Calling Laos, Part 2

Greetings from Vientiane. We've been here 9 days already, and I've got one week of work down. It's been challenging and interesting, but at the end of the day I'm tired as hell from trying to speak Lao, and, more importantly, trying to understand Lao.

Katherine has done more exploring around the city than I have. She's been to a few expat lunches and has generally kept as busy as I am.

At night we've explored the many great restaurants around the city and I'm excited to report I've found quite tasty pizza already, so I'm all set. We've also been well taken care of by the embassy community, with parties both Friday and Saturday night last week, and a trip up north about an hour to the Nam Ngum river for an afternoon on a floating restaurant. It was a great way to end our first weekend here, although I did have to (okay, I willingly) ate what Katherine now refers to as Lao Caviar....ant eggs. They actually weren't bad, and now I know that if I'm ever at a dinner in an official capacity and I am served ant eggs, I can eat them.

We have a bunch of pictures of our first week, but can't upload them yet from our home computer as we STILL DON'T HAVE HOME PHONE SERVICE. So if any of you have tried to call, sorry about that. Will get them up when we can. Hopefully some time this week. And Katherine and I will try to be more timely in updating the site with both the exciting and mundane aspects of life in Laos.

A few highlights from my week:

Visiting the morgue on Day 2 of work to identify an American citizen who passed away (of natural causes).

Spending my first day on the visa line interviewing applicants, some of whom measure their annual income in bags of rice.

Getting cable

Exploring the city at night with Katherine and some of the new friends we've made.

Telling our corner store lady that it's REALLY hot out and having her laugh at us and say basically "you ain't seen nothing yet"


Katherine's highlights:

Meeting Erin Sawyer -- our new friend & sponsor!

Not eating ant eggs

Negiotiating a tuk-tuk fare and getting where I wanted to go

Exploring the food markets

Drinking a delicious ice coffee in a French bakery

Getting locked out off the house and trying to communicate that to our landlord and guards.

Not seeing any rats!



That's it for us. We'll get some pictures up soon.

phil & katherine