Buddha Park

Over the last few days I’ve been introduced to many things:
-future colleagues and other PiAers (there are 6 of us here)
-many favorite restaurants in town, from Indian to falafel to lots of Lao (I can’t say that I’m disappointed that eating out is the norm here since it’s cheaper than cooking unless you know how to cook Asian food…and not even too much more expensive than that)
-the morning (though I’m not usually a morning person, the combination of jet lag and loud motorbikes outside has gotten me up between 6 and 8am everyday)
-dust, dust, dust.  sunglasses are a must to keep dust out of my contacts by day, and yesterday I felt like I had smokers’ lung after the ride out of the city.

our transport to and from Buddha Park

Yesterday, I went with 3 of the other PiAers and two new expat friends to Buddha Park, a concrete theme park filled with Buddhist statues a few kilometers out of town.  To get here, we hired one of the Lao versions of a taxi cab, called a jumbo. The three most common forms of mass transit in town, in order of increasing size, are the tuk tuk, the jumbo, and the songathaew. A tuk tuk is basically a motorbike with a bench for passengers in the back, a jumbo is a miniature truck with a covered bed with benches, and a songathaew is a full-sized truck.  Our jumbo driver took us on the dusty roads out of town, where we passed many cows and chickens, the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge, and the Beerlao factory before arriving at the park.  Near the entrance of the park was a circular concrete structure, with creepy statues inside (the whole place was kind of creepy, actually) and dimly lit, treacherous winding stairs to the top (no railing on either of these…clearly lawsuits are not an issue in Laos) where we overlooked the rest of the park, dominated by the enormous reclining Buddha.  We finished at the park just in time for the rainy season downpour to begin on our jumbo ride back into the city.

Reclining Buddha

Some things that are totally normal here, like riding in the back of a truck in a monsoon, or buying gas in a used liquor bottle off the side of the road when the gas station is closed (which it does around 5pm) are very different than my daily life in America.  Others, naturally, are much the same.  About a week ago, I saw B.o.B. perform his top-40 “Nothing on You” live at Princeton Lawnparties.  Less than a week later, I heard a Lao band perform it in a crowded bar.  It’s hard to say which rendition was better.  At the moment I feel as though I could be anywhere: I have an iced coffee, the air-con is up high, and American oldies are playing.  But then I notice the dragonfruit in my fruit salad and the songathaew passing outside and remember that I couldn’t be anywhere else.