May 18, 2007 –
Well here I am and there you are. Wonder which one of us is happy and not stressed?
Let’s see... I had my coffee again at 8AM as I have been doing for the last several days but this morning I am waiting for my visa to return from the Vietnamese embassy/consulate here in
Supposedly I pick it and my air ticket up at 5PM for an afternoon flight tomorrow to
If anyone stumbles onto these ramblings and is interested, the visas here are more than in Luang Prabang. Go figure. Why would the visas in the capital, which is closer to
If you have been following my journal entries, you might get the feeling from me that
Strong words you say (and some might argue with me), but have you been here recently? This use to be one of my favorite places in
Photo Gallery Two - The Mekong
Today however the elegant old French colonial buildings lining the wide, tree lined boulevards, resemble 3rd world shanty towns as they have now been encased with tin covered roofs and walls. The once brightly colored facades have faded to dim yellows and pale greens with large patches of black and brown mildew. Ugly is the operative word here....
In one of my favorite movies, ‘City of Ghost’, which is about Phnom Penh and Cambodia after the demise of the Khmer Rouge and a place that I once 'lived long time', there is a famous exchange about how shitty it looks with a response stating that “…. that’s it charm” and ‘…the whole country needs a paint job”. Today those lines fit
I even did the morning market again. I went and looked at every shop and their wares and like the night market in Luang Prabang, more of the same but different. At least in Luang Prabang there was the illusion that these local folks were selling their own goods but you realized that after 3 streets of identical items there, that someone had to be giving these things to these people on consignment. Here in
The people though seem to have a smile left now and again. That was one of the wonderful things I remembered most about
Just outside the morning market and across from the post office there is a new, multi-storied shopping mall. At a distance it looks to be very upscale until you reach it and look inside, and discover that it is 95% empty for the most part and for those shops left, obviously slowing dying. Someone thought they would make a ton of money with that monstrosity but I wonder if they still have their new Mercedes or Land Cruiser now they got when they touted the projects to the big boys? Probably so, it wasn’t their money anyway I am sure, and it probably didn’t costs that many logs……
Evening Hours in
I also went back to my hangout when I use to work up here which is a place called ‘Samlo’. Ouch! It use to be a dirty, filthy, smelly, hot bar (but quaint), with all the beer drinking, fat bellied, tequila swilling local ex-pats meeting there after ‘work’ to exchange lies and tall tales. The food use to be bad but now it has gone to horrific. I ordered something sold as “porkchops and apple sauce” with potatoes and peas. Yum! Yum! I thought, that sounds damn good. When it finally arrived from the Indian restaurant across the alley from the Samlo (which I discovered it had originated from), nothing on that plate could be described as food, and I surely would not give it to my dog!
But all this Samlo charm is now being lost to a new yuppie upstart place down the street of ‘mud and sewage’ to a charming sounding establishment called ‘Kao Chai Deu’. Wow, what a name. I guess simple country folk like me aren’t suppose to hang out in such fancy sounding places like the ‘Kao Chai Deu” as I butchered the name talking with a local and was promptly laughed at for my stupidity. Got to love French educated folks, they are just so patient and kind when others try to communicate with them. Maybe rubbing my stomach and pointing at my mouth would better communicate my needs and wants like we do in
Anyway. I spent a couple of evenings at the Samlo with the boys Jay and Matt shooting pool, but after peeking my nose into the Asian/French sounding upscale boutique bar, I turned my collar up and sauntered in for a beer. Holy shit batman! The place starts to rock with happy hour and by 10PM or so, it is jammed with cocktail drinking, yuppie backpackers with their Mai Tai and Daiquiris. What a scene!
After all these years in
Anyway. The Frenchy sounding place was a real joy. Nice young ladies in very sexy dresses selling their wares (slap…get your head out of the gutter!). I am referring to the Carlsberg beer girls floating amongst the clientele in their green silk dresses with white sashes selling beer! (By the way, this is one of the places that has the sign advising you not to entertain ‘working girls’ in the establishment as it goes against the social norms of the Laotian people. Cough…cough…right….)
Me.....“Excuse me miss, do you have a job?”
Her...."No. Why?"
Me....“The sign says near the toilet that if you don't I can talk to you….”
What a great opening line!
Of course, as you stumble home in the mud at closing time, there is always the ever present lady boy that offers to take care of your manly needs for $5 as an added bonus to the evening’s festivities if you haven't managed to find the right, .....un-employed lady at a local club. Isn’t Asia grand and communist
There is another club in town which is making the rounds of the Novatel boys ($70 a night types) and that is the club called ‘Future’ just up from the Novatel. Now I had to laugh as I listened to the stories of the boys telling me about their erotic encounters from the young ladies they met there and they swore, up and down, that no money exchanged hands. Out of curiosity, I had to see this place where local girls took no money for favors given. So I tagged along for the cultural experience to see with my with my own eyes to see how
Inside the number of women to men was about 10 to 1. Hmmm. Easy to see how one could score here but this sure had a familiar feel to it I though. Flashback…..And where were all these local ladies getting the kind of money it took to stand around for hours, laughing and talking and tossing back bottle after bottle of Beer Lao that littered their tables? Were they all executive secretaries for large international law firms here in this cosmoploitian capital? Were they all friends of the owner? Were they waiting for their boyfriends to show up after late dinner meetings with important clients? Maybe executive assistants to the Mekong River Commission boys?
Oh yeah! I remember now.
Martinis Bar.
Girls everywhere….hmmmmm
“Free lancers” as they were called by some.
Some might say ‘coyotes’ in
In
People here don’t have sex and they surely don’t take money for it as that would be sooooooo capitalistic. I was probably mistaken and in fact I missed the sign offering sun tanning booth services……but the boys still SWORE that this wasn’t a brothel! At 35 years old, you see the world through a different shade of glasses than at 50. But whatever gets your boat to float I thought………
In the states we say when it is really raining hard that it is pouring ‘cats and dogs’. Here in SE Asia, watching the rain come down somehow that expression seems rather weak and I think ‘its raining elephants and water buffalo’ might be a better expression for just how hard it is raining at the moment, but life goes on. (Did you know buffalo is both singular and plural..;>)
Today finds me in the capital of
Along with that transition comes the inevitable construction which can be found anywhere and everywhere throughout this part of the world. The sound of saws whirling and hammers banging is constant, from sunup to sundown. Even the Aussie lads are building a new embassy across from the ever present Japanese a bit out of town. The US Embassy looks busy as well, with long queues of locals trying to get to the ‘American Dream’, which is neither American nor a dream anymore.
Even here in
As I sit here having some amazing Tom Yum Goon (hot spicy shrimp soup) and a cold Beer Lao, I stare out across this image and feel sick inside from the site. Having lived and traveled along these waters from Chiang Saen to
The change is due to the Chinese dams upstream. It is the monsoon season here and these waters should be surging at their banks with currents rushing by towards the Mekong Delta in
Ahhhh yes, another international bureaucy which was established to rape the people and their resources and as I predicted 5 years ago, did just that and are in the process of destroying them and their livelihoods. When there was no rules to control the water, there was water. With the rules, the water has ended. Wonder who is making the rules? Combined with the pillage of the lands due to logging, what do these people have left? Chinese shops houses filled with cheap junk to sell to dope smoking backpackers in an environmental disaster? Sounds like a place I want to tell all my friends about….
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