Snapshots

• On the karaoke boat yesterday, the staff and friends of Lao Rugby shared a spread of at least 12 dishes as we relaxed on Thai mattresses and sang Thai, Lao and English classics. While waiting for the boat, I talked to Vieng in Lao about my nose piercing and how hot the weather was.
• Sitting at my desk at VC, I had a conversation with a long-time expat coworker who told me that Laos is one of those places that you just have to learn to love because life is so tough here — loving it doesn’t come naturally like Bali or the South of France. The next day, over lunch with my friend Alex who has spent time living in African slums and much less developed parts of Southeast Asia, she talked about how easy life was here and how far removed from developing-world truths so many parts of Vientiane are.
• Sunday, it was 90 degrees in the shade with a perfect breeze and a few puffy clouds in the sky; we deemed it cool enough to eat our snack-style lunch outside on the patio and enjoyed the beautiful weather.
• I’ve heard a rumor that they have root beer here, and cottage cheese. I forget sometimes the small American novelties that couldn’t be found in France. For all its first-world glitz and glamor, France still manages to fall behind Laos in a few categories.
• Traffic here flows in a beautifully novel way. Two-wheeled vehicles (bikes and motorbikes) always get a front-row seat at traffic lights and, as long as you stay in the outside lanes, nobody will bat an eyelash at your slow speeds. Honks are simply reminders that there’s somebody behind you who needs to get around and even on the busiest roads, if it isn’t a peak hour, you can identify the vehicle behind you by its sound because traffic in general is so quiet.
• Even though the Dalat Sao market is bursting at the seams with people and merchandise of all kinds and qualities, it still comes down to “knowing a guy” or “knowing a place” to find a certain kind of fabric or shoe. I can imagine it a decade or two ago, a shadow of its current sprawling self, conducting business in exactly the same way.
•  I talked to my students the other day about “our generation” — that is, people born between 1978 and 2000. The article we read described Generation Y as people who are focused on success, aren’t afraid to demand what they need from the world, are tech and consumer savvy and who are generally pretty bad with money. I asked them if they saw themselves as fitting into that description and they agreed fully. Where they differed from the article, though, was when we talked about how our generation is different from our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Where in the west, those generations might be affected by the world wars or the war in Vietnam — with strictness and openness and senses of failure to match — here, those generations are defined by extreme poverty and a revolution that might still change everything. One student talked about her mother’s 11 siblings (workers to ward off poverty); another about his and his father’s differing opinions on Communism and Capitalism; another about her parents who moved from their farms to the city after the regime change. These students of mine might have cars and computers (and they certainly live in a world full of them), but they exist much Much closer to a different world than their peers in the article.