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Published: February 3rd 2015
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You know it’s going to be difficult when people can’t even agree on how to pronounce the name of the country.
‘Lao(s) ‘, I had said confidently with the silent s until I heard others say Laos.
So, ‘We’re going to Laos,’ I said to the next inquirer. ‘Where?’ she said, ‘Oh, we just loved Lao(s)! And there it was again, the silent s.
It’s difficult to strike a happy pronunciation medium between the two so we continue the struggle. Wiengchan instead of Vientiane. We shall be linguistically challenged every step of the way.
Difficult too was our mode of arrival. We had rather hoped that after a flight to Kuala Lumpur we would make our way by train up through Malaysia down along Thailand to Bangkok and up to Nong Khai and into Laos. It was not to be. The train was booked from the first day of enquiry so a hurried search found us an early morning flight from KLIA2 (KL’s budget airline hub) straight into Vientiane.
We found ourselves with 24 hours in KL. Well from even such a cursory visit it would not qualify for one of my top ten cities. Why,
you ask? Outwardly, transport by bus, train and monorail was frequent and inexpensive. Free purple commuter buses roam the streets.
But KL has lost its soul. We search for clinging vestiges of its multi-racial culture. We visit Chinatown, a Chinese temple and an Indian one. We spy an old building which fulfils my idea of stereotypical of old Malaysia. Maybe that’s it, all an imagined past.
Amanda and her friend Lisa, window display designers sat with us under a dripping Dong The Mun foodcourt awning where they come for breakfast every day before work. The rain was heavy now and talk began with the terrible flooding on the East Coast. We muse that a train trip would probably have been out of the question with landslides and tracks under water.
Conversation moves to the architecture in KL apart from the Petronas Towers.
‘Nearly all the old buildings have been destroyed,’ she said, ’if you don’t want to go shopping there’s not much to see.’ We had already taken the monorail which skirted the central shopping area and the skyscraper skyline looming through the stormy skies. We had toyed with the idea of looking for a new
laptop/tablet but thankfully only toyed. Last time this happened Graeme disappeared for hours in the backstreets of Kolkata (a black hole?) in search of a good deal!
Back to streetscapes she painstakingly drew us a map to guide us to the old train station ‘interesting architecture’ and across to the national mosque.
‘If you really want to see architecture you must go to Malacca and Penang. Lovely. You can walk or cycle around on the island.’
Visibly impressed by our impending stay at The Majestic Hotel on our return to KL they vow to meet up again at this stall for breakfast. And we vow to keep the old station for our return visit.
Food at our overnight stay hotel The Bary Inn was Indian influenced and guided by the restaurateur we enjoyed curried fish and roti before we retired for the night with an early wake-up call of 5am for our flight to Vientiane or was it Wiengchan?
All our flights were booked with Air Asia. A concerned email from my sister awaited us on arrival in Kuala Lumpur. We had been rather concerned too. The wreckage and bodies of passengers on the missing
Air Asia Indonesia flight had been found. The law of circumstance says that it could not happen to an airline twice in a row, but Malaysia has certainly had an unfair share of airline disasters in the last year. We had no desire to be a statistical impossibility.
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
La-os vs Laos
Growing up in SE Asia in the 1950's and 60's we always pronounced it La-os, with two syllables. When the GI's arrived in the mid-60's they pronounced it Laos with one syllable. I think they are the ones who screwed up the pronunciation. You could ask the Lao how they pronounce it...probably Muang Lao.