Today is my last day in Vientiane and although I have been having a good time, there really isn’t too much more that I want to see. For the record, I don’t think that the city has changed that much since I was last here. There may be more people, or maybe more expats is more accurate, but in general there hasn’t been any real surprises since I got here a few days ago.
Last night I decided to get some night photos of some of the attractions around here. Specifically, I wanted some photos of the Patuxai Arch and of the night market. So before sunset I started out and managed to barely get to the arch before the sun went down. The Patuxai is a monument to those who fought the French for independence. The funny thing is that the US was going to build an airport and donated the concrete to the Laos government, the Lao built the monument instead. I write, “instead” but in all honestly I don’t know if the US changed its mind and was okay with the monument.
After that I headed to the riverbank to get some photos of the night market. I actually did this two nights ago but after walking for about thirty-minutes I realized that I forgot to put my SD card in my camera. I headed back to the hostel to grab it, but lost the desire to go back out again. So last night I did manage to take a few okay photos of the market, but probably not enough to give a good sense of how large it is. Kind of funny, I was walking through the market just minding my business looking for something to take a photo of when I kind of hear someone speaking English. I kept walking thinking that it wasn’t aimed at me. When I actually started to hear what was being said I realized that they were saying, “hello.” and, “Excuse me.” I turned around and there was a little old lady looking up at me. She kind of gave me a hard time because it took me so long to actually acknowledge her. We ended up talking for about five minutes and although I kept waiting for there to be a ‘catch’ to the conversation, there never was.
Today I am leaving for Pakse, Laos. It’s about a 12-hour bus ride from Vientiane and I leave at about 6:30pm. So I checked out of the hostel and have to find a way to kill about six hours. Fortunately the hostel is cool about letting me hang here until the tuk-tuk comes to pick me up. Funny too, the Belgium guy that I mentioned in the other post is going to be on the same bus as me. The other thing that I’m kind of nervous about is that I used a visa service to get a visa for Vietnam. Nothing special about it except that I’m supposed to get my passport back at 5 tonight. That’s cutting it pretty close to the time that I’m leaving for the bus station. I think it will work out so I’m not too concerned, but there is a ‘bug’ in the back of my mind that is trying to prepare myself for the chance that things may fall apart.
