While my feet are now securely back in the People’s Republic of China my heart is still dreaming of the lovely life I was leading back in Lao (the “s” is silent). As testament to this fact I am ignoring the one-color spectrum of bland Chinese beers and instead drinking a Beer Lao, one of Asia’s few good beers. I’m in Jinhong, the capital of the Xishuangbanna prefecture in southern Yunnan province; right on the edge, as it were, of China. Luckily this means I’m still in the tropics, even if it does get cold at night, and I have not completely left the warm sunny embrace of southeast Asia.
I was only in Laos for a week, though it all feels like a few weeks looking back on it. Last week I taught my last classes of the fall semester and hoped a train to Kunming. Sadly, this train trip sucked ass since I had food poisoning from my last meal in Huaihua (and I went to my favorite restaurant too!), I arrived in Kunming feeling horrible and uncertain of what to do. Luckily for me two of my American teacher friends from Hunan had been on my train as well, though we didn’t know it, and all we met up at the Kunming bus station trying to buy tickets to Laos. So with the energy that one can only get when they find their friends when they really need them, I bought a bus ticket to Luang Prabang, Laos. While in Kunming I also saw some friends from the University of Vermont who are doing the study abroad thing, like I had two years ago, and we all sat down at the French Cafe chatting about this and that. I made sure to visit the closed door of Salvador’s Cafe, my all-time favorite cafe in China, and write a quick note on the sign pasted on the door. If you don’t remember Salvador’s was bombed by a terrorist on Christmas Eve and as it turns out may never reopen I just learned it will be reopening.
From Kunming me and my two lovely friends took a 25 hour sleeper bus down south to the tropical jungles of Laos. That journey and the days following it are all together far too much for this little post, so I’ll get to the beautiful details (with pictures) as I spend my days here lounging about watching the Mekong, or as it is called here in China: Lan Can Jiang.
I do want to make a quick note about the weird bittersweet feeling I get returning to China after my stress-reducing trip to Laos. In Laos no one yells “Halooo!” to you on the street, the street vendors are polite and have more in common with a grandmother than an evil step mother, the honking is almost non-existant, the food is not burdened with buckets of cheap oil and is in fact fresh exciting and downright tropical, and most importantly you can walk the quiet orchid lined streets in shorts lost in a relaxed haze of calm. I must also mention that they eat sandwiches in Laos; sandwiches made with crusty baguettes and filled with barbequed (boneless!) chicken. As far as the number of people the entire population of Laos is smaller than the Chinese city of Chengdu, where I spent the New Year. That. Is. Nuts.
On the other hand Laos is expensive, at least for a clueless tourist like me. The Laowai (foreigners) are everywhere and they all seem to speak the elitist beautiful languages of Europe; the huge number of foreigners drive up the prices and have the ability to turn the wonderful timeless feeling markets into tourist bazaars. Though, I must be honest, after 6 months of being one of 4 foreigners in a city of 2 or 3 million the added number of westerners was very welcome, if not a tad off putting. The exchange rate was simply whack. The Chinese Yuan was worth 1,200 kip and the American dollar was 8,400 kip. While it is cool to carry around a million dollars of anything I found that trying to save money with this new currency, that I never really bothered to understand, difficult. I also did my best to learn as much of the Lao language as I could and I really hope to take some lessons in Lao sometime in the future, but still I was often at a loss for what to say and when my massause giggled at me I had no idea why. For these reasons and others I am glad to be back in China. Though I am unbelievably happy to be sitting on the warm quasi-foreign edge of the country rather than smack in the middle.
