Nong Khiaw to Luang Prabang with culture shock

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I just had a dream about Cam. I went to his Salon but his employees were all gone, there were only customers there waiting to get their hair done. I went into the Salon to look for Cam and they all told me where he was. All of the Salon employees were in a coffee shop cutting hair. On my way over to the coffee shop I ran into Leason and he could also speak English, I told him his English was really good and then kept on walking. When I got into the coffee shop I thought I saw Kast so I went over to say hi but when I got there it wasn't him, it was a customer with his hair in a similar fashion to Kast's so I went further into the coffee shop to continue looking. When I finally found him he was in a back room of the coffee shop speaking really good English with a foreign woman. When I went into where they were sitting she recognized me and I knew that she and Cam were together for some reason, but we seemed to be like friends.

Then I had another dream where Cam told Jason to come to our home to help him do something. While Jason was doing whatever it was Cam wanted him to do I went into that room and started making out with Jason, then the phone rang and he had to go. I have such random dreams, I swear all they mean to me is I had a bad night's sleep last night cause I kept waking up to all the noises. When I remember my dreams I usually don't feel like I got a good night's sleep.

Now I'm with an Indian (Navneet) and a German (Brigitte) in a big room. Today Brigitte and I woke up in Nong Khiaw, the most beautiful place in Laos, there was a big river in the middle of the town and two big mountain ranges on both sides of the river. It was a really lush place but there also weren't very many people there so it was really quiet. We got up at 7am and went to the boat landing at 8am to look at the boat schedule for the day. They told us to come back at 11 so we went to eat breakfast and talk with some other foreigners. I drank a lemon shake which I really like over here. After I finished drinking it we still had to wait two more hours for a boat to come so we would have more people to go with us. But when the boat came there was still no one to go with us so we ended up going ourselves, just the three of us. The first hour on the boat was really pretty we all took a lot of pictures and then I half read my book half stared at the scenery for another hour before having a bathroom break beside the river. I think the bathrooms here in Laos are quite something because it's just somewhere along the road or along the river, no real house or place to stop at to go to the bathroom in the western sense of the word.

It took us five hours to get to Luang Prabang and I really got a culture shock when I got there. There were too many foreigners and too many people wanted us to go follow them to some guest house or another, too many people on the streets. Compared to the past couple days of villages and tiny towns with a max of 15 foreigners a city of 200,000 with about 100 foreigners was just a bit too much for me. We went to a lot of hotels before finally stopping at one only for the two of them to put their bags down and me to wait while they went to look at even more guest houses. The people at the place I was waiting were so nice, they offered me some food (a sweet wrapped in a banana leaf and a banana) and some water and were very friendly. So I felt even worse when they came back to tell me we were going somewhere else to sleep. By this point I hadn't eaten food in a long time and was kind of in a bad mood but we went to check-in and have a five kuai veg meal and then went for internet. I got to call Cam and Dad on Skype and got set up with it for the first time. Cam was out at the beach playing cards with the boys for Mid-Autumn Festival so I didn't talk to him long, he asked me to call him tomorrow at 12 Lao time. I'm glad he's having fun and so am I but I kinda wished he missed me some so we'll have to see on that one.

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