Vientiane

The capital of Laos is a small and boring version of BKK. However, the people are more personable and attractive. On my first day in town Elina and I found some bicycles, met some friends, and took a long herbal steam sauna with monks. We were in a temple in the middle of the jungle inside of a bamboo hut on stilts. We were served delicious hot tea and undressed to a sarong as we dipped in and out of the comfort of the bamboo steam room. The steam entered the room through some holes in the floor, so you had to keep your feet on an elevated plank. At first when you enter you can't see anything! Then your eyes adjust and you sweat and sloth of dead skin with several sweaty bodies around you. You can't see the person next to you on the bench, but the experience is very relaxing. We didn't realize we were in a steam bath with about 8 monks until we all showered with Mekong water from a giant tub outside, and they dressed in their attire afterwards.
We were so famished after a day of biking and sauna, so we went to a lovely cafe for dinner. A very cool man named Michael from Nigeria approached me and ate his dinner with us, and his friend Jo joined us. We made plans to meet up and go dancing an hour later. Michael now lives in the UK where he is a professional Soccer player, but he's in the warm climate recuperating his injured knee. Jo and Michael ended up taking us to THE premier club in Vientiane! We had so much fun dancing the night away with our new African friends in the posh settings of this club. The music wasn't very good, but the atmosphere was extremely entertaining with all the zany locals, old Pharangs and young girls, the Lao gay men bumping and grinding on the dance floor, and the random guy who puked on 6 people as he was dragged to the bathroom by the bouncers. I was thoroughly amused, and told Michael so. He told me I was charismatic and asked to accompany Elina and I to the Buddha park, so we made a group date before Elina and I biked back to our guesthouse in our clubbing clothes on our beach cruisers. Elina was more than half drunk.
Today Michael met Elina and I at the cafe and we bumped into our Finnish friend Vox and our Polish/French friend Pat. We all negotiated a fair price with the tuk tuk and cruised out to the Buddha park together. This park was created in 1958 by a yogi-priest-shaman who combined Hindi-Buddhist iconography into a cosmic park. To say the least it was odd yet magical. We enjoyed exploring all the statues. Michael bought me a beautiful silk Lao scarf that looked African, because it was designed in patterns mostly orange, red, black, and green. We met 20 Lao Soccer players who just finished a championship game, and were celebrating with lots of beer, so when they invited us to join them we couldn't say no. After several beers they bet Michael that their best player could win a best out of three kick-off match. The bet was that the loser had to buy the winner three large BeerLaos. This was the most exciting part of the day! What was wonderful is that Michael won! He schooled the Lao guy, and we had fun cheering him on. Much later we took a tuk tuk back to Vientiane.

Tomorrow evening I depart this city on a 10 hr. bus ride to the south: Paske, where I will slowly make my way through the 4,000 islands in the south of Laos over the next 2 weeks.

I previously mentioned that Thailand is the land of a thousand scents, well...
Lao is the Land of a million butterflies. You couldn't imagine how gorgeous this country is, nor could you know how in love with this country I am. :)