Shopping and Border Crossing
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2009
1
36
42
Trip End
Nov 29, 2009
Vientiane, Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Sunday, November 22, 2009
After we shopped for awhile, we went back to the hotel, checked out, and hopped into the hotel’s car for a ride to the border. On the way there, we listened to Thai talk radio
Hurry....we're standing in the road!
. Whatever they were saying must have been funny because everyone in the car was laughing. We arrived at the border, exited through Lao immigration, and then headed to the duty-free shops. Notice a theme here? O loves to shop and is the best bargain-hunter I’ve ever met. She led us through the duty-free shops and I was astonished at how many fakes (Izod, Gucci, Prada, Polo, etc) were being sold in the shops. O put it best when she said, "many, many copies." And GOOD copies – wow! The purses weren’t all that convincing but the Izod and Polo fakes were dead-ringers for the original versions. Interestingly, since many of the products being copied are manufactured in Asia, there were few appreciable differences in terms of product quality. Kind of frightening, actually. When you buy a full-price “brand-name” product in America, who’s to say it’s an original and not a fake? I understand now more than ever why manufacturers get so upset about copies of their products being sold. With fake Ralph Lauren button-down shirts selling for the equivalent of $4 US, how can the big companies compete? We shopped for a bit, then stopped at Mittaphab Coffee Shop and Bakery for a quick lunch. I ordered a vegetarian spring roll which ended up being a translucent noodle wrapped around what tasted like parsley. Actually pretty yummy – better than it sounds. Best of all, I ordered an “orange frosty” which was a frozen drink that reminded me of the Orange Julius drinks I used to love as a kid. On the way out, we picked up some baguettes at an outdoor food vendor to bring back to Thailand.
We took a van to the Thai border crossing and went through immigration, then we took a samlor (like a three-wheeled songthaew) to the Nong Khai bus terminal
Riding in the samlor to the bus at border
. We found a bus headed to Khon Kaen but it wouldn’t leave for about 45 minutes so we bought tickets and boarded the bus early to claim our seats. The bus left around 3pm and arrived at Khon Kaen around 7pm. Along the way, the bus made a bunch of quick stops to pick up passengers and we got to watch a Vin Diesel movie, dubbed in Thai, for our viewing pleasure en route. For the last hour and a half of the trip, Fei Li had to go to the bathroom desperately - when we arrived in Khon Kaen, I've never seen someone disembark from a bus so quickly. There was no bathroom available at the bus terminal so we ran to the Faculty of Nursing van and hopped in for a quick ride to a nearby convenience store. Once our quick bathroom stop was completed, the van took Fei Li and I back to the dorm and after that, took Nan and O home.Vientiane was an amazing trip - I'm so glad I had the opportunity to go. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a walkable city filled with history and atmosphere. If you speak French, even better - you'll find Vientiane to be like a tiny little Paris in the middle of Southeast Asia.
