three short stories about laos

1-kip-tastrophe

the currency in laos is the kip, this series of gorgeous, multi-colored, bills, with an exchange rate of about $1=10,000 kip or 33 baht=10,000 kip.
jigga whhhhhattttt? who can handle those conversions?!!?! i withdrew 500,000 kip and felt like i was going to have a panic attack, before i realized it was like 50 bucks. every room stayed in, ice cream bar eaten is total chaos-it is really just too many zeros for my dollarized brain to handle.
'if i just bought a bunch of lychee for 5000 kip, did i get ripped off, should i bargain, or is that a great deal, wait my room was 30000 kip, or wait was it 3000. oh shit'

2-the akha women

as emily and i were sitting down to lunch, a woman from this local hilltribe, the akha, came to ask us to buy bracelets. anyone whos traveled, especially in the developing world, or hell this happens in chapel hill, knows how to deal. a polite 'no thanks,' or in our case, 'mai kwap jai du,' should handle it.
NOT SO with the akha.
20 minutes later there were 6 women swarming around us, tying hats on our head, belts around our waist, laying dozens of bracelets on the table. after some really dorky pantomime (FIRST-EAT-THEN-BUY), we communicated to them that we just wanted to eat in peace.
so what did the akha do?
sit down at the table next to us, waiting for us to finish.

in the couple days that we were in muang sing, the akha women threatened to hit us (imagine a crazy toothless hilltribe woman pantomiming that she will beat you up if you dont buy her shit), offered us pot and OPIUM ( imagine a crazy toothless hilltribe woman whispering in your ear 'OPIUM OPIUM SHHH SHH SHHH'), and invited us into their home, where we sat around and ate nasty corn stuff .

3-biking to china!

thats really the whole story. we biked to china the other day. it was awesome.

4-summary

laos is so gorgeous i dont even know how to talk about it and it smells like smoke and the only english anyone really knows is, for some reason, 'you beautiful' so everyone says that all the time and the people are so good and it is so good to see good people everywhere.

i have akha bracelets for you all,
lovejaki