Laos discovered and remembered

---

Its 9.30pm, and i am sitting in my house in Vientiane, with an overhead fan, and a laptop fan under my laptop dripping sweat into my keyboard having just attended "an event" run by WIG, a Lao equivalent of the women's institute. It was held above a bookshop and was a moderately interesting talk about a website /discussion group on topics ranging from farming and agricultural policies to insect farming - which i would muchrather have heard about.
Warm wine and orange juice was served at the door as aprt of the 30,000 kip $3 entry fee, and it was packed with an uninteresting mix of people, apart from a lovely couple i play the occasional game of tennis with.
The presentation itself was professional, but the content, for me at least , was bland to the extreme.

I am deeply saddened by my time in Laos, before i lived here i beleived Luang Prabang to be my favourite place in the universe, but living there for only three weeks it took on the sinister undertones of Twin Peaks, and was apparently run by a mercenary and very aggresive gang of tuk tuk drivers whose prices compared unfavourably with those of London cabbies!

Initially looking for work there, i realised that more was left unsaid than said, and there was a retinence to welcome a newcomer into their tiny fold comprising fueding factions from France, America and UK, Competion and avarice is rife, and only the beautiful surrounds and healthy Lao food compensated for the overpriced hotels, guesthouses and gently mocking locals - it was only as a wouldbe ex-pat that i realised how much i had been taken for a ride as a tourist in previuous years - where the tranquility of the surrounding countryside was sheer heaven compared to the sirens and traffic of London and Vietnam. Sad, but true.

Even the saffron clad monks who wander the streets in abundance, had the disconsolate looks of grumpy adolescents, mobiles and i-pods clamped in their ears, they appeared to spend more time in the internet cafes than listening to the works of Buddha. But then then the violent and quite horrific graphics of their equivalent to purgatorywhich were painted in each and almost every temple may holdtestimony that this is not Buddhism as i know it.

---