One of the sons in the family I'm staying with introduced me to a pickup basketball game here in Vientiane, usually attended by about half Laotian and half Westerners. Yesterday I went there with a colleague from work and an Israeli-American he'd met traveling. It's a great workout, and an interesting place to compare Western and Laotian cultures. The Westerners are always the ones complaining about calls and about unfair play. The Laotians are very competitive, but abhor confrontation. They never contend a call or claim mistreatment. The typical Laotian saying is "Bo pah nyan", no problem.
After the game, I went for Chinese food with my colleague nad the Israeli. Adam and I were on bikes, and Chuck had walked, thinking he'd get a tuk-tuk after. We finished around 9:30, and of course, none of us had thought about the fact that Vientiane shuts down at 9. There wasn't a tuk-tuk anywhere -- anywhere! We were about 3 miles from Chuck's guesthouse, so we started to walk our bikes back with him. There was almost no one on the road. One woman on a moto passed us by and smiled, but that was about the only interaction we had. We got about a half-mile along, when the same woman came up behind us on her moto. She spoke English, and she'd come to give the Israeli a ride, wherever he wanted to go. Just cause she saw we were stuck. This was not an atypical experience here.
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