Ah, Vientiane - it sounds so exotic with its colonial French architecture framed by leafy boulevards. Except there aren't any leafy boulevards, although the narrow streets full of motorbikes are reasonably clean. Most of the architecture is functional, low-rise Asian, with some monstrous government buildings along the main boulevard leading to Patouxay, the Lao 'Arc de Triomphe' which its own official sign describes as a 'concrete monster'. It was constructed with donated materials intended for an airport runway. The name is simply the French spelling of Viang Chan, which means sandalwood city. As a colony apparently Laos never paid its way, and even in 1940, when the French were still firmly clinging to Indochina, there were only 600 of them in the entire country. It's an odd place, with restaurants serving adequate, overpriced Western food, wildly
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