Sunday, May 30, 2010

So it is Laos now: Life of an expat in Vientiane

breakfast at home
I just arrived in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, and probably one of the smallest capitals in the world. Ha, I should not say small, it's actually cute. Coming from a hometown with 17.000 population, the 200.000 of Vientiane is much closer to than 8 million in Ho Chi Minh City.
So, yes, I feel good here. The weather is not too bad, it's cool in the morning and in the evening, we don't need a/c during the day cause the fan is enough. Saves money.
Tomorrow I will try to get Internet at home, since the coffeeshop provide free, but quite slow connections here. Especially Gmail is sometimes difficult to access.
People here are quite friendly, as expected. I will not compare Laos to Vietnam here, it's another country and of course different What I can say so far is that live seems kind of easy here, laid back, slows you down. Having breakfast on our terrace is something I was always dreaming of, now we have it.
I see a lot of young backpackers here, always funny to watch them being so authentic and having no idea that everyone is laughing at them or art least trying to get the most money out of them. Actually they are not backpackers anymore since they use trolleys. I would call them waterbottlers, because they always carry a bottle of water (because it was mentioned in the Loney Planet).

That's for now, I have to go home and ask my french neighbor to help me picking the bananas from our tree.