The last night I was in Vientienne I got a little bored of watching the CNN and ESPN in my room although at first since I hadn't watched any TV in 55 days it was like gorging myself on candy. So, I looked at the Lonely Planet and they said that there was a bowling alley near my hotel so I walked down there to bowl a few frames. The LP is pretty snarky in the commentary saying that there is some "interesting local form" or something similar but when I got there I was easily the worst bowler in the place. When I first went to get shoes they told me I'd have to buy socks as well to go with the shoes but I told the woman that I didn't really want to have to but socks and so she pointed me over to another rack of shoes that were just the old ones that I guess they didn't care if your dirty socks got in.

How much are the beers at MutMee guesthouse?

This is the view from the Wat at Mt. Phousi in Luang Prahbang. Although my photography is below average at best I hope you can see that it is very beautiful there.

Here is the reclining Buddha. I'm hoping to start putting some pictures up.

So, I sent some postcards to from Lang Prabang and I put them in a mailbox. Today when I tried that in Vientienne a woman came out from the shop next to the mailbox and laughed. Then she took out a key, got my postcards, and told me to go across the street to a different mailbox. So, I don't know if the mailbox I used was valid or not.

People in Laos seem to like to drink. And that's not the backpackers, that's the locals. I went to see the Plain of Jars the other day (it's dull. I took a picture that I want to title "Everyone at the Plain of Jars wondering what the fuck to do") and our guide went on this impromptu spiel about prostitution (for some reason you go to BBQ places if you want to find the ladies in Laos) and how much he enjoys rice whiskey which is called LaoLao. It's not actually produced commercially. It's all just made moonshine style in these villages, which in between our visits to the three sites of jars, he took us too. It's just this covering with some oil barrels. Some of them are filled with rice and some of them are filled with fermenting LaoLao. The guide cracked himself up with a story about how a chicken ate some of the alcoholic rice and staggered around for awhile. I made some joke about drunk animals always being funny but no one else really seemed to think so. So, then he asks if we want to sample some of the whiskey and so we say "Sure." and he brings out a shot glass and a plastic water bottle full of it. He starts pouring shots for everyone and everyone has two until he pours one and we all say "For you!" and he smiled and said he'd already had some in the hut but he drank it anyway. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he'd been telling us about his hangover all morning. He also told us that the way he drinks LaoLao is to mix it with BeerLao, pepsi, and milk. This sounds horrible. I wanted to try it but no one else would so it didn't really happen. So, before we went to the third jars site we stopped at this roadside place for lunch and in the back everyone, the guide and our driver plus the people that worked at the restaurant, were all getting WASTED. Yelling and drinking and generally carrying on until the driver came back out, put on his pith helmet, and started up the van blaring Thai pop as loud as it would go. I was a little worried about his ability to drive but he seemed to handle it pretty well. He didn't wreck or anything.



So, that night I went out with these two American guys I met from SF that were really cool and seemed the closest to people like my friends that I've met on the trip. I was with them, Lukas who is Polish ("Oh, you are going to Russia. Hmm. Well, uh, have fun. It will be very difficult. Cold? Oh yes, it will be very cold.") and this guy Kevin who just walked up to the Plain of Jars out of nowhere and who I've now run into three times so far on my trip. Twice in China and now in Laos. Anyway, we all went down to this place next door to the NGO that clears away land mines in Laos called "Craters" and settled in for some BeerLaos, which are pretty good by the way. Things were a little stilted at first but then everyone got kind of drunk and it started to get more fun. Then this guy Oz showed up who I'd ridden the bus to Phonsavanh with and he said, "Let's get some LaoLao!" which we did at the store next door. It was in a seltzer bottle. He told me that when he bought it a police officer was there and Oz asked if he wanted a shot and the officer said "Sure!", took one, and then got on his motorcycle and drove off. Anyway, we drank quite a bit of LaoLao until the place closed and then we headed down the street to some place the American guys had been which was pretty much a Laos roadhouse. We came in and there was music blaring and about five tables of Laos teenagers. We started to dance and then after a bit the teenagers started dancing too including one guy who started breakdancing! It was pretty awesome. So yeah, that was my birthday. The ten hour bus trip the next day was a little brutal but even that wasn't so bad. They did hand out barf bags to everyone though since the trip was going to be up and down some serious winding roads. I didn't have a problem but I did see some guys throwing bags of puke out the window. Also, there is a guy on the busses with an AK-47 in case we come across bandits or something. I wanted to take his picture but was a little too intimidated to ask.

I'm in Phonsavanh and the internet is fairly expensive so I'm going to keep this short. Didn't do too much in Luang Phabang but did see the old Royal Palace which has some great artwork including a murual done in the 1930 that shows a day in Laotian life. Apparently each part of the mural looks best if you see it during the part of the day it is depicting. The throne room was also pretty nice with all of these colored glass figures reprsenting Laotian folktales. They also kept the King and Queen's bedrooms exactly how they were when they left so that was pretty interesting.

Also climed up Mt. Phousi which has a temple on top and there were women there selling birds in cages since I guess it is a good thing if you set them free up there at the temple. Not sure how Buddha thinks about catching theam in the first place but that seemed deeper than my knowledge of Lao would allow me to go.

One of my greatest regrets so far is that I didn't start my photo blog of Chinese people asleep at work. At least once a day you would see someone just dead ass asleep at a store or restaurant or something. One time I had to wake up a woman to ask about a train ticket and she was so pissed.

Anyway, I'm not dead. Merely been away from the internet again. I decided to go to Laos and so I took a minibus with some English girls, some Austrian girls, one Dutch couple, and what I think is a gay man and a lesbian traveling together who were from Finland. We stopped at a town where you pick up the boat for the two day trip down the Mekong to Luang Phabang. In the morning we went through Thai and Laos customs and so on and headed down to the boat. Oops! The boat is full! This turns out great actually since they put another boat into service and it was bigger and less crowded than the other boat. I had a seat to myself which was nice since if there was someone else there it would have been a fairly cramped. The trip was six hours and then a stop and then six hours again the next day. The trip itself was pretty great. The scenery was just amazing, and I'm not a scenery guy for the most part, but just being able to look up from my book and see these amazing hills and with all the different shades of greenery was great. Eventually we pulled into Pak Beng which is a city that has these boat tourists coming through every day. I had paid for a room beforehand in Thailand and I can only say it was pretty much a huge mistake. The place I stayed was the worst place I've ever stayed. Everything was totally uncomfortable, including the pillow which was unusable, and the bathroom was concrete with just a candle. Which was fine with me actually. It was like you were pissing in a medieval castle or something, but the bed was so bad that I hardly got any sleep and I'm pretty good at sleeping in most places. The next morning I went to brush my teeth and I heard the loudest retching from the other bathroom and then the owner of the guesthouse came out with a big smile on his face and said "Too much to drink last night!". I wasn't surprised since he reeked of alcohol when I met him on the dock.

The next day we were only in one boat and it was filled to the brim with people on the floor etc...A few people complained but finally the guy said "Only one boat." and I mean, what are you going to do?

So, we set off and we saw some villages, someone pointed out we had not seen any roads at all on the banks, we saw an elephant, and then we saw a dead body floating down the river. It floated so closely that you could see the beard on his face. Some guy behind me said "Oh, that's not real!" but unless someone had thrown a very lifelike mannequin in the water, it was.

Finally we showed up at Luang Phabanfg and I got a guesthouse that was very comfortable and there were two young boys playing Playstation when I got there so it is very homey.

So, here I am. Next stop: The Plain of Jars.

I was two and a half days away from the internet so that's why there's been a real lack of posts lately. I went on a three day/two night trek to see some hill tribes in Thailand. The trip started off with eight of us but three of the people were only going for a two day/one night trip so halfway through we split up with them. It was me, a sixteen year old kid from Britain named Stephen, three Belgian girls, Charlotte, Tina, and Tina, and a couple, the man was Thai, and the woman was Thai too but she lived in Rome. The last person was a Chinese woman who was the Thai woman's friend and also lived in Rome so they spoke Italian to one another.

We had about a two hour ride out to where we started trekking and it took awhile to get there since the truck really didn't go very quickly up hills. Once we started off our guide showed off his many leaf tricks which included tearing one leaf apart and blowing bubbles with the sap and another trick where he took the leaf and hit it with his palm and it made a huge POP! noise. The first place we stopped wasn't exactly all that rural in the sense that there were powerlines and a telephone booth and it really sort of seemed like this is what it would be like if you went on a tour of poor, rural, West Virginia. We hiked along and saw a lot of insects, tons of huge spiders, and numerous furry caterpillars.

Finally we showed up at the village where we were going to spend the night and we stayed in a raised up house thing that had a solar panel attached to a battery so there was a light. It was kind of early and so we just kind of all sat there together waiting for the guide to cook dinner. At one point a guy on an elephant just strolled by in the background and that was kind of exciting but that was it. There wasn't really much to see otherwise. So, we sat around and ate and it got dark and we sat some more and I chatted away with the Belgians mostly. Then it was time for bed. (Jeez, this is a dull story.)

The next day we got to ride the elephants. First we fed them bananas and they came right over with their trunks and took them right out of your hands. One of them managed to fling mucus on one of the Tinas which was pretty amusing. So, then we got on the elephants on a little elephant chair. My partner in this was Steven who was wearing his anarchy doo rag today. He'd worn his Union Jack one yesterday. So, we set off and our elephant was the slow one. And the one with the flatulence. You couldn't really smell it but every so often the elephant would just make this really loud sound like "BWAAAAAP". The elephants didn't appear to be mistreated from what I saw, although I'm sure they don't do too much in front of tourists, other than once they shot one of them in the side with a slingshot and a couple of times they threw dung at the elephant. I'm not sure why. When we were riding the elephant it stopped once and uprooted a tree. Just reached down with the trunk and pulled it right out of the ground to munch on the leaves.

We got done with the elephants and then hiked on until we were supposed to get to these waterfalls where we could swim. Well, the waterfalls were a pretty big disappointment in the fact that they were really small and, according to my Belgian colleagues, smelled pretty bad. I couldn't smell anything but it was decided by everyone that my nose doesn't work very well. We didn't spend too much time swimming then and since we were where we were going to sleep we all sat down and sat some more. I learned that when I mispronounce the word "Qatar" it means "pussy" in Dutch. Towards the end of the evening our guide and the cook came out to the table and we played some card games including one called "Pig" that I had never heard of. There was a special "We're camping!" sort of rule where if you lost a hand then the person that won the hand could draw on your face with the soot from the frying pan. So, I lost three hands in a row since I didn't understand the rules and got my face totally covered in soot or grease or whatever it was despite my protestations that it wasn't really fair since I didn't understand the rules. We played for about an hour and a half until I was super tired and we all went to bed. In the middle of the night I woke up and smelled something burning but I didn't really pay attention to it and just fell back asleep. It turns out that in the middle of the night the cook had fallen asleep and a candle had fallen on his bedding and set it on fire. He went and woke up the guide and the two of them had to take it, still burning, and throw it in the river. You could see it there. A big charred mattress.

That morning we headed off to do bamboo rafting down a river. I was chosen to be the driver and I dutifully took up the bamboo pole and pushed us down the river while a Thai man in front guided us. There some very, very, light rapids on the river but at one point the guy in front lost his balance for a second and tipped the raft and I fell in the river. It wasn't deep at all so I just swam for the shore and then swam right back out to raft and got back on. We did a little bit more rafting, had lunch, I got some chili in my eye, and we came back to Chiang Mai.

Tomorrow...Laos.

Let's just hope things calm down a little before I get over to Israel.

Who I've met and what I've learned:

Who:In Chengdu I met Audrey who was a Montrealean who worked in television.

What I learned: Traveling by yourself as a woman can be hard. "I was travelling with this Japanese guy for two days and we shared a room one night in a hostel and in the middle of the night he turned to me and said "I've been thinking about our relationship..." and I had to interrupt and say and "What relationship? Just go back to sleep." and then the next day I had to tell him it was just a little too weird."

Who: Dave the owner of the hostel in Bangkok

What I learned: "There are three places you never open a whorehouse: near a police station, near a school, or near a hospital."

Who: Guy I met in a bar after I watched him grab some guys arm and the guy stormed off. I came over to ask what had happened.

What I Learned: He was a sniper with the SAS. He'd killed three people. He was a spy looking for Osama Bin Laden. Osama Bin Laden is in China.

Who: Wen was a 21 year old Chinese girl I met in Shanghai who wanted me to teach English for two weeks at a camp she was part of. She was also smitten with a French guy who was in our dorm. "He is very beautiful." Unfortunately, M'sieu met a Shanghainese girl one evening and Wen was not pleased and went into a lengthy diatribe against big city Chinese girls and Shanghai girls in particular.

What I learned: "There is a saying among Shanghainese girls that you want an American first, a British guy second, after that any kind of European, and after that a rich Chinese guy."

Who: Jim a guy from Las Vegas who runs his own adult web site and who has that weird "I've been smoking since I was 13 and now I'm 45" skin.

What I learned: Don't use an ATM in Cambodia. Have the money changing places swipe your card for you. Also, if you are going to ask other tourists for money then have a story that makes at least a little bit of sense. He apparently had lost his atm card in Cambodia and the bank was online and would only send him a new card to his house and not to the U.S. embassy in Thailand but there was plenty of money there etc...until it led up to him showing me the entrance to the skytrain and asking me for some money and "If you give me your bank account number I'll pay you back for sure.". I refused and two times after that I saw Jim on the street and he didn't acknowledge me. Oh yeah, he had a rat tail. It was never explained how it was that he was living in hotel in Bangkok or had any money at all and also why he didn't have any family or friends to help him out rather than having to strike up conversations with guys in a restaurant. I asked him why he didn't just transfer the money out via wire or open up a Netbank account or something. He didn't really have a good answer for me. Scammers 1 Josh 1

So, I'm still in Bangkok. Why? Well, it turns out that even though my card was at the bank where it got sucked into that ATM I couldn't get it since I didn't have my passport. This was on Friday and I figured I'd just make it back to the bank on Monday. Unfortunately, both Monday and Tuesday are bank holidays in Thailand. Monday being the anniversary of the Buddha's first sermon and Tuesday being the beginning of Buddhist lent. Tomorrow I can finally get my ATM card and head up to Chiang Mai where I hope to do some jungle trekking.

What have I done in Bangkok? Not much really. I did see Superman Returns and The new Pirates of the Caribbean. This was an interesting experience since they have assigned seating in the theaters (which with the language barrier it was hard for me to understand) and it was hard to order normal popcorn. The first time I ordered popcorn it was "Golden Classic" which was the carmel corn. I threw it away. So, then I went to another stand and saw what looked like normal popcorn and got that but it turns out it was "Chic Cheezy". I ate that since I was really hungry. Before the movie starts they play the Thai national anthem and everyone stands while they also show this movie of the king of Thailand and lots of really fucking happy Thai people. At the very end they show this animation of a guy in the ocean who reaches up to a glowing woman in the sky. I didn't understand that part.

I'm here Thailand. They drive on the left side of the road here. One thing that all the guesthouses I've stayed at have that is an interesting feature is that your room key activates the electricity in your room. So, without your room key in a little slot you cannot work the lights, fan, etc....

So, first day in Thailand...relaxing...sunny...I lost my atm card.... Yeah, I did. But, as a veteran of absentmindedness I knew exactly what to do when I found out this happened. I checked my bank statement, figured out I had been to Bangkok bank to withdraw money and figured that the ATM had just sucked my card in. And after a few hours searching for the bank and figuring out who to talk to that was exactly what had happened. So, really the worst that occured was that when I went to the bank to get the card it was so hot that I had sweat through my shirt and that was a little embarassing.

I checked out Wat Pho this morning which was pretty fucking awesome. I mean, it really blows you away in that way that really huge things you aren't expecting to see will. The feet are also really intricate mother of pearl designs and the whole temple itself has amazing drawings on the wall. In a total Josh Reynolds moment I'm walking around the temple and I see three Indian women with their shoes off and I think "Hmm, no shoes in the temple. That seems rather informal." and it wasn't until a woman in the temple pointed at my shoes rather unhappily that I realized that I was the one in the wrong and had totally walked right by the people in the front with the big shoe repository which seemed huge and totally non not noticeable ont the way out.

Today is my last day in China. And so this is a wrap up of China posting. Just to get the odds and ends out before I head of to Thailand. I had the opportunity to take a two week English teaching job here but it didn't start until the tenth and I wasn't all that into three more weeks in China. Feeling the need to move on.

1. I was approached two times today with the teahouse scam by different groups of young and friendly Chinese people.

2. Did I write about the dental office I saw where there was huge glass window and you could actually look in and see someone getting dental work? Well, I thought that was weird until I saw the same thing with a vet's clinic. I saw a dog on an IV!

3. There is this weird unfinished looking European castle thing on the way to see the Great Wall. It looks like it was going to be an amusement park that was never finished. I can't find any information on it. As we were driving to the wall, the woman who drove me pointed at it and said "beautiful" which isn't really true unless you find the kind of things that show up in Weird NJ beautiful.

4. In Shanghai boxy glasses with a reddish tint to the frames are way in. It makes all the women look like they are receptionists at art galleries.

5. I might have mentioned this one before: short shorts are all the rage in China.

6. I had never seen a child take a shit on a newspaper outside of his or her parent's store before China.

Bangkok here I come.

Well, it was bound to happen I suppose. I got scammed. The thing is I was even aware that this particular scam existed and was on guard and I STILL got scammed. They were that good. The scam is rundown pretty well here. Also here. And here: This describes it in more detail than I will. Anyway, I was aware that this sort of thing could happen but I was on the lookout for one, or maybe two girls. Not two girls and one guy. This is is exactly the combination that stopped me in front of the Shanghai Museum. They asked me all sortrs of questions about where I was from etc... and we talked for about ten minutes. Then they brought up the teahouse and I orginally wasn't going to go, not because warning bells were going off, but because I wasn't feeling social. But, I had been to a teahouse with a friend of a friend in Beijing and it had been really cool. So, I thought, "Fuck it" and went with them. They chatted with me the whole way asking how many girlfriends I had had in my life, and so on. We finally arrived at the teahouse and went and sat down. Ok, now they showed me a menu and I didn't read it very carefully I must admit. These kids were good. They really put me at ease. All I saw was Y 38 for tea. So, I thought, it's 38 Yuan for each kind of tea tried. There was also a small service charge for the tea making and all the tea service the host does (which is indeed considerable) and for tea snacks. So, we try some teas. We try six teas. I am never asked how many teas we are going to have until we have six. It's not really bothering me because six teas at Y38 split four ways isn't too bad. Anyway, they ask if I want to try two more and I say no. We do get some snacks. We are there about an hour and a half and then they say it is time for them to go and the tea mistress brings the bill. It's something to the tune of 1300 Yuan. This is totally out of control expensive. Around 160 dollars I think. So, I think to myself, "Well, this is certainly more than I would have paid for tea, but I had a fun time and them's the breaks." when the guy, Tommy, said "The girls pay for their tea (they had bought tea and there had been a hard sell by the teahouse to buy some earlier) and here in China we pay for girls half of the bill.". Well, I was kind of taken aback by this and just sort of stunned so I took out my 738 Yuan and paid. We then went to the bathroom and left. They walked me back to the Shanghai Musueum and left. I went in the museum and looked around but could totally not concentrate because all I could think of was "Holy Fuck. I just got scammed.". So, one of the women gave me her email address which I assume is fake but it's just kind of weird that she did that. I can only imagine that it is done in order to cement the "We are friends!" vibe.She also took a photo of all of us together which I'm assuming goes into a funny flickr account of "Clueless Whitey"'s.

So, I'm in Shanghai. It's so hot it's almost disturbing.

2 for 1 martinis = trouble