Inferior Decorating

Yesterday, I visited our sister school Saphanthong Tai. The purpose of the visit was to take all of the year 9 students and paint the interior of 3 of the school's classrooms. I have had experience with year 9 students in the past. I have also had experience with large amounts of paint. The two of them together was not suggesting itself to be an enticing prospect.
Arriving at the Primary school was a fairly humbling experience. They do not have a lot. Two small, dark and simple buildings separated by a very small muddy yard covered with weeds and dog shit. What little they do have however they are very proud of.

The circus that followed with 2 dozen 15 year olds armed with brushes, rollers, paint and absolutely zero painting skills must have been fairly disconcerting for them. The poor old school janitor bounced from room to room like a nervous cat watching its offspring being tormented by a visiting Kindergarten group from the local ADHD association. It didn't help that amongst our arsenal of mayhem implements, there were NO roller trays. The plunging of painting impliments deep, (up to ones wrist sounds about right), into the giant tubs of paint appeared to be the solution. It doesn't seem to matter how many times you suggest to a 15 year old with access to copious amounts of mark-making equipment, that if their roller isn't actually rolling down the wall but merely sliding down and covering them and the floor with dripping paint that perhaps they have a little to much on it. It is a waste of breathing out past one's vocal chords whilst making various shapes with one's lips and tongue. Better to save all that energy for the head shaking and tsk-tsking that will shortly be required. I did my best to try and tidy up some of the edge-work, and by day's end we had succeeded in covering almost everything that was required to be covered, in paint of varying thicknesses, as well as a few other things that perhaps may have been better left unpainted. eg the floor. Today we return to the school armed with a different armful-of-destruction in order to unpaint the unfortunate sections of floor and classroom furniture. I am sure the enthusiasm of the Year 9's will be not as forthcoming as it was yesterday, but I have faith that they will come to the party and do a good job.

One of the rooms newly painted.

Tomorrow will mark 3 months since I arrived here in Vientiane. It has been a very different 3 months to that which I had imagined, but also a very rewarding one in so many ways.
Firstly, the opportunity to receive as much work as I have has been most fortunate. The school has not only provided me with employment, but also a great base for building friendships in both a social and professional context. Working with so many of the kids at the school and also meeting some of their family members has been a joy. This really is a wonderful educational environment that I imagine would be very hard to better should we ever leave here during the boy's schooling years.

Little salas that are spread around our school for the kids to eat and play in.

Part of this new building will be home to the new music and theatre dept for the school.

Secondly, the food here is just wonderful. Of course some of it is also downright frightening, but on the whole, it is a great thing. The streets of Vientiane city are lined with many restaurants offering foods from around the world and all for the price of the proverbial oily rag. One of my favourite discoveries is the wonderful bowls of noodle soups with herbs and greens and savoury doughnuts for not much more than a single dollar. Of course the Beerlao is cheap too.

Merrilee enjoying a Beerlao Tower with our first visitor, the glorious Kylie JL.

Wandering through some on the markets and seeing the vast array of fresh fruits and vegetables, many of which I have never seen before is a magnificent adventure in itself. Then as you make your way deeper into the bowels of the marketplace, the air changes, a dank and humid clamour erodes the senses and the putrescence of raw offal, rotting fish and row upon row of bowls of meat soaking in fetid, brown juices tempts the bile to rise to the occasion. Large catfish seem to be very popular here, (there is a rare catfish in the mighty Mekong that can grow to 300kg....haven't seen any quite that big yet), frogs too are seemingly common on the menu. Tubs and tubs of them at the markets, all about the size of a regular cane toad and no more pleasant to look at. Then of course there are the 'regular' foods, the many types of rice that are available, the spices, the giant bags filled with dried chillies. Truly the markets are worth a visit just for the sake of the visit itself.

Then of course there are the people here in Laos. It is quite magic what a simple smile can achieve. Meeting people in the street and smiling at them most often brings a return smile wider and warmer than that which you just gave. I have heard very few cross words since I arrived, and the ones I have heard are invariably from foreigners.
My skills at communicating with the local Lao people in their native tongue have unfortunately not improved. I can say hello, count to ten.....and....that's about it. I shall endeavour to fix this in the coming weeks, months, years!
Then I just may be able to ask these locals just what sort of fish they are actually catching on the side of the road on my way home.

There are only 3 days left in the school year before most of the staff and students make their way back to their respective homelands for a much earned break. Some, like us, will not return home but instead broaden their adventure with visits to new places. Part one for us begins this coming Monday evening with a 12 hour train journey from here to Bangkok. We are traveling in a first-class sleeper....we shall see how much sleeping actually gets done.



Favourite quote from a girl at the school here in Vientiane.
"I'm never going to Asia. I don't even like Asians."


The amusing signs continue.

Well I guess it is for kiddies.

We Built This City: It'll Rock and Roll

We live here in a house at the end of a single lane dirt drive that runs off an almost-wide-enough-for-two-vehicles dirt road that leads back, via a positively multi-laned, (in relative comparison), dirt highway to a road that has some sort of permanent sealing on it. (I don't believe it is asphalt, it looks more like concrete. Either way, I do not wish to have cause to meet it on terms close enough for me to decipher its exact origin.) But never the less, that fact remains that we live in a house. It is, in many ways, a pleasant dwelling and if you can forego the aforementioned goat track and all its inherent chiropractic adventure, it is a comforting place to call home. The view of the sun sneaking its way above the horizon, a gigantic rich red glowing ball hovering above the rice fields, before launching into its day is a sight to behold and one that is not easily forgotten. It is peaceful. There is no traffic to assault either the ears or the eyes. (Unless the rarely seen bullock drawn cart slowly ambling its way through the rice fields can be classed as traffic) There are no noisy neighbours with their infernal doof-doof running late into the night. OK..... Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch. There is SOME music that goes on. The Lao people seem to be, by and large, a happy people who take great joy in not only supporting their country's economy by consuming copious amounts of the greatest resource that Laos has to offer, Beerlaos, but also in participating, with much vigour, in that ancient Asian custom we have come to know as....Karaoke. Every Sunday afternoon. From across the rice fields, each week, drifts the sound of not one, but several gatherings where the apparent ritual strangling of cats, (of which there seem to be a limitless supply), takes place. This recurrent aural assault is of course accompanied by backing tracks that always, (and I do mean always), contain the melodic, soothing sounds of that wonderfully rich classical Asian instrument...the cowbell. Quite how the cowbell became such an integral part of Indochinese musical custom I am not sure. Perhaps there is an ethnomusicological dissertation awaiting a PhD student who is keen of spirit but perhaps not so keen of ear. In order to embark upon such a tertiary chore one would need to be unfathomably foolhardy or be possessed of a hearing impairment so severe as to render one's self entirely deaf. Perhaps both ought to be considered a prerequisite. So yes....sometimes there are celebratory gatherings near our home that involve this tolerated custom. However, unlike the blue collared suburban chicken coop of the developed world that I am used to, this festivity does not go on until the early hours of the morning followed by the ubiquitous shouting that comes with the revelry of either joyous inebriation or drunken fisticuffs, I could never really tell the difference.
Somewhere in here I was talking about our house.
Its architecture is a blend of Asian and Western influence with its solid concrete walls rising to meet the high peaked roof trimmed and adorned with quaint Asian curves and swirls. The dark, simple timbers of the interior create an atmosphere of sombre, colonial splendour for the masses. The need for interior decorating a must. A splash of brightness or colour here and there indeed transforms the house into a home.

Looking around Vientiane, it would seem that the process of building such a dwelling, or any for that matter, seems to follow the same pattern. Find somewhere, (anywhere), to fit a house. Put some dirt on it. Pour concrete over it. Make some sticking up bits out of concrete. Then fill all the gaps with bricks. Quite how long these buildings are expected to remain in their preferred erect state is unclear. Having endured the lengthy red tape that is required in the cyclone-prone tropical north of Australia's building process, it is in some ways a breath of fresh air......and also a potential disaster waiting to happen. Our home is not very old. A couple of years I believe. And yet the cracks and lines in the walls and supporting columns in some places are no less apparent than those on the face of Bob Hawke. Sitting on our front balcony, (where all the palings charmingly display hand carved elephants supporting the balustrades), I look across at a building site where I have watched this standard building procedure take place. All that needs doing now is the roof being attached and the brick walls being plastered almost as thickly as a 40 something's bridesmaid on a hens night. Both are hiding something. What I find interesting is the fact that the columns never looked perfectly vertical to my eye, and the top layer of bricks is about as straight as a women's soccer tournament. I'm guessing that building inspections, like many other things here, are conducted at a distance and over, (or perhaps that should be under), a counter rather than actually on the job. Not far from our home, there was a pond on the side of the road when I arrived here 2 months ago. It is no longer there. It took several days to pump out all of the water and reveal the gloomy mass of fallen trees, dead animals and forgotten trinkets that had existed at its murky bottom. It was in fact quite surprising to see just how deep it actually was. It then took about the same amount of days to back fill it with mud, trucked in from goodness knows where, and packed down by nothing more than the very trucks that delivered it which then had to be towed out of the resulting quagmire by the next waiting delivery. I can only assume that this has all taken place in order to now build upon this wonderfully rugged, architectural blank canvas. The wise man may indeed have built his house upon the rock.....but I don't recall there being a man, or woman, of any intellectual persuasion being described building their house upon the mud! This being the case, how are we to know if this action leans more toward the wise or the foolish? Perhaps looking to your immediate right may help. Just next door there is a new shopping centre and restaurant that already has a car park exit consisting of a concrete slab that hovers some 3 ft above the ground. One wonders if this will serve as a visual learning tool for the prospective neighbours or just something for them to ignore as they slowly sink closer to England or perhaps Wales. (One assumes this is approximately where one would end up if you were to dig completely through the earth's core and out the other side given our proximity to China.) The other thing that perplexes me is the seemingly complete lack of use of bamboo in the Lao construction industry. I can't say I've seen a lot of Asia, but from what I have seen, and also am led to believe by others far more learned in all things Asia, is that given the availability and inherent strength of bamboo, it lends itself rather perfectly to a variety of construction applications, in particular scaffolding. For some reason, (I don't know, perhaps it only grows in the more mountainous areas of Laos), it is not used here in Vientiane. Instead, loads of small timber trunks are substituted and are used for any multilevel scaffold or bracing requirements. It looks rather peculiar, but it gets the job done.

I wonder what the Greenies would have to say about it? It would appear that entire forests would need to be brought to their proverbial knees purely for the peripheral purpose of constructing large amounts of concrete walls for apartment buildings.
Of course the local landscape is littered with the resultant dwellings created via this apparently haphazard, earth subsiding, deforestation modus-operandi. I have even seen occasions where the 'put some dirt on it' step has been omitted entirely. Why bother with all of that noisy mess when you can simply build directly on top of a swamp living in the faint hope that A: your house won't sink any lower. And B: the water won't rise any higher. Either way, it would seem the fool's odyssey.

In the end, and there must always be one, these houses, just like any others, will indeed fall down. When?......is the great question. It is of course quite possible that my distinctly home-brand building and fabrication expertise has left me inadequately disposed to make judgements on the fineries of construction in Asia. For all I know some of these houses may just look as though they're standing in front of the proverbial bucket just deciding with which foot to kick it, but may in fact have many years, decades or even centuries of vertical permanence about them. Others, of course.....will not.

Some of these building practices do indeed seem a little odd, certainly to my untrained eye, but one thing cannot be denied. Yes, there are some shonky looking places in this town. Some I would rather not set foot in, others still under construction that I would rather not look at lest I be called at some point in the future to cross the threshold and enter the belly of their tenuous interiors. The fact remains that some of the creations that come out of this tradition are indeed nothing short of splendid.

The pure majesty and opulence of the Wats, (temples), and shrines that pepper this city's architectural landscape are more than enough to compensate for any of its anatomical misgivings. It took an army of marauding Siamese in the early 1800's to bring down these magnificent creations that otherwise may have stood for many centuries. So let it not be my position to judge, but merely to observe and enjoy the great things of this city. We have a house here, (that manages to remain in an upright manner), that we have made into a wonderful home. Our children are blossoming into glorious young gentlemen. (Zachary has only just returned from Hanoi where he represented the school on the junior volleyball team. A lone 6th grader in a world of towering grade 8's. They came second.....a mighty achievement as 6 weeks ago none of them had ever even played volleyball) And there are still many wonderful and delicious morsels of life yet to be encountered on our continuing adventure. I can hardly wait.





P.S.
If you are a disadvantaged child in Laos......it would be a useful thing to have a fleet set of heels around this textiles boutique.

Two beers thanks..........on the rocks.

Sabaidee.
I sit here on our kitchen balcony sipping on an ice cooled Beerlao, watching, in the coolness of the late afternoon sun, people from the neighbourhood cultivating rice in the fields. The women bob around amongst the rice with the obligatory Chinese peaked hats, cutting handfuls at a time, stacking them then tying them into bushels before the men cart them on sticks across their shoulders to a block just behind our house where they will soon be threshed out to collect the precious grains that are the life blood of this region of the world. Meanwhile, another fellow trolls his way through the watery canals that run between each rice plot tending to his bamboo fish traps, attempting to collect whatever fish, eels and frogs happen to use that particular mini aquatic highway.

I am quite astounded at the rate that the water flows through these small brooks. To look out over these rice fields, one would easily assume that the ground is very flat, and yet this water flows, as I guess it must in order to keep it all working, down some unseen slope towards ........somewhere. It would be interesting to know where it all ends up, or even more interesting, where it all comes from! I feel a great urge to offer my assistance, as uninformed and unskilled as it is in the art of rice harvesting, but I am still way too shy. Perhaps when my language skills improve I may be able to explain my curiosity and willingness to take part.
Currently we are on a school holiday for 10 days. Back home, Easter would just have been celebrated. It seems peculiar to be in a country where there is no recognition whatsoever, (officially anyhow), of this festival that has been so much a part of my life in one way or another since I was born. I would have forgotten completely had we not driven past the Korean Christian Church on Sunday, and noted the enormous number of cars parked everywhere, almost blocking the road as seems to be the practice here.
Here however, we are in the beginning stages of celebrating Pii Mai Lao, the Lao New Year. The festival proper begins today and continues for 6 days of partying, drinking, very bad and very loud karaoke, baci, (pronounced baasee), ceremonies and of course the traditional cleansing ritual that means that everyone at some stage is going to end up soaking wet.
Last Thursday, Merrilee and I attended a Lao staff party at VIS, (Vientiane International School). The Lao at VIS work as gardeners, guards, teachers assistants and admin staff and every year they have a Pii Mai celebration on the last day of school before the break. Not all that many of the regular staff attend, but those that do are in for a treat.
We began the afternoon in the covered eating area of the school eating small snacks etc before Merrilee and I were beckoned into the kitchen by the kitchen staff where we partook in a baci ceremony.
A large central silver tower stood in the centre of the table covered with flowers, offerings and a number of long strings which were then held by all the participants. Some short prayers and statements were made by those gathered wishing good fortune before rice and flowers were thrown all around. Then many short pieces of plaited strings were taken from the central tower and everyone moved around the room wishing each other many fortuitous things and making any apologies for any wrong doing that may have happened in the past. This is signified by the tying of the baci strings around the wrists of those you are wishing good fortune. It was a great thing to be involved in and I think the Lao staff were thrilled that we were there.
Then the fun began.
The beer started to flow extremely freely followed by the splashing of water. Traditionally, especially to elders, a small cuplet of water is gently poured over the hands and shoulder to cleanse away the things of the past year I guess. Well the niceties very soon went out the window and pandemonium took over the proceedings. Buckets of water, sometimes filled with ice, were heaved over anyone and everyone. In order to keep the water coming, a large tub was placed in the centre of the covered area with a hose running continuously into it. Watching the Laos kitchen staff who on the whole are very quiet humble people, go completely nuts is pretty damn amusing. From hardly saying a word, to jumping up on tables and picking up people and dumping them in the water tub, all within a couple of bottles of Beerlao.....priceless. Before long of course, the entire cafeteria eating area was almost ankle deep in water. Fortunately not too much of the pig on a spit ended up in it......may have been a bit ugly.
Merrilee and I finally called it quits and bid our farewells totally soaked to the bone. Although just one more tummy slide on the floor the length of the cafeteria before we left was of course a necessity.
We are now officially into the Pii Mai festival, so what we witnessed in the school cafeteria was just a tiny taste of what we can expect over the coming week. The whole country goes completely bananas. Every conceivable design of water pistol can be seen on sale at anything from large department stores to a guy sitting on the back of a broken down truck tending to his goats.

As it turns out.......this festival is indeed nuts.
We spent an afternoon in the city with some friends of ours squirting anyone and everyone that passed by.
After finally making our way into the city, which took forever....the traffic was almost at a standstill, (at which point we got soaked by a bunch of revelers with buckets of water heaved through our open car windows!!), we drank beer on the side of the road with buckets, bottles, bowls and water pistols filled withed iced water and became a part of the crazy procession that slowly moves down the streets. Utes loaded with sometimes 10 or more people, cars, trucks, motorcycles, tuktuks...... Anyone that was on the streets was absolutely soaked to the bone and smiling from ear to ear. Of course there was the odd dye tainted water bomb or flour bomb just to make things a little more messy as well.

This craziness continued in the streets for several days, which whilst being a lot of fun, made it very difficult to just get around the place in order to buy something at the shop. Wandering to the market to get a small bag of veggies meant putting your phone into a plastic bag and making sure you had some dry footwear to change into when you get home.
On the last day of celebrations, I walked up to the corner of our little goat track armed with a few bottles of Beerlao and introduced myself to a small group of locals having a party on the side of the road. I spoke no Lao and they spoke no English, but the beer flowed freely and much merriment was had. It would seem I have finally come to terms with the Lao tradition of drinking beer with ice. With the lack of refrigeration in many areas, it's the only way to have cold beer, and in the end......that's all that matters. Every passing vehicle was stopped, beer offered, (this ended up being my job), and water splashed over the occupants.....sometimes respectfully......sometimes not. Needless to say, our standing in the local neighbourhood has gone up another notch.

Sok Dee Pii Mai

I will endeavour to bring at least one strange sight each post.
Here is number 1.

Together Again

Sabaidee. Welcome to our adventure.
After many months of planning, organising and separation our family is finally together in our new home of Vientiane in the People's Democratic Republic of Laos. A massive sigh of relief from everyone involved. Merrilee having to cope in a new job in a new country for six months while I did my best to keep things going in Darwin with the boys finishing up at Moil Primary and also trying to get the house in shape ready to be rented out. With some new paving done under and around the house and a few new bits and pieces, it felt, as could be expected, a little sad to be leaving such a lovely looking home.
Our new home here thankfully  is just as wonderful in its own way. Situated a little way out of town, we have committed the ultimate real estate crime. Rather than choosing the worst house in the best street, instead, we have gone for a right corker that is at the very end of one of the worst roads in Vientiane. At the moment it is the tail end of the dry season, so the road in is very dusty and littered with potholes waiting to swallow any wary motorbikes that stray from the prescribed zig-zag route. Once the rains arrive it will not only be muddy and slippery, but the potholes that were at least visible......will no longer be. That will be an exciting ride I'm sure. Of course there is no guarantee that the road will in fact be enough above water to make it navigable in anything other that a dugout canoe. (Note to self, must buy one of those.................soon) 
There are not many falangs, (originally a word for the French....now just any foreigner),  in our neck of the woods, so we are still a bit of a novelty with the locals. Quizzical stares from strangers as we head with great purpose down dead end dirt tracks are generally turned into friendly smiles as we smile and greet those that we have come to recognise in our short time here already. 
It is a fairly quiet neighbourhood with our house being right at the edge of a series of rice fields where people are often seen gathering weed and fish during the day, and other things that I am not sure of by night. (Perhaps eels or fish or frogs or even some of those motorbikes that disappeared into the potholes must surely turn up somewhere!)
The sunrise from our small kitchen balcony where we usually eat breakfast is ridiculously insane. It is without a lie some kind of stereotypical Asian cartoon background. Rice paddie, with a single tree growing out of the middle of it, and a giant red ball, which is apparently the sun, glowing through the smokey haze. .....pretty much every day. Thankfully there is no bamboo in the above picture otherwise I would have trouble believing it myself.
The boys have settled into school life at VIS, (Vientiane International School), where Merrilee teaches. It is a wonderful school with great staff and beautiful students. I have been working as a substitute teacher almost from the moment I stepped off the plane. Pretty frightening straight up,  but great to have some work so early on. I have had so many classes already it is turning into a blur. Grade 12 French, History and Science, all the way down to Prep and Grade 1 PE it's been very interesting. Had a class of Grade 2's all day at one stage. Felt a bit like the Kindergarton Cop......minus the muscles.
Well, this being my first delve into the Blogging world, I apolgise if it is a little uninteresting for many of you. But with the months and maybe years to come I hope that my blogging skills will improve and there will be enough articles, photos, videos, recipes or pets for sale to keep you all interested and coming back to check on our Asian adventure.