Vientiane

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We planned to travel pretty far south today in hopes of getting close to the Vietnam border and crossing over. We ended up stopping in the capital of Vientiane as Matt looks for a new camera. We are undecided about doing the massive caves as our last stop in Laos or heading straight over to Vietnam. I think it will be a last minute decision.

Vientiane itself is like all the other big capital cities. It is crowded with tourists and has many expensive stores selling all of the same stuff you find in the smaller cities for twice the price. We did head over to the mall to look for cameras but ended p finding a large amount of watch kiosks instead. The main electronics dealer here is called the k-plaza. So we grabbed a tuk-tuk and tried to head over there. Unfortunately the tuk-tuk driver had very poor English and we should have found another. We are slow learners with this process though and trusted him to get us to the right place. We ended up at a pizza shop a block away. Apparently Plaza and Pizza sound the same and he couldn't understand what the problem was. We paid him and ended up walking the 15 minutes instead (we got better directions from another tuk-tuk driver).

The internet was another blunder when we got here. We went into a cafe with free wifi and bought some fruit shakes (which we really didnt want but had to buy for the internet) only to find out the wifi was not working. Luckily internet cafes are in abundance so we headed over to one across the street. Tomorrow we head out of the big city for the caves or for Vietnam.

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