The movie, Bomb Harvest, is currently playing on ABC TV. It’s an excellent film and anyone with a remote interest in Laos should watch it. The movie’s accompanying website is very good.
During the ‘Secret War’ that the Americans conducted in South East Asia during the conflict in Vietnam, nearly 2 million tonnes of bombs were dropped on neighbouring Laos.
Many of those bombs failed to explode and are embedded in the landscape. A new documentary BOMB HARVEST follows Australian bomb disposal specialist Laith Stevens in his work for the humanitarian organization Mines Advisory Group.
A source tells me the Lao people weren’t so receptive to Regurgitator. The band hit the stage at around 9:30pm, but by that stage it was getting pretty close to curfew so a lot of Lao people decided to leave. Regurgitator’s music is a little too contemporary for Lao tastes. Someone should have told them to try playing some Thai-pop covers or a bit of “Hotel California”.
Kahn Souphanousinphone: From Laos, stupid! It’s a landlocked country in South East Asia between Vietnam and Thailand, population approximately 4.7 million!
An amusing past time when travelling in Asia is to notice unknowing wearers clad in t-shirts with inappropriate English phrases. A favourite is one a friend’s immensely pleasant co-worker wearing, “Find them, F**k them, Forget them”.
There’s no reason to feel superior by mocking these non-English speaker’s ignorance because at least they don’t tattoo these mistakes on themselves.
I’m going to go ahead a make up a phrase to describe this: reverse-engrish. Another examples of reverse-engrish I often see are people wearing chopsticks in their hair. There are plenty of more out there. If you can think of some please share them in the comments. There’s probably enough material to make a website out of it.
