This weekend marked one month in Laos, which has passed much more quickly than I expected.
In the past four weeks I have:
-moved into a new house
-bought and learned to drive a motorbike
-learned how to say just a few things in Lao
-learned how to say just a few things in Australian/British English (the cause of some amount of confusion to me when I open the textbook to teach a lesson and realize that the English I’m about to teach doesn’t sound right to me)
-learned how to play badminton
-started teaching, and learned all of my students’ names (major accomplishment)
-experienced my first Lao holiday
-eaten more sticky rice and drank more Beerlao than I care to think about
-done karaoke, danced at a birthday party, gone bowling, and met several Lao popstars
-heard different renditions of “Hotel California” by at least 4 Lao bands
-eaten Lao, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, French, Italian, home-cooked, and street vendor food
-visited the Joma coffeeshop enough times to redeem a frequent buyer card
-shopped at street markets, the labyrinth like “Talat Sao” (Morning Market), and Home Ideal, the Walmart of Asia
Fireworks celebrating the Dragonboat festival and my first month in Laos.
I was reminded by the fact that a month has already passed because I had to make the trip to Thailand this past weekend to renew my visa. Despite the fact that I had the paperwork and approval for a business visa for my employer, the formality of “leaving the country” was still necessary to changeover my visa. I drove with a coworker to the Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge, just a few kilometers out of town. Once at the bridge, we had to get exit stamps from Laos, then get on an over-packed bus to drive across the bridge. There’s a strange interchange that switches traffic from the right, like in Laos, to the left, as in Thailand. Five minutes later, we were processed as entering Thailand, and refused all of the tuk-tuk drivers’ offers to drive us into Nong Khai (the closest town, which apparently has really good shopping…I’ll be returning there in the future), instead running across the street where we got exit stamps from Thailand, and onto another bus which took us back across the bridge, where we reentered Laos.