Photo Montage: A day in the life of Francis in Vientiane

Greetings Capitalists!  I was feeling a bit bored recently and decided it was high time to update the blog again.  Since the last update, I've gotten Dengue, had tons of schoolwork to do and had my parents visit.  I will have blog updates shortly both Dengue and my parents visit.  I assume there is little interest in seeing pictures of me studying.  For now, a look at a day in the life of Francis in Vientiane.

Morning begins.  Standard wares on bed: laptop and Cognitive Psychology book with some withered palm trees outside the window as we're nearing the end of dry season.  

First sight out of the bedroom:  my beautiful wife.  Likely catching up on celebrity gossip on People.com

Head downstairs and greeted by Mit, our Mae Bon.  She is pretty much the sweetest person there is.

After getting ready and walking out the door, I am a greeted by the sounds of dog barking and  chicken shrieking.  Turns out the neighbors dog, Poppy (pictured)...

And Buddy...

Had cornered and were trying to kill our neighbors chicken...

Enter Muong, the gardener.  He saved the day.   Muong, like all Lao, is extraordinarily friendly.  Quick story:  He also takes care of the pool.  Trying to make a few extra bucks, he had sold all of the chemicals for said pool and rendered it both bright green and unusable for the month of February.  Upon hearing this, the people that own the house inexplicably gave him a raise.

Later, after putting on some of this...

So I don't get this again...

I hopped on this and made my way into town.  FYI, this is a Kolao Classic, joint venture company between Korea and Laos.  It's a 100cc scooter that we bought for 750 bucks brand new.  Life changer.  Awesomely fun to ride and allowed me to lean my around Vientiane.  Now, the route to kickboxing practice.

The dirt road we live on.  No idea what it's called.  To give directions to our house, we have to tell people to go to the closest embassy and give directions from there.

Our street from the opposite end.  Tin shack houses, stray dogs and chickens everywhere.



Turning right off our street you can see the local garbage burning area.  Who needs garbage pickup when you can massively pollute your own neighborhood for free?  The smell of this smoke is god awful and everywhere.  In a weird way, it is the thing I will always associate with and remember most vividly about this place.  Dusk is prime garbage burnin' time.




The greatest sign in the history of signs. 



Finally, I make it to kickboxing class.




My buddy Don (left) and our teacher Safaa.



Saf with your humble narrator.  Saf is an amazing teacher and has led an extraordinary life.  I should do a blog entry just on him.

So, I stopped here, Simuang, our local go-to Western food store which also has an ATM.  I pick up some cigarettes.  Carton of Marlboro Lights = $15.  Just about the price for a pack in NYC. 

Park across the street from Simuang.  This guy says hello.

  

  After hitting up the cash machine, I get a bunch of these.  The local currency here, the Lao kip, is 8000 to the dollar.  

Afterwards I invite my buddy Don to the house for some of this...




And we immediately negate our hour and a half workout with a lot of cigarette smoking and aforementioned coffee drinking.  Don displaying his Canadian roots via this killer Canada Rocks t-shirt.

After finishing coffee time with Don, I went to Joma Phonton cafe.  I eat here all the time while Alex is at work because I can't cook for shit.

I ate this.  It cost 3 dollars.

View from where I was sitting.  Even in Laos, there is always money in the banana stand.

By the time I finished eating, it was probably around 11:30am and I was sweating balls.  I checked my handy Samsung phone's Weather.com app.  95 degrees with heat index of 107.  It went up to 100 and 115 respectively by 5pm (which is the hottest part of the day).  Still not hot season.

After lunch, I stopped home.  Greeted by our UN mandated security guard, Khamount, and his daughter Liu.

After heading out again, I stop by the other Western food store by us to pick up a few things.

Stop by my buddy Steve's house to hang out for a bit.  This is the outside of his condo complex.

My man Steve.

 After hanging with Steve, I go back in attempt to study for a bit.  Doesn't happen.  Swim instead.

Afterwards, Alex and I grab dinner here - Aria.  Good pizza and pistachio ice cream were had.

End of the night, I treat my lady to a $1 DVD of Les Miserables.  I fall asleep.

THE END.

E-Coli and Electricity Ladders

Greetings Capitalists.  Sorry for the delay on updating this page. Between getting E-Coli and catching up my schoolwork I haven't had the time and/or energy to do so.  But, I'm going to try to do a post every 1-2 weeks from here on out.  I will probably post things less often on Facebook so I'll have more to write on here.

Anyway...

So, since my last update quite a few things have happened.  Most notably I contracted E-Coli which royally sucked.  The most typical way to get it is from drinking non-treated tap water or eating poorly cooked food.  I'm thinking I got it by eating a disgusting piece of street meat.  It was beef that tasted more like rotten fish, so fairly safe to assume that was the culprit.  Never again will I do that.  I'm downright scared to eat meat of any sort now.

E-Coli is straight-up AWFUL and I now understand what the meaning of 'feeling like death' is.  I dropped a good 10-15 pounds in a week as my stomach become bloated to the point of not being able to drink or eat anything.  I took far too long to go to the doctor as I never had a high fever, but found out after going that I have an allergy to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin.  This set me back a pretty nasty rash and allowed the E-Coli to stay in my body for an additional week.  Eventually I was given a mix of different antibiotics by a doctor at the French Medical Clinic here, which is basically the best place to receive medical treatment in all of Laos, which isn't saying a lot.

On a more positive note, I have fulfilled a long-held bucket list wish of getting a moped.  She's a beauty and is insanely fun to hop around Vientiane in.  Seriously, I love this thing.  It's a Kolao, which is a joint venture company between Korea and Laos.  I was tempted to buy a faster Suzuki or Honda motorcycle, but those things get stolen constantly.  The Kalao ended up costing only about 900 bucks brand new and I can get a weeks worth of gas for around 3 bucks.  Francis likey.  Here's a pic.

Alex and I finally have a pretty good feel for this city now.  Here's a map (click on it to make it large enough to see).  We live where the red circle is within the embassy part of town.  The black square is the downtown area.  That's easy to find because it's where all of the white people are.  Lots of great little restaurants here where you can get a good meal for less than 5 bucks.

The weather here is insane.  I've mentioned on facebook several times that it's the cool season,  yet somehow is still 95 degrees every day.  It's also the dry season.  I think we've had a combined 5 minutes of rain so far in 5 weeks.  Hot season is going to be an unbearable 110 degrees and 90 percent humidity, or so I've been told.  Thankfully it only lasts for the months of March and April.  I think I'll head back to Jersey for most of April to jointly visit family and friends while getting out of the heat.

Speaking of heat, it has made me already go through several haircuts and facial hair configurations.  I think you'll notice a pattern here.

I'm also happy to report that I've gotten my driver's license back.  On our second day in Vientiane I was pulled over for a cop for having my headlights on during the day.  Apparently, that's a no-no for some reason.  Once I was pulled over, the cops here (who are kind of scary looking communist police) took my license and drove away.  Apparently, I was supposed to follow them but it was hard to know that considering they spoke zero English.  Only later did I learn I could just give them 4 dollars and they'd walk away with no questions asked.  Instead, Alex had to enlist the help of UN security to first locate my license.  It wasn't until we offered $25 to a policeman that they finally 'found' it.  Bribery goes a long way here.

Since we have gotten here two major things have happened at home - Hurricane Sandy and the re-election of President Obama.  It was a very helpless feeling watching the reports of Hurricane Sandy and watching foreign coverage of the election helped me realize what an enormous impact US politics and policies have on the world, even here in tiny, communist, landlocked Laos.  It's easy to see how the US affects places like Iraq or Afghanistan but seeing it from here provides a very different and very real perspective that I hadn't had before.  I'm sure I'll write more on that in future posts.

Please note -I now have a US phone number that forwards to my cell phone here in Laos.  The number is 908-514-4473.  Call me!  Reminder:  Laos is 12 hours ahead of EST.

Lastly, escalators in Laos are called 'electricity ladders'.  How awesome is that?

Over and out.

-Pat

Long overdue update from Laos.

Hi all - we only had intermittent access to the internet for awhile and now that its back this post is way overdue. 

First off - it's insane what we've seen on the news and from our Facebook feeds regarding Hurricane Sandy.  It always seems like the media overhypes these things but the sense from here is that things, if anything, were worse than predicted.  Our thoughts are with all of you and Alex and I wish we could be there to help in some way.

As far as things over here, it's been a very interesting first two weeks to say the least.

As I mentioned on Facebook at some point, after 20 hours of flying we arrived in Bangkok.  Here's some photographic evidence of that.

First picture - right as we departed the plane in Bangkok.

Bags, Buddy and all.

Buddy's ID for the plane.  He is friendly.

Our 24 hours in Bangkok coincided with Alex's birthday so we treated ourselves to a suite at the Conrad Hilton Hotel.  Amazingly enough, also in Bangkok for one night, and staying in the same hotel was my college roommate Ryan and his fiancé Andrea - both of whom were en route back to Germany from a month long trip in Australia. 

In the morning, we set off for what was expected to be an 8 hour drive to Vientiane, but ended up being 14.  All the while, we had to have buddy's crate on top of the van as there wasn't enough room with all of our luggage.  The crate had these giant 'LIVE ANIMAL' stickers all over it from the flight and even though buddy was in the car with us, definitely looked like we were pulling a Mitt Romney-dog-on-the-car trick.

Buddy Mobile

We came into Laos via the Friendship Bridge connecting Thailand and Laos.  My initial impression after crossing was that Laos seemed like North Korea compared to the Westernized Thai side of the border.  My next thought was 'wow, there is no corporate advertizing here at all - awesome!'.   Well, except for the ubiquitous Lao Beer signs everywhere.  Everywhere.  

We stayed the first 5-6 days in temporary housing.  It wasn't too shabby.

Our piece of home we brought here.

My new best friend.

Then we moved into our permanent home.  I'm not going to lie - it's absolutely gorgeous.  It's hard not to feel like we live in paradise.  But, I think its also emblematic of this country in that such opulence is completely surrounded by abject poverty.  Our neighbors quite literally live in tin shacks (which I did not feel comfortable photographing as I didn't want to disrespect them in any way).  It's hard not to feel guilty but makes me feel that much more determined to do serious volunteer work here to give back in some way.

Front Porch

House

Backyard

After moving in, Alex had picked up a bad cold and between that and work she's been a bit out of it.  However, today she finally started to feel better and had off of work for Buddhist Lent, which is a huge holiday here.  Essentially, it consists of crazy drunk Lao people boat racing on the Mekong and setting off fireworks all over the place.  We thought it would be an ideal day to take our first side trip, to Buddha Park, about 45 minutes east of Vientiane.  

This group of Chinese dudes ran up to us wanting to take our picture, so we returned the favor.

Afterwards we went out to dinner at Lao Gardens, which is looking like our go-to restaurant here as it's just down the road.  It was a beautiful night following a near perfect 75 degree, no humidity day which hopefully will be very common during the dry season, which lasts from November - February.

As we were finishing dinner I think it finally sunk in that we will be living here for at least the next two years.  And I'm very happy about that.  This place is so beautiful, both aesthetically and culturally.  The laid back nature and friendliness of the people is a welcome change from NYC and really suits my personality in a way NYC did not (though believe me, I miss home!).   I can't help but feel at peace and content here and I can't wait to experience it more fully each day.

Love and miss you all!
Pat (and of course Alex, too).