Beer Laos.
Saturday, December 13th, 2008There are many, many things we love about Laos, but now that we’re in a remote, nearly tourist-free eastern corner of the country, we’ve found even more. No one in any part of this country has overcharged us, looked suspiciously at us or been anything but 100% welcoming. The food is good, the people are phenomenal, and the Beer Lao never stops coming…
….ever. We arrived in SamNeua after a loooong 11 hour mountainous bus trip without the slightest indication of civilization and were happy to see that there was in fact an internet cafe in town. After dinner we headed straight there and found a painfully slow connection at a painfully expensive rate, as is the norm in Laos. The place was soon devoid of kids and a group of guys had gathered and were popping open the Beer Laos around a coffee table.
One guy soon brought over two glasses of beer and offered them to us, saying “please join when finish! Friendship!” We couldn’t refuse, and soon abandoned the frustrating email attempts for the party on the other side of the room. We were warmly welcomed, and informed by the shop’s owner (who spoke excellent english, thanks to a six year education in Vietnam) that he’d just had his first baby on December 1 and that his friends had come into town to celebrate (In Laos, men drink and drive things while women do pretty much everything else).
The Beer Lao kept coming, as did shots of lao-lao, and our communication with the non-english speakers got better and better! They would accept no payment, and charged us for only a fraction of the internet that we’d used. It was a great time, and my love of Laos grew even more! The next two days were spent elsewhere (including the find of the trip, a steaming hot spring located across a rice paddy that allowed us use a heavenly private bathing room for merely 50 cents), but we returned tonight and found that the owner’s boss had come to visit.
Result? We’ve had unlimited glasses of Beer Lao placed in front of us (though Gabe went across the street so that we could contribute a few beers of our own), and could care less about the crappy connection. Everything in Laos has been a delight, and we hate to see the time flying by the way that it is!
allisonrae