Richard Simons is that you??

Hello and greetings from the Captial of Laos, again.

Last night after finishing writting the blog we went back to our hotel room, and lay down on the bed for a minute or two before getting ready for bed. However those couple of minutes turned into hours. At 2 am I (tyson) finally got up and turned off the light before once again collapsing into the bed. I don't know if it was the jet lag catching up to us, or us just trying to get use to travelling again or what, but we got knocked out for the count last night hard. This morning when we got up, somewhat more refreshed we enjoyed our breakfast in the hotel, checked our email for emails that were not there, hint hint (except for Phyllis). Then we proceeded to look for a more affordable place to stay. Sara says she wants to write now....

Ahem yes now I will tell the truth! The place we were staying at was beautifully nice and clean with a shower curtain wierd i know! Anyways I only agreed to look for another place because i knew i really did not have an option. So we checked out several about 5 before we agreed and i should have just not agreed but again i knew we weren't going back to the nice hotel. Anyways the place we have is small with no window and no shower curtain and the room that the guy was going to give us had mould on the ceiling... lovely. Not impressed at this point. Tyson likes to call the room 'functional' "it has a bed and a toliet and A/C what more do you want?" to which i replied "you're cheap!" But whatever I lost the battle and were stuck in that place now. I am not saying its the worse place I am just saying the other place was nicer and maybe a little more pricey but it had free breakfast and free internet as opposed to no breakfast and no internet. (we can buy a lot of breakfast and internet for $30 a day) Let us just remind ourselves again that this is a 3 week vacation not a 4 month tight budget travel... i think it is fair to say we both make money and we are both paying for this sooooo...... (well how about more massages then?) Yes we will get to the massage part!

Anyways after we quarreled for about 10 minutes not even really that bad we decided to check out another Wat, but before twe checked into our hotel we went to the only Wat (temple) that survived the Siam army. (More random point: it is pouring out monsoon style but it wasn't all day.. this morning earlier it must have but we were sleeping.) The Wat was cool with a million and one buddhas that were there in full and then many that were some what destroyed but still in the temple.

After that we walked around and found some shops that are a little more pricey than lets say a market, but we looked anyways just to get a feel for the prices. I found a beautiful scarf that if i can't find in the morning market I will just go and buy it. After browsing we went to some more Wats.

We went for lunch at this place that had a menu of like 30 million cultures I wanted Garlic Naan bread and veggie spring rolls but the Indian portion wasn't open till dinner time. So i just got some veggie pad thai and veggie spring rolls and Tyson had some bbq chicken skewers and sticky rice that was super sticky.

After lunch we went to the Scandanavian bakery for dessert of doughnut and some chocolate cakey thingy. We then headed to see another Wat or 2.

The last Wat we saw had no tourists because it was maybe 5 minutes away from the tourist centers and it had a monk in there who was blessing people. I decided that I wanted to get blessed so i gave some donation money and got water sprayed on me and a blessed bracelet on my wrist. It was surreal I really enjoyed it and should think about converting to Buddhism. If the religion was not so complicated. After watching me get blessed Tyson decided that he should as well and did the same.

From there we made our way back to the guesthouse to cool off (soooo hot and sticky that i have drank about 4 liters of water and my pee is still the colour of dark beer!!!). I decided after cooling off to go get massages. We found this nice little place after walking by 4 others and decided to try the Traditional Lao massage which is what i like to call a mixture of physiotherapy and massaging. It was great! This little Lao girl (Tyson had a guy) was moving me around and pushing on things i didn't even know were tight and ticklish. But it was good and relaxing and an hour long for 5 dollars.

From there on walking back to find some shower sandles (never did find any yet that I liked) we ran into an outdoor richard simmons aerobic dance class by the river. It was filled with what we think were a little bit on the overweight side (if possible) for Lao people. We thought maybe it was mandatory that if your BMI was a certain measure you were forced into exercising.. communist you know or they just care about there body image, either way it totally was Richard Simmons investing in Laos.

On the way to dinner we ran into two little girls who i wanted to take home, as well as the two massage people ... anyways these little girls were really cute.. they were kind of scared of us and the bigger one took the little one by the arm and was sort of protecting her.. so to break the ice I gave them two canadian coins (a penny and a dime) at first they just studied the coins.. looking at eachothers and then theirs. (There are no coins in Lao money) but then when we walked away they gave us a wave bye and ran to what we think was thier dad and showed him the coins they were so excited jumping up and down, it was really cute.

We ate at the Blue Banana Restaurant which is owned by a British guy who moved here 18 months ago to make Laos his home. He loves it here. I had pizza again .... (but in my defense i had asian food for lunch) and tyson had more rice this time fried rice.

Tomorow we will see the last there is here to see, maybe do some shopping at the morning market and Tyson says "get out of town" I am not too sure what that means yet. (get outta town means to either explore the countryside around the area by bike or foot, or go to the plain of jars) Get out of town means for Sara taking a taxi or tuk tuk and not sweating my face off on a bike or by foot. Lets try to keep the pee a clear colour thanks. We'll see tomorrow how that turns out....maybe pictures tomorrow. To keep you coming back.

Sara and Tyson