the final post
This blog will no longer be updated.I've moved to bigger and better accomodations with
Cristy just down the road at
two peas, no podThanks for vacillating with me and be sure to keep reading on
two peas, no pod.
going out with a bang
The new blog is almost ready for its maiden post and so I think that this will be the last post on Vacillation.
It's been great. I'd like to thank god, the academy, my producers...
We had a tremondous storm last night which took out the phone and electricity for most of the day. Things were quickly back to normal downtown, but poor Cristy had not lights, fan or fridge for half the day.
The rain was really torrential, we stood just inside the doorway leading to our balcony and watch it come down for a while, until the wind thrreatened to rip the door out of my hands. At which point we gave up storm watching and went to bed.
We've been pretty lucky actually. The wet season has come quite late and
Mother Nature has made up for it with a vengence in many parts of the country, sending down so much rain that the rivers (the one thing that Laos has in abundance, other than extreme poverty) have been flooding like crazy causing millions of dollars of damage, but no loss of life as yet. I guess after a while you get used to the extreme weather and everybody knows how to avoid dying in the storms.
In Vientiane, however, the weather has been quite mild in comparision. we've had the odd storm, and all the rain falling in the north has made the Mekong rise to within "warning" but not "alarm" levels in recent days. The new dykes seem to be doing their job though and flooding doesn't appear to be immanent.
Good thing too, as my parents are arrving soon and I'd rather not have to greet them at the airport carrying galloshes.
I guess this was more like going out with a whimper than a bang. I might have to rethink this whole last post business.
Either way the new blog, two peas, no pod, is located
here for future reference. Please update your RSS feeds (if that doesn't mean anything to you you probably don't need to update them).
moving on up
This will be one of the last posts on Vacillation as Cristy and I have decided to merge our blogs, as we have merged so much else. We figured that there wasn't much point in having two of them as we seem to be hitting on the same issues anyway, particularly since she's been back in Laos.
So we're going to saddle up and ride on over to a new address, which will be forthcoming shortly, just as soon as we finish building it. It's almost done and is looking good, so get ready from some great dual blogging from me and my favourite person in the world.
Vacillation, while it won't be updated any more (soon), will still be here, so if you get all sentimental and want to read over those old posts (particularly the one in
April where I banged my head on a pole while attempting to locate a nipple!) you can still access them here. There will even be a handy link to this blog from the new one.
Enough talking about the new blog, I'm off home to try and finish it...
online at home
We now have broadband access at home, so I can blog to my hearts content on weekends without having to leave the house. Ah, the sedentary lifestyle...
Interestingly, when Cristy was in Australia and I was investigating the possibility of getting hooked up at home so she would have the ability to actually do some study during the day, I discovered that there are two companies offering broadband access in Vientiane.
We'd already tried the dial up, which was fine once you were connected, but getting connected was never an easy task as our home phone line ceases to work for days at a time. Ironically, when the phone was working the dial up was so congested (as everyone's phone was working) that it was still almost impossible to get connected.
The two companies that offer broadband here are both pretty expensive, though the private (Australian owned as it turns out) company is much cheaper than the government owned one.
Planetonline, as they are called, advertise "wireless broadband access" (note the prefix "wireless"). I emailed them from work and made some enquiries to make sure that their service would work on our Mac. They said it would be fine, not mentioning anything about how the connection would actually be made. So, me thinking that "wireless" actually meant without wires, sent Cristy off to the Apple store to obtain an airport card, which would enable us to access a wireless connection through our laptop.
Turns out our laptop is too old and that they don't make the wireless card that fits it anymore (that's an "upgrade now" hint if I ever heard one). So Cristy did some running around and eventually tracked down a substitute that seemed like it would be fine.
After she got back to Laos I called the company and set up the installation, paid the money and waited for the installers to arrive. They decided to be very late the day they were coming an had to get to work. So i headed off leaving everything in Cristy's very capable hands.
The installation crew eventually turned up and set to installing an aerial on the roof our our house (I found all this out through a series of phone calls, in case you are wondering about my omnipotence). That seemed odd as a wireless signal should really just kind of be available, but I didn't think too much of it.
The next call was to inform me that the installation crew had laughed at Cristy when she showed them the wireless adapter she had spent all that time locating in Australia and proceeded to install a broadband modem on our desk and plug the increasingly-less-wireless wireless broadband connection directly into the ethernet port on the laptop.
So much for blogging from bed (a long held dream, sadly).
Still, we have internet access at home that seems to work most of the time and while it's not cheap at US$50 a month for 500MB (ouch!), it does mean that Cristy can do some work.
Or will be able to once she's better.
I had a cold last week, as you would have read. Sorry for the pouty posts, but I was feeling pretty miserable in the freezer that is my office. Who knew that a fleece and thick socks would come in so handy in this climate?
just as I got over the cold Cristy started to come down with one. The joys of sharing everything. I was let off the hook yesterday morning however, when she discovered some rather large pussy lumps on her tonsils. Yup, tonsillitis is the culprit, not me.
For those of you who don't know, Cristy has, in the past, been a regular tonsillitis victim. It seems that it's usually associated with stress, but since she has only had it twice in the time we've been together I like to think that she was merely susceptible in the absence of me...
Anyway, as she has had infected tonsils many times she knows the drill and didn't really feel the urge to pay the Australian Embassy Clinic (the only reliable medical service in the country) US$50 for the pleasure of having the doctor tell her what she already knew.
In a bid to save a little cash ($50 is a whole month of blogging not-quite-in-bed after all) I ventured to the clinic to see if they would cut out the middle man, cut to the chase and sell me the drugs without an appointment. No such luck, of course - it would definitely not be sound medical practice to do so, but in this case I hoped they might make an exception. I even wore a nice shirt and smiled politely, but it wasn't to be. Fair enough really.
The nurse did however, have another suggestion. Laos, as you know, is a very poor country and not one in 100 people can afford to visit a doctor (the public heath system here isn't free despite the fact that the majority of people live below the poverty line) and in response a mass of pharmacies have sprung up. They are all, or for the most part anyway, run by qualified pharmacists who double as GPs when the need arises. So long as you pretty much know what's wrong they can prescribe the correct medicine and let you know the dosage etc. And they certainly are cheap.
We already knew that Cristy needed amoxycillin (penicillin for the throat) so the nurse directed me to one of the better pharmacies and I supercubbed on over to see what I could find.
When I arrived I saw an assistant with an open bottle of some kind of medication counting out individual pills and slipping them into small plastic zip lock bags for a customer. I guess you only pay for what you need, which makes sense for everyone in a poor country.
The pharmacist didn't even blink when I told him what I needed. While amoxycillin is most certainly a prescription only drug in the west, the above-mentioned poverty makes that an untenable situation here. The pharmacies will sell you whatever you need, though I suspect they would have questioned me more closely if we had more languages in common (to make sure that I knew what I was doing). I imagine the nice shirt and polite smile went a long way in the absence of proper communication.
I got them to throw in some paracetamol as well as we were running low and the whole lot came to a staggering totally of US$ 40 cents. 40 cents!
Let's hope that Laos' WTO agreement won't take life saving drugs out of the reach of the vast majority of people here, though from the look of the
initial membership negotiations from the end of last year, Laos won't be getting much of a break.
Despite the worries of the world, Cristy is slowly getting better. She's passed out all over the bed at the moment, forcing me to blog from the desk (when will my bed blogging dreams become a reality?). Her pustules (I love that word) are slowly receding from whence they came and she has more colour in her face.
All good things.
The photo is of a large street sign in the middle of the city, provided by the Australian government you'll note, describing how "good" people behave in relation to litter. One can only hope DFAT didn't have input on the actual wording. Click on the photo to see a bigger version.
Despite the wording, however, litter is a huge issue here, as is recycling. One of my reporters wrote a feature about it that was very interesting. I'll post the link on Monday when it goes online.
Now if I can only figure out how to get the modem into bed without Cristy noticing...
look what else I can do!
This whole blogging from gmail thing is great fun.
I've discovered that I can make things bold and italics and even underlined. Not that that's a big deal as it's easy to do with html, but what about using differnet fonts and different font sizes ?
And how much fun will it be to read my posts in red, or blue, or green or even a weird shade of pink that's next to impossible to read.
And if I want to say something that's really important and needs to be noticed I can make it bold and highlight it in lots of different colours.
Okay, I'll stop now.
What can I say, slow news day, again...
Oh, just so that there's a vague point to this post, I found an interesting organisation online this morning, the Internatioanl Consortium of Investigative Journalists , based in the Center for Public Integrity in Washington DC. They are basically a bunch of journalists who work around the clock to make sure that important info that other people try to cover up comes to light.
If I was a journalist I think I'd be knocking on their door and begging for a job, even if it did mean livingin the US again. Hmmm, maybe Reporters Without Borders might be a better bet, they're based in Paris...
hey! I can post via email!
Now that was definitely worth two exclamation points.
I'm feeling a little better today. The head cold is drifting away
slowly and my brain is becoming less fuzzy by the day. About time is
all I can say.
There's been a lot of rain lately. It's been pretty heavy in
Vientiane, but no where near as bad as in the north and south of the
country where floods have badly damaged and destroyed tons of roads,
bridges and crops. Doesn't seem very fair now does it. It's not like
Laos has a lot of infrastructure to begin with and then every year the
dozens of tributaries coming off the mighty Mekong get pumped up full
of rain and flood, sweeping away a years hard work in the process.
The people here deal with it the only way they can, re-build and hope
next year isn't as bad. Surely there are better ways. But better ways
cost money and money is the one thing Laos doesn't have anywhere near
enough of.
Vicious circles always make my skin crawl.
achy breaky head
That's it. I officially have the flu.
I'm going home and taking my achy breaky head with me.
Maybe I'll get more sympathy at home than in the office. Wouldn't be hard.
bowling fever
I meant to say the other day, when I was rambling about Israel, that Cristy and I had a great time in Bangkok. We spent three days shopping hard for items of clothing that we need/want.
Cristy out did me buy buying two dresses, a pair of shoes and some sunglasses(which just might be the most she's ever bought in one spree - Sally you should be proud)
I, on the other hand, ended up with a new pair of cuff links, a handful of ties and some sunglasses. I can't help but feel I let the team down a little. Oh, I bought some CDs too.
The only saving grace of our combined lack of shopping ability was that we purchased a truck load of material with which we will get a tailor over here to make a massive amount of clothing.
I, for the first time in my life, will be required to wear business attire when I start at AusAID next year. I've already had a couple of shirts made and two pairs of pants. I just might be the only one in the office wearing hipster flared business pants!
They look better than they sound dad.
Anyway, we're back in Vientiane and everything is clicking into place. We have a new
Australian Business Volunteer who has just started working in my office. He's here to totally redesign the paper and make it look more, well, more like a paper.
He'll be here for 4 months and seems totally capable and very cool. Should be good.
A bunch of us took him out last night to perform a traditional Lao ritual, 10 pin bowling. There are at least 4 bowling alleys in Vientiane, which is a lot for a town this size. You can play a game, including shoe hire, for just over two dollars. Not bad really.
I had a fairly minor cold before we played, but I think I must have overdone it as this morning I seem to have a fully fledged chest infection. Might just be the flu (not the avian type I hope) so I'll see how I go for a few days before checking myself into the nearest hospital and praying.
The photo above was taken by a now sadly departed volunteer named Daniel. Beer Lao is a very serious business here, so serious that the delivery truck gets its own crossing...
