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My neighbours are heavily into the early 90s. I never thought I'd hear Take That again. Or Take Five, or All-4-One, or a few gems from Extreme. (Xtreme?) It starts at about 8:30 and carries on all day. Every once in a while they throw in some Lao pop to shake things up.

Customer last night: "Don't you feel your youth burning away like a candle?"

1) Jesus, dude. 2) I'd feel more like that were I working an administrative job through a cold, dark winter, commuting in traffic two or so hours a day. But here? No.

Oddly, I think it was a come on. He was cute, but nobody's chances can survive putting "I'm writing a novel" and "stream of consciousness" that close together in a coversation. But hey, drink up, pal.

Slightly cloudy and ever so slightly cooler today. I'm wearing long sleeves before dark for the first time. Of course, the sleeves are pushed up past my elbows and I'm wearing flip flops, so don't get the wrong idea. The Lao folks on the street, mind you, are all in double and triple layers. It's at least 75 degrees.

Wednesday

beyond my wildest dreams

Today: two kids, maybe a brother and sister, riding their bikes down the middle of the street, talking animatedly, holding hands.

***
Last night I dashed out of the bar at 9:45 to get food. The night market and most of the cheap street food is wrapping up by then. The crepe sellers are closer and linger longer, but I really only want to have to eat sweetish crepes with egg and cheese in a pinch.

I was lucky—I caught the last somtam girl, and her buddy, who was packing up, sold me enough sticky rice to feed a family. Just for the hell of it—but no, really because I hate the thought of, perhaps, not having enough food—I bought some other weedy, spicy Lao thing in a bag to eat with the rice. The bar had gotten busy around 9:30, but L was fine when I got back and I'd been there since three, so I took my feast home where I could eat it by myself, with no one to mind the fermented stink of the pa dek in the papaya salad, or me letting my mouth hang open and air out in between bites, because of the heat.

It was a lot of heat, this time.

A lot of the days are differentiated by what I ate: baguette, somtam, soup. Yesterday I discovered a new snack: sticky rice dipped in egg, grilled, and stuck on a stick with some spicy paste spread over it. Schoolkids buy it over the short wall that separates their yard from the venders outside on the main road through the middle of the old town. Sometime last week I splurged and bought a mint lemonade ice from the posh bakery, which appeared to employ most of the ladyboys in town, but is, apparently, run by devout Christians who require their staff to pray before each shift and have banned the Lao sarong, mandating pants instead. I guess I won't go back there, except maybe to sniff around for scandal.

There are also minor daily errands. I've been to the post office, to the stationary shop, to the small market and the big market, to guesthouses around town to hand out fliers. I've hemmed a shirt. Yesterday I opened an account at the Lao Development Bank with the million kip I've accumulated. (I took a picture of my deposit slip with the six figures. Somehow, the crazy quantities of money here are still funny.) I opened the account with someone else's phone number and an address (Bah Khili) that's just the name of the block I live on; no one even looked at my passport. And this is what I love about the developing world, or at least this region of it—everything is personal. My visa was organized because somebody knew somebody in the visa office—this aspect of it, I know, is problematic, but in regular daily life it's awfully pleasant. Take your food, sit down, eat it, pay when you're done, not before. People remember me and bring me my usual. Short of cash—at the post office, mind you, not a pub: come back tomorrow. Bo pen gnang. Today I'll go back to the bank to get my account number—yesterday, lunch interrupted the process.

Lao of the day:

mehn-neh: tomorrow. This is the closest I can spell it in English, but the vowel sounds aren't made in English. They're like the French "le" I think. I'd need an umlaut, maybe. Purse your lips and say "er." That gets close.

Sunday

I jogged past a bar and saw a sign: "Football on Big Screen". I got very excited--then I read on. "Arsenal vs. Newcastle."

Oh.

The Lao flag and the hammer and sickle are all over the guesthouses along the Mekong today--it must be a holiday or something. I love the hammer and sickle.

Fist sighting of Lao kids playing a game that seems to have similar rules to marbles, but with flip flops, in the street. Cute.

Forgotten Lao: bo pen gnang--never mind, no big deal, no problem. Same as mai pen lai in Thai.

Money cant

Today, as I was unlocking my bike, a motorbike with a small Lao woman driving and a big white guy riding behind pulled up and stopped in front of me. As the driver unbuckled her helmet, the passenger got off and took some money out of his pocket and tried to hand it to her. She ran away into one of the handicraft shops, giggling and shrieking “No, no, no.”

Part of the appeal of this country is that money really doesn't seem to trump everything. There are a few people who try to scam you, of course, but it's not nearly as omnipresent as it is in other parts of the region or the world. It's sometimes inconvenient, of course, but I like the fact that if the boatman hasn't planned on crossing the river today, he's not going to do it for one dollar or five or ten. In Thailand, he'd take you, but ask for extra for his trouble, of course. In Cambodia, he'd pocket your couple of bucks, take you across, and then as for the same again to get his boat back over. Just, you know, to see if he could get it. He'd go away again without a fuss if you said no, and it's hard to criticize Cambodia for that kind of thing, seeing how brutally they've been taught that you'd better get what you can in any given moment because everything can be taken away at any time.

But this was going to be about Laos. When I was traveling through the north of this country six years ago, Gabor and I wanted to get to a small town on a day when no bus was passing through. There happened to be a few other foreigners in the village we were in who wanted to move on as well, and we agreed on a price for a truck to take all of us on the six or eight hour journey. I remember some of our party getting frustrated as we picked up other Lao passengers on the way, who were obviously paying the driver a small fee as well—we had paid for the truck and we wanted the truck for ourselves, or some of us did. But the truck driver really wasn't trying to be shady—it's just that the idea of paying for and keeping all this big roomy truck for only a few people would have been pretty foreign here. This is a culture that shares and crams in and shares some more: women in trucks will enthusiastically pat a three-inch gap next to them and then grab you by the shoulders and press down until you're wedged in. I've had my hand pushed into communal plates of sticky rice. Traveling here, I got used to taking trips with strangers' heads resting on my knee or shoulder as we rocked together in the back of some truck, trying to dodge the drops of rotten vegetable juice seeping through the roof from the produce piled on top.

OK, typing this, I can't wait to do it all again. Anybody in?

My Lao has stalled a bit—I need to go out and recruit someone to teach me for an hour or so a few times a week. What I can say I say pretty well, which leads the people I talk to to grin and immediately start talking and asking me questions and laughing, at which point I have to flap my hands like an idiot and try to remember the word for “I don't understand” (bo kow jai) and “a little bit” (noi nung).

New words:

sin (short, falling tone): meat
sin (high tone): Lao dress or sarong.

Anee men gnang: what's that. (Anee means this or that).
Paeng si die: so expensive I die, or expensive until I die. Paeng means expensive; it's another one that's the same in Thai. This gets a lot of laughs.

Sweeping ghosts

I woke up facing the wall, just before dawn, to a sound in the room. It was a sort of swishing or scuffling, as though someone was shuffling his feet, slowly, on the dark hard wood floors of my bedroom. The sound continued steadily, a clawed, gnarled, drooling ghost moving slowly toward the bed, perhaps dragging his entrails, like Phii Krasue in Thailand. I remembered that you're supposed to turn around and confront ghosts here, to ask them what they want, so after a few minutes of teeth chattering, I did. There was only the empty, brightening room.

Someone outside had been sweeping, of course. I had known this, in the same way I know I don't believe in ghosts. In North America. But over here, I'm not so sure.

Viva la difference

Laos is the land of public grooming. I really think people here actually stop themselves from, say, extracting their blackheads in the privacy of their own bathrooms and pack up and take the show on the road on purpose. Everywhere you turn there's solo, amateur blemish detonation, tandem nose picking, turn-by-turn plucking of various errant hairs. I saw a pedicure--but the nasty bits, not the artistic application of color--happening in the middle of the night market as I went to get my evening baguette.

So if I come home and casually ask you to, say, dig out some weird thing in my ear as we brunch, remember that I'm not insane. I've just been in the Lao sun too long.

Oh, and a ps: a young Norwegian couple came into the bar last night. A) Why aren't we all living in Norway? B) They both looked like me. It was weird. I guess we Vikings all look alike.

I'm trying to think of the adjective for this place. "Tranquil" rings tinny and artificial; "mellow" is closer but doesn't quite get there and sounds too drug-induced anyway. The image that sticks in my head is of being gently pressed upon from above by soft cotton fluff. "Muted," perhaps, is what I'm after.

And it's not just me--this town has an effect on everyone. People get stuck here. People spend days drifting around town, suddenly no longer in such a hurry to cross temples and treks off their lists. Johnny the American/Albanian has been here for twelve days and has no plans to leave. He's come to my bar three or four days in a row now. He says he may spend his whole trip here; that this town is "giving him what he needs."

As I was riding out to the bar to hook up to the internet and write this, it occured to me that some people might say it's all the Buddhism here. This is a town full of temples and monks all in the service of a religion that seeks dispassion, disengagement, detachment. Maybe some of it bleeds out across the town. Maybe this has to do with the slightly stupefying effect of being here. Maybe enlightenment is a place.

I certainly find all my desires tamped down. I see the same papaya salad man every day. That is the papaya salad I want; I don't crave variety; I am content rather than bored. I have, maybe, one drink behind the bar on most nights. Getting drunk seems sort of pointless and potentially unpleasant. The "work" I do during the day is slow and quiet and solitary, and that's also fine. I write, I ride my bike around in the sun, I look for new food to eat. I make plans to do the things there are to do in town, but when the day ends with them undone, I don't feel regret. I feel very little, to be honest. I have next to nothing--I have a backpack and a toothbrush and some clothes. I don't have my own room; I don't have my own bed. I can't think of what I might want right now. Or maybe, when you want for everything, no individual desire can really sting. Grabbing a fistful of hair and pulling doesn't really hurt, but plucking out one--ouch. Awkward metaphor, perhaps, but I'm just too chilled out right now to bother fixing it.

If I dig I can get to dissatisfaction, of course. I sometimes miss feeling more involved in the world--but living on a street a few blocks from some power center didn't really give me any more power than I have out here. Proximity isn't influence. Not in my case, anyway. And it's hard to maintain that burning need to change the world when, looking around me, there ain't nothing I'd change.

And there's the Mekong. Maybe Bodhi is the Mekong. There's something compelling about that river; it pulls like a spell; it's trance-like. I ride alongside it and stare. And it's just a wide, flat, brown river, but maybe that's it, that it is so absolutely itself, so much bigger than metaphors, so much simpler than symbols. It's just water, a lot of it, moving constantly and evenly; it doesn't change but the light on it does. It is full of things we can't see, but I'm content with the surface.

Boy. This has wandered into dangerously metaphysical realms, so I'll cut myself off. New tourism slogan: Luang Prabang. Get inside your own head.

(And not up my own ass, sniggerers. A, I'm looking at you.)

The electricity has just gone off. Perfect timing, eh? And, ah, who cares. It'll come back on at some point. In the meantime, I've got everything and nothing to do.