Vientiane, Laos!

August 8, 2011

Sitting on a balcony overlooking Vientiane I couldn’t really ask more from life.  This used to be a concept I couldn’t even grasp my brain around for long enough to understand its simplicity.  There isn’t much more I could ask from this life right now in this moment - as families ride by in motorbikes and as the noise of other cities…of Southeast Asia, slowly evaporates and people feel free and light enough to walk in the street.  Vientiane, Laos, so far away in my mind, so close now I can taste it, feel its pale yellowness and large boulevards and hear and smell how different it is than any other place.  It’s French, and although I heard the man at the Vietnamese embassy speaking French today, it’s not at all French.  It’s small, but one tuk tuk drive shows me how large it really is.  It’s calming and enveloping; saturating me in the same food I’ve known before, only with different smells.  No bright lights, no pounding music, just hazy sunshine making it look like an old photograph come to life.  It’s dusty here, a feeling my feet had forgotten in the soaked streets of Mae Sot.  It’s luxurious.  People hold hands, children play badminton in the street and bowls upon bowls of leafy green vegetables are served at breakfast.  The language rhymes at every turn and the letters, or symbols rather, look like the people; round and small with smiles so big you think that it would break their face in half.  If I lined up a group of Lao people and told them to smile, a story would emerge.  I love it!  

Only a few hidden anxieties are still present within me….my inability to make my own decision, or rather my ability to choose not to stay when I know I love this place so much.  Traveling makes it so that I never want to go back to a schedule, where timeless days are all I could possibly live for and where rigidity suffocates me.  All of those options back home seem that way…suffocating. Yet I am choosing to be there when I don’t have to be, when I could spend my money and time here looking for a job, when I could live here happily and endlessly in the dripping heat, drinking mango lassies and eating nameless fruit.  But at the same time I feel like my time here, for this cycle, is up and that I want to fill my head with more knowledge before coming back to a place like this.  

We shall see, nervously, we shall see.  I will never, in this process or in any other, lose myself, not even long enough to lose sight of myself…I will never even lose touch of myself.