The first 5 star hotel (according to one news report) is now open in Savannakhet in Laos.
Check out their website, called TYCOONRESORT.COM.
April 28, 2009
April 17, 2009
It’s Lao New Year again so wishing you all a Sok Dii Pi Mai (literally Good Luck New Year).
The NYTimes has an excellent article on the water festivities of the New Year celebrations in Myanmar. It’s not quite Lao, but same same.
A friend told me an exquisite Lao fact that I’d never heard of before. Apparently during the Lao New Year festivities, where everyone throws water on each other, there is no need to use the toilet. If you need to go, you can just pour water over yourself while doing it. It’s perfectly acceptable for men and women to do this. What an ingenious way to combat the plague that is massive toilet queues at festival events.
April 13, 2009
The current political unrest in Bangkok, Thailand will surely be very damaging to the Lao tourism trade. Many people come into Laos through Bangkok, so any disruptions there will block one of the main avenues of tourists into Laos.
I hope that people wanting to travel to Laos will realise that there are many alternate avenues to Laos. Air Asia fly from Kuala Lumpur to Vientiane at very reasonable rates so there should be no reason why problems in Bangkok should stop you coming to Laos.
There are also flights from Vietnam, China and Cambodia to Laos so there are definitely many options on the table for those not wishing to come through Bangkok.
April 8, 2009
Over the weekend someone recounted to me their wedding photo experience in Laos. A wedding in Vientiane for the reasonably well off will include a wedding photo of the bride and groom. This is taken before the wedding day. It is placed at the front of the reception to greet guests. Signature features of a wedding photo are heavy photo-shopping and an ostentatious gold frame.
In this particular case the groom had hair artifically added to his receding hair line. “It was like standing next to a photo of a stranger”, was how he described it.
The photo store must have been very proud of their work because a few weeks later a friend called to say, “You’re on an 8 foot poster on Dong Palang Road!”. The couple were also printed on the photo store’s business cards. It was the Lao equivalent of being featured in a poster on Time Square.
March 15, 2009
I’ve found a pretty cool blog by a Lao coffee plantation near Pakse. It looks like a couple of falang have started a plantation and are working to export Lao coffee around the world. http://cafelao.blogspot.com/
The way I’ve seen coffee made in Laos is made by putting the coffee in a sift and pouring boiling water through it. It usually comes out very black. Even without sugar, the coffee tends to have a rather sweet flavour. Coffee is usually served by pouring the coffee over a cup generously filled with condensed milk. It’s a sickly sweet experience for the uninitiated, but sugar hit soon becomes addictive.
I think most people that have travelled to developing countries for an extensive time find out how prevalent Nestle condensed milk and their food flavouring products are.
How to ask for a coffee in Lao? “Coy (as in the carp-like fish) yak (or yark, like the name Mark) gin (rhymes with fin) cafe (pronounced with a french accent) horn (like the thing on your steering wheel)”. Altogether it means I want drink coffee hot.
In Australia you can buy Lao coffee from: http://www.obscura.net.au
March 14, 2009
I lived in Laos for one year and was very surprised to find out this week that there is a roller skating rink in Vientiane. Learning about it from social networking, the details of its location are:
“it’s just past the Talat Thongkamkan Chao Anou intersection on Chao Anou, to the left as you head from town towards Russian Circus. Just past the traffic lights.”
One more thing to add to the list of fun activities available in Vientiane, to which I would include the shooting range, go karting, bowling and Mekong aerobics.
February 21, 2009
William Easterly is often considered the main proponent against aid, so it’s interesting to hear this coming from his latest paper:
“There are well known and striking donor success stories, like the elimination of smallpox, the near-eradication of river blindness and Guinea worm, the spread of oral rehydration therapy for treating infant diarrheal diseases, DDT campaigns against malarial mosquitoes (although later halted for environmental reasons), and the success of WHO vaccination programs against measles and other childhood diseases.”
The bottom line is aid has some successes, so it’s important to get it right to make sure there are more of them. HT
February 7, 2009
Australian ethics philosopher Peter Singer (tk) has a new book out, “The Life You Can Save”.
You can read an exert of the book here.
“Think about something like that happening 27,000 times every day. Some children die because they don’t have enough to eat. More die, like that small boy in Ghana, from measles, malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia, conditions that either don’t exist in developed nations, or, if they do, are almost never fatal. The children are vulnerable to these diseases because they have no safe drinking water, or no sanitation, and because when they do fall ill, their parents can’t afford any medical treatment. UNICEF, Oxfam, and many other organizations are working to reduce poverty and provide clean water and basic health care, and these efforts are reducing the toll. If the relief organizations had more money, they could do more, and more lives would be saved.”
January 28, 2009
This film about a Lao immigrant’s life growing up in Brooklyn has received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Laos is making a big impact on Hollywood this year.
FILM SYNOPSIS
The life of Laotian immigrant Thavisouk Phrasavath serves as a metaphor for the far-reaching repercussions that are still felt from America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. When his family suffered persecution following the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia as a result of his father’s work for the CIA, Phrasavath’s mother fled with eight of her ten children to a life of poverty in Brooklyn.
January 23, 2009
I just watched the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino and was surprised to see it featured a Hmong family. They feature very prominently as central characters. Clint Eastwood’s character, Walt, a grumpy Korean War veteran, befriends his Hmong neighbours and in particular a young boy called Thao. Tau gets into trouble with a local Hmong gang, and Walt intervenes to protect him and his family.
The characters never specifically mention they come from Laos. Things that are culturally familiar to me are a wall textile, traditional Hmong clothing worn by Thao’s sister, and the mention of it being socially unacceptable to touch the head of a Hmong person.
It’s a very good film and is currently ranked 88th in the Internet Movie Database’s top 250 films of all time. The film used real Hmong people in almost all the roles. It’s the most prominent example of Hmong culture in the history of Hollywood. Clint Eastwood amazes me with his ability to break new ground with this excellent film at age 78.
