Vientiane

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164_6445-4.JPGDespite hearing from multiple sources that Vientiane was “quiet,” I was still surprised by this small town. It shouldn’t have been that surprising though, as its population is a miniscule 200,000. I think the next biggest town is less than half of that. I say miniscule because with a population of over 5 million, one would expect Lao’s capitol to have more people. In India, 200,000 people is barely a town and I think even Male, in the Maldives, has 200,000 residents (from national population of only a half million). Anyways, Vientiane’s population quantifies how agrarian the country is, if nothing else. Combine the smallness of Vientiane with the mellow Lao culture and you have the most laid-back capitol I’ve ever visited. In my opinion, Vientiane was too quiet. I’ve learned that I like living in and around cities, but usually try to avoid them when traveling. I’ve found that the majority of large cities have little to offer travelers and tourists, although the famous ones often offer sightseeing. Vientiane had even less. We toured the national museum, which had recently been renamed from the “Lao Revolutionary Museum.” The first exhibit was about dinosaurs because several dinosaur skeletons were discovered in Lao a hundred years ago. Most of the museum was an interesting history of Lao since its European discovery and the end was chock-full of propaganda; busts of everyone from Lenin to Ho Chi Minh and plenty of references to “American imperialists.” Besides the museum, we saw the city’s most famous wat, Wat Si Saket, which was disappointingly unimpressive, although it had an interesting collection of Buddhas. Patuxai (pictured above) was an interesting monument to see for a brief few moments, kind of Vientiane’s answer to the Arc de Triumphe. We also walked to the Cambodian Embassy twice to drop off and pick up our passports to get visas. And the American Embassy to get extra passport pages for Joylani. You can see where I’m going with all this. We found the food in Vientiane pretty mediocre, which was tough for Joylani (she does want me to quote her saying, “The Vietnamese restaurant was my favorite though. Bo Bun- its where its at.”). We tried all sorts of restaurants, but the street stalls were the best we ate. There were and handful of ATMs in Vientiane, but I only found 3 of them that accept international cards. The city has no buses and very little traffic overall. With the exception of one tall hotel, most of the city doesn’t rise about three stories. And all the nicest buildings are government and or Party ones- sad when you think how poor the country is. There’s a sizable NGO population too, which can be seen by the numerous nice SUVs they drive. Overall, we both found Vientiane underwhelming and were plenty ready to leave once we had our visas and new passport pages in hand.

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