence from France, so it was slightly ironic they modeled it after one of Paris's most famous landmarks. (Examples of French colonization can be seen all over, from the aritechure to the food to many of the important signs (inc all street signs) being in both Lao and French.) But we are walking towards the Patuxay and I look over to my right to see a big government building...and notice the red and yellow hammer and sickle flag of the USSR. Wait a second, Laos is communist?

I mean, disregarding the fact that my world knowledge is severely lacking and ignoring my complete and utter lack of research about a country I was going to be in for 3 days, I am actually kind of excited. I'm in a communist country! And to be honest with you, aside from the flag (which, get with it Laos, there isn't even a USSR anymore), there really wasn't any indication that the country was very communist. I didn't have to recite a loyalty oath when I entered the country, and people weren't lined up at the local collective to receive their share of the fruits of production. About the only place it really became apparent was in the museum.

Being the capital, one of the things located in the city was the National History Museum. Julia and I headed over there and entered a seemly deserted building and began to look around. After skipping quickly through the clay pots and arrowheads of early peoples of Laos, I began to get to the last few centuries of the country, depicting everything from French colonization up to present time, including multiple rooms depicting the struggle against 'U.S. Imperialists', a phrase I would see quite often. Most of these rooms were filled with pictures, captioned in three languages, Laos, French and English, though a few of the later rooms also contained guns and bombs used in the conflict. During the next hour, I was dumbfounded at the things I hadn't known about historical U.S.-Laos 'relations.' I learned Laos is the most bombed country in the history of the world, and that a majority of those bombs were dropped by us in the Vietnam War. I saw over and over again pictures of Laos leaders (always called 'comrade so and so') 'inspiring troops to fight against the U.S. Imperialists.' I saw some of the recovered bombs we had dropped on this country, and some of the guns those very same future communist leaders had used to kill Americans. I mean, I am not trying to comment on the necessity or wisdom of our actions during Vietnam, but it was just bizarre to be standing here reading all of these things, with a copy of my U.S. Passport in my pocket, looking around wondering if someone is going to jump out of the walls and tackle me for the 2,000,000 TONS of bombs my country dropped in theirs. We dropped more bombs on Laos than all of the bombs in WWII put together! And yet, here I am, strolling the museum without a care in the world. Just a bizarre experience.

The rest of the city was also pretty cool. We hopped on a local bus to head out to a place called Buddha Park, where a local rich guy had collected all these crazy stone statues of Buddha and other crazy things and just put them all in a park. We had to ride on a local bus to get out there...which was awesome, being the only white people on the bus, having no idea where to get off or how far it was, and just getting to watch the local people interact with each other. Very cool. We made it out there, and the park was amazing. They had the biggest sleeping Buddha I have ever seen (my favorite of all the Buddha's, obviously.) They also had this huge 5 story orb cut out of stone, that you could go inside and they had a center chamber in each level filled with these messed up statues and it was like pitch black in there and you could climb up on the roof of it and overlook the whole park. It was pretty awesome, mostly because you could climb on the roof. We meandered around the park for a bit, then headed back out to the road to wait for another bus. Well, we didn't quite know what the deal was, so we crossed the street to wait for the return bus, assuming it was a 'there and back' bus route. Unfortunately, it turned out it was a big loop route, so when we saw a bus fly by in the opposite direction, little did we realize that not only was it the bus we wanted, but it was the last one of the night. We wouldn't even have known this if some people who were checking out the park with us hadn't decided to roll down their window and ask where we were headed as they were driving away. It ended up being two girls from New Zealand visiting their relatives, and not only did they inform us that the buses were done, but they offered to give us a ride to Friendship Bridge where it would be a lot easier to catch a ride than on the side of the two lane highway on which we were currently standing. They were very nice, and although I'm sure we could have found a tuk tuk (eventually...I think) for the 45 min ride back into the capital, they saved us a lot of money and trouble by giving us that ride. So thank you family, wherever you are.

We also saw some cool temples and other things of that nature, which were cool and beautiful and cultural and which I will link to some pictures soon because I can't really do them justice with my words alone. (Also, it would be so American to me to say they looked very similar to many of the Wats I have seen and become used to here in Thailand, so I won't say it.) The morning of the day we left, we did check out Pah That Luang, the national symbol of Laos. It was a huge golden minaret type structure surrounded by many other smaller golden points. It was unique in being known more for its cultural than religious significance, though there was a definite religious aspect to it as well. Although being there for 3 days was hardly enough time to see everything, I felt like I got a decent sense of the city and enjoyed it. It was much less touristy than Chiang Mai, and also just had a more relaxed feel. Less to do, stuff closed earlier, but still an interesting mix of religion and politics, of Asian and French culture, of tradition and tourism. And like I said multiple times while I was there, I got to spend a weekend in Laos, how many people can say they have done that? :)

TPWWLT - New Found Glory - 'Something I Call Personality'

PS - I am not addressing my failure of the blog the last two weeks, other to say that I am good, not injured or sick or anything, and that I had about 3/4 of this post written the night after my last post, so I had to finish it before some more recent updates.

PPS - Instead of 'Laos' rhyming with 'mouse', the locals pronounce its as rhyming with 'now.' (Like 'Lau.') That might make some of the post titles and my weak puns and exchanging 'Laos' and 'low' a little more understandable to some of you.

Yah!

I apologize to those looking for Part 3 of my journey to Laos...the hours I had scheduled this afternoon to work on it were interrupted by an attack of new bugs. The last few days I had begin to suspect that I had either acquired a new species of ants, or brought them back somehow from Laos. The previous ones would only show up when I had food, they would make a straight line towards it and I could usually trace the trail of them all of way from their getaway in the corner of the room towards whatever delicious morsel I had left out. If I removed the food, I would try and sweep along their line of advance to kill as many as I could, but the rest would be left to their devices and would shortly disappear to wherever they had come from. But these new guys, besides the fact that they were smaller, darker and faster, just don't really leave. I can usually spot a few of them on the ground if I look hard enough, and they aren't going anywhere, just sort of meandering around.

And then today, I'm laying in bed reading, when a bug lands on me. My focus broken from my book, I look up and notice 50 or so insects hovering around my light. Where they came from, what they are, I have no idea. Are they connected to the ants, did they suddenly evolve and grow wings like those bugs in the Smoothie King used to? I don't know. They are way bigger than the ants, so I don't think its likely, but I'm no entomologist. What I do know is that I spent the next 2 hours trying to kill them all, not to mention the crawly bugs that were either them before they had wings or them after their wings fell off. Or at least I hope thats what they are, otherwise I have THREE new insect species suddenly popping up in my room.

Either way, the few hours I spent killing them means I'm tired, cranky, and in no mood to wax poetically about Laos the way it deserves. So I'm going to do one last sweep of my room to make sure I've gotten all the buggers, and get some sleep. Everyone enjoy your Sunday and the Oscars.

TPWWLT - Bob Dylan - 'Like A Rolling Stone'

Bummer

Woke up today to find ants on my toothbrush. Not sure why they decided to suddenly check it out today, its not like it hasn't been in the same spot the last few months. Oh well, good thing I have spares.

The Laos Down

Part 2 - The Journey

The distance between Chiang Mai and Vientiane is 252 miles. To put that in perspective, the distance between Chicago and Detroit is around 270 miles. And while that trip can be done in around 4 hours, (to be fair, since we were riding on public transportation the whole time, we should use the bus time of about 6 hours) the trip we took was just a bit longer. The first leg was an overnight bus ride from Chiang Mai to a town called Udonthani, still located in Thailand but much closer to its eastern border it shares with Laos. Considering Julia and I spent most of Sunday Googling info about the trip and trying to glean as much info as we could from various travel blogs, we arrived at the bus station Sunday evening around 6, not really sure what to expect, nor even sure if they would have tickets still available. For about 12 dollars, we ended up getting tickets on the 2nd class bus, or the lowest possible grade, as the nicer ones we already sold out. It was your average coach bus, packed tight with uncomfortable seats and lack of amenities. It left at 7, so we quickly grabbed some food and hopped on.

For anyone who has ever traveled on an overnight bus, its not very fun. I understand the appeal, and the idea of saving a night spent on a hostel or guesthouse somewhere, I really do. We did it many times in Australia on spring break. But that doesn't mean I like it. For someone who values sleep as much as I do, trying to grab all that I need while reclining at a 135 deg angle is enough to make me quite grumpy. We seemed to stop every 45 min to pick up or drop off a single person in some nameless town in the Thai countryside, every stop requiring all the lights to be turned on. Mostly it was a blur of tossing and turning, shivering, and the dulcet tones of Frank I had playing over my ipod to lull me to sleep. I did remember how cold the trip up from Pattaya was, so I came prepared with a hoodie and socks. However, I failed to account for the aircon blowing cold air straight down the center aisle of the bus, and ended up with a tshirt wrapped around my legs, my feet sticking out of the sleeves as I tried to keep the waist tucked under my knees so it wouldn't fall down while I was sleeping. I prob grabbed a total of 3 hours of sleep, but like all things, it eventually ended, and we pulled into our destination just as the sun was peeking over the Thai horizon, 12 hours and 3 minutes after we left Chiang Mai.

We quickly hopped on another bus and spent an hour on it traveling to a town right up against the border. On this one Julia and I had noticed a pair of guys, one farang and one Asian, who we were thinking were heading to Laos for the same reason we were. When we ended up in the same ticket line trying to buy a bus ticket for Laos that they wouldn't let us buy because we didn't have a Laos visa yet, we introduced ourselves and asked them what their plans were, mostly because we didn't have much of a clue what do next. There names were Aiden and Goldie, a Brit and a Filipino, who were also teachers in Thailand and has been living there for years. They were very friendly and we tagged along with them for the rest of the trip. They showed us how to make copies of our documents where it was cheap, and negotiated the price for the tuk tuk to the border.

The biggest border crossing between Laos and Thailand is the Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge. Now I haven't been to many international borders, but it seemed it a bit superfluous to me. You can't take a bus directly to the border, only the bus station a few miles away, where you can hire a tuk tuk to take you to the border. You depart Thailand, standing in line and heading through the immigration stations where they check to make sure you haven't overstayed your alloted time on your passport, and stamp you out of the country. (Because of mix-up of his work visa and some miscommunication with the local immigration officer, Aiden actually hadn't been getting his visa renewed like he thought he had been, and had technically been in the country illegally since last June. This means two things. First, if he had been stopped by the police for any reason, even a cursory inspection, one glance at his passport and they could have deported him immediately for being in the country illegally. Second, because of the 219 day overstay, he ended up with a fine of 20,000 bhat, or around $600 bucks. Ouch. Though they still gave him a visa at the embassy and let him back in the country two days later, so I guess they didn't think it was that big of a deal. But it just goes to show how important this stuff is. And also how its tough to plan for everything, and even to know what the proper thing to do is all the time with this stuff. Both his school and the local immigration office said he was fine and not to worry about it, but that didn't mean much to the officers at the border. This isn't a country where he could get them to call whoever at his local office and work it out. They don't really care, its pay the fine or say hello to you cell.) But anyways, once you pass out of Thailand, you can't walk across the bridge, you have to buy a ticket to take a bus across. You are on it for about 90 seconds, crossing the mighty Mekong river, the geographical divide between the eastern edge of Thailand and the western edge of Laos. Here they let us off, and we fill out the usual paperwork for entering a country, hand over our passport and 1500 bhat ($45 bucks, by far our biggest expense of the trip, and something that would only have been $35 if we paid in American, but we couldn't find anyone who would give us American dollars before we left...woo Asia. :) ) and wait 15 minutes to get our passports back. Boom, they call my name, I have a stamp that allows me to be in Laos for 30 days, and I walk into the newest country on my list.

We split an airconditioned minvan with Aiden and Goldie for the 45 minute ride to the capital. We are pretty sure it was a holiday and that the embassy is closed but seeing as we don't have a place to stay, we figure we will get dropped off there, see where it is, and just try and find a place within walking distance, making getting there in the morning a little easier. We hop out, and the embassy is indeed closed, so we pick a random direction and start walking. Aiden and Goldie know of a place not too far away, but Julia and I decide its a little out of our budget so we keep looking. After 45 min of walking around in the blistering noonday heat, not even really sure where we are on the map, we finally get tired of snapping at each other and decide to just head back to the place where they guys are staying. As our luck would have it, we stumble past a tiny little place located literally a stones throw from the embassy that we had missed in the very beginning of our search because (of course) we were on the opposite side of the street. It is pretty much perfect for us, a large, cheap fan room with two big double beds. We gratefully throw our stuff down and collapse into our respective beds.

So to overview, it had been 17 hours since we had left Chiang Mai, a scant 242 miles away. For those keeping track at home, it looked something like this: tuk tuk to bus station, 12 hour bus ride, hour long bus ride, 10 min tuk tuk ride to border, leave Thailand, 90 second ride across Friendship Bridge, enter Laos, 45 min van taxi ride to Vientiane. The time different was spent among waiting in line to leave Thailand, waiting in line to get in Laos, and of course that hour walking around in circles looking for a place to stay. But we are there! And we cant wait to explore the city! Right after a nap.

Coming tomorrow: Part 3 - The City

TPWWLT - Blink 182 - 'Wendy Clear'

Getting Laos

There And Back Again: A Farang's Tale

by Michael Keefer

Part 1 - The Motivation

Growing up as an American, I gave little thought to such things as passports, border crossings, travel visas and the like. I mean in the back of mind somewhere, I knew that these things existed and people weren't allowed to move countries and live wherever they liked, but it hardly seemed important enough to go find out about myself. And sure, when I went to Europe senior year of high school, I applied for my passport, and remember being excited at the half dozen stamps my two country visit resulted in - look at me, world traveler at 18, aren't I cultured? And when I went to Australia to study for a semester, I had to apply for a student visa, but that was done simply, in an hour online. I printed out the result, gave it to the immigration officer in the Sydney airport and never thought twice about it.

The average person entering into Thailand will get a 15 stamp on their passport. You pay a little bit, they let you in, and you have 15 days to do whatever. If you really love your time here, you can spend a day at an immigration office and get an extension for 10 more days, but after that you need to leave the country. Now, this is used mostly just for travelers and people passing through for a few weeks. If you are planning on staying longer, you can go to the Thai embassy in your country of choice and apply for a longer term visa, much more permanent than just a stamp in your passport, with a date you need to leave by. The most basic of these is the tourist visa. This is what we did in Cambodia before we came. Early in the morning one day, LanguageCorps picked up the 4 of us who were going to Thailand and brought us to the Thai Embassy. There we filled out a form, checked the 'tourist visa' box and handed that in along with 2 photos and our passport. We got a receipt, and the next day we got our passports back, complete with a Visa sticker for our tourist visas. We we crossed over into Thailand from Cambodia, since we already had a tourist visa, we got a stamp saying we could stay in the country for 60 days, instead of the 15 we would have gotten if we just tried to come into the country without a visa. (And at the end of that 60 days, we could go to an immigration office to get extended another 30 days, like I detailed in an earlier post.) But bottom line, even with this 60 day tourist visa and 30 day extension, there is going to come a time when you need to leave the country.

So what does someone like me, who wants to stay in this country for a while, do? Well, you go on what is affectionately called a 'visa run' by the many other people like mean in the same predicament. Thailand isn't too picky, they just want you to leave every little while so they can keep track of you, but they don't mind if you come right back in. So we have two options. The first is just to drive to the border, cross it, wait like an hour and turn back around and come in. The pro's of this are that its easier, less time consuming and cheaper. The con is that it only gets you 15 days and you would have to do it all over again in two weeks. It used to be 30 days, and it made a little more sense taking a day to run to the border once a month, but every two weeks is kind of ridiculous. So the second option is to take a longer trip to the capital of a surrounding country, and go through the application process that we went through in Cambodia, filling out a form and leaving our passports overnight. The pro of this is that it gets you a much longer amount of time in the country. The cons are that its more expensive, longer (3.5 days vs 1) and you are dealing with more complicated border crossings, not to mention the bureaucracy of the Thai embassy. (One other huge positive is that you might be able to get a double entry tourist visa. That would mean the same thing for the first 3 months, 60 days + 30 day extension, but at the end of that, we would just need to run to the border, go out and come back in, and we would get a second 3 months by only doing a day trip to the border and not a 4 day trip to another capital. Confusing I know, but just trust me when I say the double entry tourist visa is gold among the farangs here in Thailand.)

So with our first 90 days in Thailand coming to an end, Julia and I knew we needed to do something. So we crunched the numbers, looked at all the angles, and figured a trip to the Lao capital of Vientiane was prob the best bet. So last Sunday night we caught a taxi to the bus station and hopped on a bus heading off to meet our destiny...

Coming tomorrow: Part 2 - The Journey.

TPWWLT - Frank Sinatra - I Won't Dance

PS - No more boring visa talk in the rest of the Laos posts, I promise.