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One benefit to living in Laos as a foreigner is low prices, prices that haven’t been seen back in America for eighty years. For example, a manicure or pedicure, given in the comfort of your own home by the mobile Vietnamese women who bicycle around town looking for clients, will cost you 5000 kip. That’s 60 cents. I haven’t had a manicure in the US for awhile, but I think it costs more than that.
Another great deal is a shampoo, given at a salon, with an extended twenty minute head massage, while you lie comfortably in a lounge chair. That’s also 60 cents.
An hour-long full-body massage will cost you between $6 and $7 dollars.
There are no dairy cows here in Laos, so cow milk is expensive and imported from Thailand. But soy milk is made fresh each day, and you can pick it up by the bag on certain street corners for 3000 kip. Enjoy it hot or iced, sweetened with liquid sugar or natural, with gummy candies mixed in or plain. Any which way it’s the same price. 37 cents.
A delicious bag of ice coffee, ice tea, coconut juice or corn
juice will cost 4000 kip. About 50 cents. Hang it off your handlebars and drink it through a straw. Now you might be saying to yourself, “a bag of coffee?” That’s because instead of a plastic drink cup like we use for to-go beverages in the US, the classic to-go container in Asia is a bag. Yes. A bag. The beverage is poured in to a small plastic bag, with ice. A straw is inserted in to the bag, and often an elastic is used to tie the bag partially shut around the straw. Then another small plastic bag, this one with handles, is placed around the first plastic bag, as a sort of carrying case. You hold the drink by the handles as you drink it. It looks strange at first, but its really quite sensible. It also allows the seller to keep their glass or plastic bottles when selling sodas. It creates less large plastic trash, although it sure does create a lot of used plastic bags.
But Asia is full of plastic bags. You can’t get away from them. Imagine in the US when plastic bags were first invented, sixty, maybe seventy years ago. Everyone was
probably really excited about it. A bag you can just use and then throw away? Great! Give me ten! Wrap all my items separately! That’s what it’s like here. You buy hot sticky rice. It goes in a bag, and then in another bag with handles. You buy beef with vegetables. It goes in a bag with a tie, and then into another plastic bag with handles. Just try bringing your used bag back to be refilled. They look at you like your crazy before taking your bag, throwing it on the ground, and placing your food in a fresh bag. All your careful efforts to recycle at home? You can forget about them here. Recycling hasn’t yet been invented except for those who do it as a form of survival. And they don’t think of it as recycling. Those poor enough to have to collect plastic bottles and cans and bring them to be sold for a few cents per kilo are not thinking about saving the planet. So after awhile, you forget about trying to cut down on plastic bags, accept all the bags you are given each day, and then just re-use them on your own, when
Lao people aren’t looking.
Hungry? Food is the one of the cheapest things you can buy in Laos. If all you had to buy while you stayed in Laos was food, you could live here forever on a few months of income from back home. Massive three-egg omelettes stuffed with greens, accompanied by sweet, spicy peanut sauce cost $1.20. Big bowls of delicious noodle soup, accented by fresh herbs and greens, will also set you back $1.20. Kow piak, thick savory noodle or rice soup with chunks of pork cost only $1. Delicious Lao-pate wrapped in lettuce leaves, accented by dried chilies are three for 1000 kip. That’s 12 cents. Freshly rolled spring rolls, cold or fried, with a sweet peanut sauce, will also cost you 12 cents each.
A refreshing sweet and sour papaya salad will cost you 7000 kip, or 85 cents. A quarter pound of any of a whole table full of bowls of homemade Lao foods, imagine a sort of deli, will cost you 3000 kip. 37 cents. Sticky rice, a key component to any meal, (it’s like your spoon or your bread for dipping for most Lao foods), costs 1000 kip per 1/5
lb. 3000 kip, or 37 cents worth, is enough sticky rice for one. You buy it by the thousand kip. You actually go up to the rice woman, with her table set up on the roadside, a big thermos full of hot sticky rice inside and say 3000 kip please. That’s like being able to order bread by the ten cents, twenty cents, thirty cents. I’ll take 40 cents of bread please. Its great!
You can have a sandwich made for you on the street-side, Vietnamese-style, stuffed with all manner of unidentified meats and spices and vegetables, or Western-style, stuffed with vegetables, cheese and chicken, for 10,000 kip. That’s $1.20. You can have waffles in the morning, fresh off the press, for 24 cents. Curry puffs and little donuts, freshly fried, are 12 cents. Like many developing countries, Laos is a mecca of cheap, delicious, fresh food. Some visitors do complain about the liberal use of MSG though. It’s not a traditional ingredient in Laos food, but over the last twenty years, it’s become one.
Not everything here is cheap though. If you want to play tennis, there’s only one court, located 5 miles out of town, at
a fancy resort. One hour of play here will cost you $4. OK. Fine. I guess that’s still pretty inexpensive. But it’s all relative. Let me think. Another thing that’s not cheap here is meat. I believe that’s because Laos, thankfully, doesn’t yet have a mass produced meat industry. The normal meat you get here is what we back home would call “organic” or “free-range”, having lived a happy, free life, eating grass and natural foods. You still see chickens at random across the city, just wandering around yards and streets. And the fish for sale here was caught this morning from the river two hundred feet from the market. A grilled fish will cost you $3, a pound of grilled chicken breast or leg about $2. A skewer of delicious bacon-like pork pieces costs about 60 cents. A hunk of bacon-like pork will cost about $1.20. OK. Fine. I guess that’s pretty cheap too. But it’s all relative. A cocktail at a restaurant will cost you about $3 to $4. A large 420 ml domestic beer, $1.20.
A new leisure bike will set you back $80. A decent Trek mountain bike, about $250. A nice guesthouse room about
$12. A gorgeous hotel room, $60. A swim at the new local pool, $5. A meal at a fancy French restaurant, $100. Sushi, $5. Twelve hour bus ride, $10. Thirty-minute flight to the capital, $90. Flight to Bangkok, $270. Decent new motorbike, $500. Imports tend to be expensive, but products made or grown in Laos, as well as food and services, tend to be very low priced.
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Fred Appel
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YUMMMY !!!!!!!!!!!
Wow now I have to go into the kitchen for some, corn flakes , po me! Those Lao foods sound awesome!!!!!!! - Freddy.