Vientiane: the First Year

One year ago, I touched down in Hong Kong, arriving in Asia for the first time.  It would take me far too long right now to contemplate and comprehensibly all of the things I’ve learned, encountered, and enjoyed in the past year, and all of the reasons I am happier everyday that I took the opportunity to stay a second year.  So, in lieu of that, and in honor of my one year anniversary of life in Asia, I’ll just share a few more superficial everyday things (besides the food!) that I enjoy about living in Vientiane.

Motorbikes
Seriously…what a great mode of transport!  Cool-looking, fun, and faster than driving a car–especially as the roads here aren’t exactly built for large cars, so it’s much faster to have a motorbike so you can always cut to the front of traffic.  I haven’t driven a car in a year (?!).  There are times though in the rainy season–along with every time I’m sitting behind a 1980s-era bus spewing black clouds right into my face–when I remember the merits of an enclosed vehicle.  Otherwise, motorbikes are always conducive to adventure, which I appreciate.

My motorbike, and those of two friends.

Motorcycles we drove to Luang Prabang in March.

Handicrafts
Markets, bags, colors, textiles, scarves, fabrics, carvings, ceramics, bargaining.  Enough said.  Now I just need to find some handmade suitcases to take home all of the stuff I’ll be accumulating in two years here.

A whole street filled with handicrafts, Luang Prabang.

Indulgences
Along the same self-indulgent lines as handicrafts–when else am I going to be able to afford this?  $5 massages, $3 pedicures, designing my own clothes to be tailor-made, $8 set menus at classy French restaurants. (The answer to the above question is never–unless I decide not to leave).

Shophouses
Stores+houses=most businesses.  Grandma watching TV while Uncle Phet fixes your motorbike.  Kids eating jelly snacks while mom makes fried rice and their three gnarly-looking dogs sleep under the table.  Something about the collision of “home” and “public” is comforting–it makes running down the road to pick up mundane things like toilet paper or dish detergent more personal in a way.

Dusk
Perhaps I’ve partly become so fond of this time here because I rarely get a chance to see it–5 days a week I’m teaching from 5-8 at night.  But between the afternoon and the sunset the atmosphere around the city gets palpably more lively.  People are off work and our driving or socializing, grilled meat aroma fills the streets, the weather has cooled enough to make walking around tolerable.  The riverfront is abuzz with activity each night as the light grows dim, and whenever I have the chance (which is not all that often), I like to join.

Nightly aerobics that take place by the river.

Riverside street vendors at dusk.

Really, there are so many other things that  have more made this place what it is for me (in more significant ways) that I haven’t taken the time to discuss, obvious and integral things like people, teaching, and language learning (but I don’t have exciting and colorful pictures of those things to show off in this post).  And in fact I think that my fondness for this place transcends the concrete aspects I can easily write about–the luxuries and cultural quirks and friends.  It’s a slow but steady accumulation of sounds (the grating, incessant meow of my cat, the aow? sound my students make in unison when surprised), smells (champa flowers, and the aforementioned gnarly dogs at the noodle soup shop), and images (faded advertisements for “Milo”and heavy bundles of power lines).  Maybe you could just call it familiarity.  But what I can conclude for now is that the past year has been nothing like my expectations.  It’s hard to even remember what those once were, but I know they were certainly different.  But what I have experienced has exceeded them largely because it has been a surprise.  So here’s to one more year–of motorbiking, and handicrafts, and surprises.