Parkview Executive Suites Vientiane

... larges oreilles (rendez vous compte... je suis en train d<expliquer comment diriger un elephant...comme c<est etrange !).
Et tout se passe tres bien. Mae Cot m<ecoute parfaitement. Nous allons donc faire un petit tout dans le sentier boise ensemble -- avec mon mahout qui nous accompagne a pied...plus occupe a prendre des photos avec ma camera qu<a surveiller ma conduite ! Ca a fait des super photos cependant ! Je ne peux m<empecher de sourire en les regardant ...

... we had come across. We ate out by the Mekong River at these riverside restaurants - great food, cheap beer and cool scenery! Back at the hotel we thought we'd check out what the bar was like - karaoke was in full swing and as the only foreigners in there everyone wanted to talk to us and clink glasses! Somehow ended up singing Louis Armstrongs "Wonderful World", great song, but not when it's sung by two drunken louts who thought that Oasis's "Wonderwall" was coming on...

... kids meeting up in the empty lot next to Eric Wiggins' old house, behind what is now Sonic, for some football or baseball. Those were the days. Needless to say, I never got in on vball. At the end of the game one team forked over some money. I'm glad that I didn't get into a money match. The rain started just as we started walking home and really started falling once we got inside

That evening Wes and Savin told me about the Hash that was going to take place the following evening. It ...

... for a traditional lao massage. Laos has a curfew and everyone has to be off the streets by 10pm although they tend not to enforce this on tourists so much, the only place excepmt from this is the......... bowling alley so this is where we headed for some late night games.

the next day we wen to the moring market and then spent time in laos only water park it had 3 slides and 2 were out of order but it was ...

... following evening. That night was nothing out of the ordinary, eating and drinking in a local restaurant and talking about our plans for the rest of Laos.
One funny incident I have to report came when where were in a local fishing tackle shop. Our friend Scott was shopping for a new rod and reel and it was glaringly obvious, from the moment the five of us walked in to the shop, that the owner wasn't exactly happy with our presence ...

... signs starting with “rue” tell you the silver lining of Vientiane is still semi-european. As I walked I realized that by the time I leave these little family run stands may disappear and the entire bank could be nothing but dirt. It is amazing how things are replaced in the name of modernity or motivated for tourism. I don’t know if a European park as a riverbank will create a surge in tourism, but I am positive that the money would be better served ...

... river was quite funny but long: we were still at the beginning of the rain season so not a lot of water and the river flowing veeeery slowly. So slowly that at a certain point we got out and go searching for a tuk tuk to go back! After two days in Vang Vieng, we eventually headed to Louang Prabang, the key destination for us in Laos (part of the UNESCO world heritage). After ten hours of bus we got to this beautiful village sitting on the Mekong River. Louang Prabang keeps a ...

... if he had put forth much effort in any area during his supervisor's absence. Friday afternoon after school I zipped home to pack and promptly fell asleep for an hour putting me behind schedule already. I had agreed to go watch a muay thai match in Lumpini because a friend of my brother's was fighting and it would be quite unusual for a singaporean to be in a major arena in Thailand. Unfortunately he suffered an early loss and Michael and Dharmesh ...

... it feels awful. My sandals are wet and dirty and I have a foot cramp. I am not sure what people see in this holiday. We went to Bor Pen Nyang roof top bar on the riverfront for sunset. It was a nice view of the water and Thailand. Thailand is as close to Laos here as Detroit is to Windsor. I had humus and salad, Bill had a chicken pita. The food was OK. I did not want to get wet after dinner and some people were still going. I ...

... and allegedly carried suicide pills, flew one and a half times the number of air sorties flown over Vietnam (over 580,000 in total). This meant an average of one planeload of bombs dropped on Laos every eight minutes, twenty four hours a day, for nine years. The cost of this, at least in monetary terms, was $2 million per day. In 1970 Ric********** authorised massive B-52 carpet-bombing strikes on this genteel nation in order to obliterate large tracts of the countryside ...