The Jones Family Festive Vest Extravaganza

This year, for the first time in a long time, the Jones family clan will not be gathering to celebrate Christmas. Instead we have picked names to trade gifts from afar and will be celebrating in our respective corners of the world. But just to keep things fun and interesting, this blog is a reminder to all that this year is the first Jones Family Festive Vest Extravaganza!

Every year, when the holidays roll around, Mum pulls out her festive sweater vest and puts the rest of us to shame with our lack of festiveness, but no more!

This year, every member of the Jones clan is invited to respond in kind, by begging, buying, stealing or making the most festive Christmas vest possible. All members of the immediate family are strongly suggested if not required to submit their entry. Let's see what you got punks!
Members of the extended family and complete strangers are also more than welcome to compete, but quite frankly, I think any of you stand a chance (except maybe Aunty Pam... or maybe Nanny Joyce...).

The contest works like this: sometime before December 20th, take a photo of yourself in the festive vest and email it to me. Let me know if you don't want the photo posted on the blog, otherwise its open game.

The winner will get some kind prize, likely something which matches in proportions the festive nature of your vest. It's September, so there's plenty of time to get festive!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Laos: There

My idea of a good vacation involves lots of walking, lots of eating, sleep and a good book.

Exhausted from my overnight journey across the country, I checked into a hotel, took a shower and resolved to get out and explore the capital. My first stop had to be breakfast though, and as I stepped out from the hotel, the heavens opened and the rain began pouring down, indicating a perfect time to sit down and savor some food.

Laos is famous for spicy meat salads but I was after something a little more tame. I settled for a bowl of hot noodles, the perfect fare on a rainy morning. Negotiating food, I realized I had three languages to work with in Laos; Thai - which is very similar to Laotian, French – the colonial language of the country, and English – good for tourist spots.

I thought I had successfully communicated leaving peanuts out of the noodle dish and used all three languages just to be sure, and to be fair, there were no crushed peanuts floating on top of the dish. There was, however, a dark paste in the soup, which contains what else but ground peanuts. For some reason, in the hierarchy of deathly peanut allergy attacks, ground paste or sauce is the worst (boiled peanuts in curry seems to cause the least severe attacks). I dosed myself with powerful antihistamines I carry around for this very purpose.

The drugs do their job, which is to slow and stop my allergic reaction. They also have a tendency to make the world slow down and become wrapped in cotton wool. It is recommended that people who take these pills not drive or operate heavy machinery. Most days I just go to sleep, sometimes for up to 14 hours.

I didn’t have 14 hours to waste in Laos, so I spent the afternoon floating through the gray city feeling like a ghost. My only aim was to find a new book as I had finished mine, and a herbal sauna that I had heard about.

At the sauna, I booked a Chinese massage for an hour. For the first 30 minutes I got my muscles kneaded to a pulp, which, after untold hours on busses, was simply divine. Then came the suction cups.

The masseuse holds a flame under a glass cup. The flame consumes the oxygen in the cup, creating a small vacuum. If the cup is quickly placed on a surface, it acts as a suction cup. In this case the surface is my back and the cups are arranged over pressure points determined by Chinese medical practice. I have about 15 of these glass shot glasses stuck to me when I fall asleep and start drooling on the masseuse’s pillow.

The feeling is odd. I could feel the skin pulling in strange directions and the weight of the glasses in some places. I felt like a porcupine, a heavy, fat, stoned porcupine.

After some time, the glasses are taken off and changed. After my hour is up, I leave feeling refreshed and far more alert than before. My back certainly felt better.

As a former French colony, Laos has a few things that Thailand does not. It has fashion, for example, fashion inspired by the French tradition. Far more importantly to me, Laos also has strong coffee and delicious pastries.

There are few places in Vientiane where it is not possible to get a baguette for breakfast, and not just any baguette. Freshly toasted baguettes are served up with locally made meat paste (a version of pate) and laughing cow cheese. Most sandwiches are also stuffed with some kind of local salad, like cold slaw. I wouldn’t eat anything else for breakfast and after the peanut fest, I wouldn’t eat anything else in Laos period.

Most bakeries sell baguette sandwiches and a few also offer strong coffee and every now and again you find one that also sells fresh fruit shakes. There is nothing like a mango shake or a creamy coconut shake for a sore throat.

I head back to my hotel, intending to lie down for a short time after my baguette dinner. There is a market that sets up on the banks of the Mekong, not far from my hotel, every night and I have heard that Laotian beer is the best in the region. But the moment my body hits the bed, my first day in Laos is over. I fall into a deep sleep that takes me all the way until morning.

Something in the mirror catches my eye as I am taking a shower. I turn around to get a closer look. My back looks like a spotted leopard. I am covered in black spots from the shot glass massage. Back hickeys… lots and lots of back hickeys.

My wandering begins. I wander to the baguette store for my breakfast and coffee and to the morning market, Talat Sao. I wander through the market up and down stairs, past electronics and textiles and cell phones and jewelry. I wander to the city’s most famous temple, Wat Si Saket, and pass slowly in front of the rows and rows of Buddha statues under the tiled roof of the ancient temple.

I make a mistake and walk all the way across the city before I realize I’m going the wrong way and retrace my steps. I spend some time in the shade of the Laotian version of the Arc de Triomphe, Patuxay.

Patuxay is in the middle of a large round about and from there I intended to walk up one of the connecting streets to the Thai embassy. Unfortunately I took the wrong one and ended up walking a long way through a very un-scenic neighborhood before I realized my mistake.

This time as I retraced my steps I spent more time thinking just what was going wrong with my head. The answer: water. So I sat in the shade of Patuxay for a while and kicked back a liter of water, sweat cooling on my body and the sun radiating from my skin.

There was no line to pick up visas, and things were quite calm when I arrived and scooped up my passport from the embassy counter. I flipped the pages and found what I needed: permission to stay in Thailand just a little longer.

I grabbed another bottle of water and walked back to the bus station where I found a bus to the Buddha Park.

The Buddha Park is this place on the banks of the Mekong where a rich guy with a little too much concrete decided to build a tourist attraction. He made a bunch of concrete statues depicting Hindu and Buddhist creatures. Falling into decay, with vines around the statues, it actually manages to look a little mysterious at times. However, the Mekong has risen in the past week and flooded part of the park, making huge stagnant pools that smell worse than crap. The park in the end, is just plain bizarre.

Because its bizarre, I love it, and laugh my way through the statues, the mud and the mosquitoes. I laugh my way back to Vientiane, over the dusty bumpy road and back to the baguettes.

I walk back to my hotel along the river, or rather, next to the sandbags set up beside the Mekong to stop the flooding. There is no market that night because the water has flooded out some of the market area, but I watch the sun set over the water and then take a bottle of Lao Beer home to drink from my balcony.

On my final day in Vientiane, I spend a lot of time drinking strong coffee (almost too strong to drink) and savoring baguettes. I walk up to the country’s largest market and spend a lot of time wandering through the aisles, past heaps of slaughtered meat and still jumping fish, past piles of mushrooms and heaps of chilies. I sit and watch traffic go by with a fruit shake for almost an hour.

But finally, I have to pack up, make the trip back to the border and get back to Thailand. I take an overnight bus that evening from Nong Khai to Bangkok, spend Sunday in Bangkok running errands and watching movies, and a night bus back to Mae Sot. I arrive at 4am back home, to the familiar land of cats and cuddles, ready to start work and begin teaching at 8am that day.

Laos: Getting There

I left a classroom full on noisy misbehaved children on Wednesday and walked out to the highway to catch a ride. It was noon and I was about to begin my long trek across the country.

I took a minibus from Mae Sot to Tak, somehow snagging the most coveted seat in the front and sleeping most of the hour and a half through the mountains.

Buses are greeted at every station by touts: mainly motorcycle taxi and tuk-tuk drivers and representatives from various bus companies. “Where are you going?” they scream in your face in Thai. I mention my destination and get escorted to a ticket counter where I buy a ticket.

I wander off to buy lunch and when I come back, get shown to a rickety old bus with no air con or fan. Meanwhile, another bus, newer and with air con, is leaving for my destination with plenty of extra seats. What just happened?

An hour and a half later, we finally roll out of the station, and none too fast, either.

My next stop is through Sukhothai to Phitsanouluk (pronounced: Piss-on-you-Lok). It’s about 2 hours. I sit in the back, next to an open door with my feet stretched out, enjoying the rush of wind through my hair. To the left of the bus, the sky was a deep purple and the wind through the window smelled like rain and the promise of lightening. The rice paddies stretching away to the right of the bus were blissfully bathed in sunlight with white clouds racing through blue sky towards the mountains.

I read segments of a book by Alice Walker, pausing every few pages to savor the story and enjoy the view. Nothing reminds you of the wonder of living in Thailand like speeding through it on a bus full of wind.

The rain hit and all the bus windows got closed, but the coolness had entered the bus, making travelling a pleasure. Until a drip developed over my head, that is. Luckily there were plenty of seats.

I have only been in Phitsanouluk twice, both times in transit, both times I arrived at 6pm, as the national anthem was playing and everyone stopped everything to stand at attention.

This time I looked around and saw two counters offering tickets to my next stop, Udon Thani. The 6pm bus hadn’t yet arrived and was running late, so I sat down with some snacks and felt glad I hadn’t gone with the first counter I saw, advertising a bus at 8pm.

But by 7pm the bus still hadn’t arrived. When it did, the driver needed to eat, so we didn’t roll out of the station until after 7:30pm. We drove fifteen minutes down the highway to a gas station to fill up.

At first no one got out of the bus, we were all eager to get on our way. But after 15 minutes a few people got out. After half an hour, I joined them to stretch my legs. After an hour, the driver finally announced what was going on. The gas station was out of gas, he said, and we had to wait for more gas to arrive… from Bangkok.

Pretty much everyone got out, including one old monk and two nuns in white. I circled the pumps endlessly while others circled the aisles of the 7-11. Finally we were off.

Four hours later we passed through Loei and at 3am rolled into Udon Thani. I couldn’t even use the washroom as everything at the bus station was closed and deserted. Never the less, the bus was still greeted by a crowd of touts: all motorcycle taxi and tuk-tuk drivers. I climbed into a tuk-tuk with three others and headed off into the night.

The tuk-tuk dropped me by the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere. I sat in front of a fruit stand for about an hour looking hopefully at each bus that went by, hoping for one headed to Nong Khai.

I fell asleep on the bus to Nong Khai, which was only an hour long trip. When I woke, it was sunrise and I was on the border. I watched the sunrise through a rabid swarm of touts who chased after each arriving bus like maniacs.

I got dropped off at the actual border about ten minutes before it opened and spent the time in a nearby shop getting more visa pictures made. The crossing was easy, although slightly manic, the large portion of early morning crossers being fellow visa-fiends like me and eager to get across and get to the embassy.

The Friendship Bridge connecting Thailand to Laos across the Mekong River is about 2kms and so there is a mandatory bus to take travelers across. Therefor, no matter how quickly you get stamped out, you still have to wait for the bus to be full before continuing.

On the Laos side, applying for my visa on arrival (cheaper for Australians than for Canadians and very very expensive for Americans), the manic feeling only intensifies. I’m surprised no pushing or shoving has taken place.

That feeling of desperation seeps under my skin a little. After all, it is Thursday and if I don’t get my application in to the embassy that morning (the embassy accepts visa applications from 8:30am until noon or something like that), I will have to wait all weekend to pick it up on Monday, which will mean that I will spend a lot of money on hotels and food and be very late for class on Monday.

I grab a minibus for the trip from the border into Vientiane, the capital of Laos. I was told the visa was on the route into town, but the bus keeps going and going until I am at the bus station. I fling my money down somewhat angrily and go looking for alternative transportation.

My driver pulls up in front of the embassy and immediately a man tries to sell me a visa application form. I look past him at the crowd and that nervous desperate feeling is almost palpable.

At this point I have two choices, I can get in the back of the nebulous “line” and wait for hours with the crowd, or I can be pushy, like most people who are closer to the gates of the embassy than the road. Most of the time, I would just stand back and wait, even as I watch others push ahead.

But it wasn’t one of those days, and besides, I needed a visa application form from the desk. So I excused my way to the front and just as I was about to ask the guard for a form, the gates open and people madly spilled into the embassy compound. What could I do but spill with them?

I spilled my way almost to the front of the line where I still had plenty of time to grab a form and fill it it. That’s how, within moments of the embassy opening, I was paying my visa application fee and heading out into the all too hot Laotian morning.