I took another tuk tuk taxi back to Vientiane, but this time it was filled with foreigners who had all just taken a kayak trek from Vang Vien. It seems like that would be really far, since a bus took 4-5 hours, but they had that fresh out of a wormhole smell, which explains it. I got back to Vientiane, dropped off right across from the hostel I had been staying at, so I checked back in for another 3 nights, until my train to Bangkok. Some people from my tuk tuk taxi followed me because I had recommended it. But is it really worth a mention, because I never saw them again after checking in, except once at a breakfast place as I walked by from the street, and I just waved. I got to my room and unpacked, then checked my email and found a message from Luke and Jo--they were in Vientiane and were looking for me, but the email was from two days before, so I hurriedly emailed back and told them I would be in the cafe at my hostel for the next hour, but I had no idea if they would get it. It can be tough communicating on the road, without phones, in cities where most hostels don't have internet (the one I was at had internet but it was terrible so I had to use the wifi from the bar across the road). I sat in the cafe, drank some tumeric tea, and tried to learn the Lao language by listening to the people working there gossip--at least it seemed like gossip. After an hour, no sign from Luke and Jo, so I went back to my room to drop off my stuff and go out for some dinner. As I got to the lobby I saw the curly hair of a gorgeous foreigner--Joanna, and behind her stood Luke. They were surprised to see me because they had read my email wrong and thought I would be waiting at a different cafe and they were just coming back to their hotel room, which curiously was the room next door to mine. We are getting used to the lack of likely events becomming common, but this was a bit of a behemoth on the scale of coincidences, since there are hundreds of guesthouses in Vientiane, what is the chance that we would have rooms next door to eachother. Outrageous. I mentioned that I was on my way to get some food at a night market I had found and they joined.
There wasn' t quite as much selection as the previous night market in Luang Prabang, but there was a lady who made spring rolls for 1000 kip each, or 8 for a dollar. I ordered 10 and ate 9 of them. I choked badly on one because I was looking at a ferris wheel and hit a pepper, but I recovered without people noticing. There was a super old, possibly also crazy, Laos lady sitting on a stool, kind of in the middle of the sidewalk, who kept saying stuff in Laos and then laughing manically, almost hysterically, as if she had swallowed a hyena and absorbed its essence, at us. We didn't think we were doing anything that was funny, but it could have just been the situation, of 3 White people sitting next to a ferris wheel on plastic stools eating spring rolls. It was an infectious laugh and we didn't mind. In fact we waved at her and then she laughed even more.
After the spring rolls I led us to the bowling alley, which was basically across the street. Crossing the street in Laos is much less scary than in Vietnam since there is less traffic, but you actually have to wait for a break in the traffic wheras in Vietnam you can just go and dodge traffic as it comes. I started to miss the Vietnamese way because you don't have to wait. If you are an impatient person who needs stress reduction, you should definitely consider relocating to Vietnam. The bowling alley was again mostly empty. We bowled 3 games, but kept getting distracted by this super low budget tv show that had biker ninjas, business wizards, concubines, and old men with eyebrow extensions. It felt on par with those Hindu Myth shows from India, but this was more in the style of Laos, Thais, or Vietnam. This was my fourth time being in this bowling alley too, so I had started to get to know some of the people working there.
After bowling we went back to our hostel, picked up some snacks (Laos Yogurt) from the M Point Mart, which was a Laos equivalent to 7-11 and went to our respective rooms for bed. The street around our hostel was pretty empty, a few locals hanging out and some foreigners eating out in front of a Japanese restaurant with a sign advertising the best coffee in Laos, but when I got to my room, who's window faced that same street, it sounded like Mardis Gras out there. Audio Wormhole? I don't know. It was strange, so I put on some Futurama to help me sleep--it always makes me tired.
I hung out with Luke and Jo for the next 2 days, until their flight to Thailand. One of the days I showed them the US Embassy that yelled at me (for taking a picture of a wall) and led them back to the Laotian Arc De Triumph. After that I showed them the Vegetarian restaraunt, but the food was less good that day and I felt bad because I had kind of talked it up. My allergies were still not too good so I was eating HEAPS of pineapple, which I had read about online as being good for it. Shake after shake was consumed, but then I started to realize that these shake places were adding a lot of sugar, so I switched to the street pineapple in a bag, which was cheaper and tastier.
We had some terrible Japanese food, but were lured in by the promise of Japanese pizza from their billboard. It was really just Okonomoyaki, and not even a very good version, and it cost more than Okonomoyaki in Japan. So we went and cheered our saddened stomachs up at a kind of foreigner bar, but it was full of probably prostitutes, a few of which were obvious ladyboys, the rest of which we could have guessed either way. They were hanging out playing pool and Luke went over and schooled them all, winning so much that they were getting obviously frustrated. Eventually they started cheating and one of them finally beat him. While Luke was playing pool I sat at the bar with Jo and a friend we had made on the street named Boua. She was a local who had been hanging out at the waterfront, laying on her motorcycle, that we started to talk to. Eventually we asked her if she knew of any bars with pool and she took us. After some time a foreigner came in who seemed to know a bunch of people in the bar. He was Australian and not much of a listener, except when I told him that I thought Lao Lap would be good on pizza, to which he agreed to start doing at his restaurant. He kept talking about how the pool women were all Ladyboys too, and it seemed to really excite him. Eventually we got tired of this bar and moved to a small british pub that was playing live football matches. It had a really cute logo of a beagle in a rabbit with a sherlock holmes style coat and a monocle, but I can't remember the name--probably "Hare of the" something. After a few drinks we all went back and I said goodbye, but we knew we would meet up in Thailand (as I would be 2 days behind them).
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