I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar

These last few weeks have been flying by; we can hardly believe that we will only be visiting two more countries before we reach the States (Malaysia and the Philippines)! That being said, we are packing our days full: waking up before sunrise and not hitting the beds until the wee hours of dawn (okay, that might be a little exaggeration but it does feel like we are on the run all day and all night).

Yesterday we decided to celebrate Thanksgiving. We dressed in our finest holiday attire, drafted a little sign, "ARE YOU AN AMERICAN LOOKING TO CELEBRATE THANKSGIVING...if so, come talk to us!) and hit the Russian market in downtown Phnom Penh. We held the sign for hours, but to our dismay, we discovered that there were not too many (or any) Americans frequenting that market. We then got back into a little tuk tuk and drove to the US Embassy, hoping to catch a few Americans who were looking to celebrate their home-cooked turkey dinner with a few travelers holding a sign on the street corner. Unfortunately, the embassy was closed. Luckily, however, our sign got the attention of two americans in another tuk tuk. They shouted the name of a restaurant on the riverside and we told them we might meet them there later.

We then took a brisk walk through the neighboring park and visited the temple on the top of the hill. As we were walking, we bumped into a man visiting from San Diego (and his young daughter who had just been bit by a vicious, wild city monkey). He ended up giving us a Christian missionary's phone number. So we walked to the nearby hotel and tried to call. No answer. No worries. We decided to sit down and enjoy the happy hour specials.

An hour or so later, we picked up and went down to the riverfront to meet the Americans from the tuk tuk. As we walked through the bustling riverside area, we spotted a bar with no one inside. It turned out to be a Vietnamese karaoke bar that was simply waiting for its regulars to arrive. We figured we could do no harm and quickly put in our requests, hoping to have the karaoke bar to ourselves. The second we hit the stage (with "Stop" by the Spice Girls), however, the Vietnamese karaoke bar went into full swing. They gave us the VIP treatment of free songs and after every performance, various other customers gave us things like napkin roses, grapes, and dried shrimp. Everyone else in the bar was singing very serious Vietnamese love ballads so we thought it was important to spice up the evening with Shania Twain's "Man, I Feel Like A Woman" and TLC's "Waterfalls." We finally finished our night with none other than Helen Reddy's classic, "I Am Woman." The crowd probably couldn't understand any of the lyrics but they still went wild. Who would have known that the American feminist movement would be so popular with the Vietnamese? Maybe they were just feeling the Thanksgiving Day spirit. You know we were.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Luang Prabang

Happy Halloween! We arrived in Luang Prabang on the evening of Halloween. Upon Alisa's insistence to incorporate balloons into a costume, we began a desperate, last minute search for the must-have costume component. We were hoping for green and purple balloons so we could be grapes, but we only found red and blue - a little accidental patriotism and a bit of a confusing costume, but people were amused all the same.

Leaving the disco with our new Laos friends and Rich, a friend from the Isle of Man (ten points if you've ever heard of this place). Young Laos people take the disco very seriously. They even do synchronized dancing that they've learned from how-to-dance videos.

The next day our friends took us to a waterfall and on our way home we were invited to a village party. They were celebrating their victory in a women's kayak race and we have never seen such ecstatic winners. Karaoke, dancing, and booze a plenty. This man was one of the evening's all-star dancers.

Alisa letting a bird go free at a temple on the top of the Phousi Mountain in Luang Prabang.

We crossed the Mekong River to take a walk through the villages. We gave the kids the balloons left over from our Halloween costumes.


Novice monks collecting their morning alms.

Laos has really beautiful waterfalls.

Elephant Crossing!

The world already feels like a different place

We woke up at 6am to watch the election returns with other Americans at an American-owned bar. Cheers, tears, champagne - we just wish we could have been in the United States to experience this momentous event with all of you.

The owner of the bar later that night.

Still celebrating late into the night. Yay, Obama.

Since bars in Luang Prabang close at 11:30pm, we spent the rest of the evening jumping for joy in our hotel room (notice the cool wall art) and taking photos of ourselves.

5 days later and we are still devoting every drink to Obama. We really do feel like we can be less ashamed of being Americans. In nearly 10 months of travel we have not met a single person, be it Thai villager, Indian rickshaw driver, or fellow traveler who was not rooting for Obama. Here's to continued American hope and mobilization toward change!

Laos: Untitled.

In eastern Laos we visited the mysterious Plain of Jars where there are fields and fields full of huge . . . jars. Why are they there? No one knows . . .

This area is also one of the most heavily bombed areas in the world. To see the jars, we had to walk along specific paths that had been cleared of unexploded ordnance. The unexploded bombs are left over from continuous US bombing between 1964 and 1973. Apparently the US dropped an average of one bomb every 8 minutes during these years. This is half a metric ton of bombs for every person living in the country at the time.

Laos people continue to be killed and injured by the bombs every year. In an already impoverished area that survives off of farming, the people's livelihoods are seriously inhibited by the bombs that lie hidden in much of the farmland.

In the local villages, military shrapnel is used for fencing, housing material, and flower beds. The villagers also sell the shrapnel and it is converted into all kinds of things such as forks and spoons. Recently, an increasing number of people are dying in the process of trying to salvage shrapnel to sell. To give you a sense of how little they make off the shrapnel, one side of a cluster bomb (what you see forming the fence) earns US $15. This is a lot of money for subsistence farmers.

Our tour guide, whose two cousins were killed by an unexploded bomb just last year, invited us into his home and shared with us some traditional Laos whiskey - poured out of his grandfather's military canteen. One side of our tour guide's family worked for the CIA during the war and the other side worked for Pathet Lao, the communist resistance group that eventually succeeded in gaining control of their country.

We were lucky enough to arrive in Vientiane during a big festival. The area surrounding the national monument was jam-packed with carnival rides, souvenir shops, food stalls, and lots of stages with singing and dancing performers. This wonderfully inventive man was selling special pancakes for kids. He first used colored pancake batter to draw cartoon characters in the pancake. Then he would write the kids' names in sweet chili sauce, add fried fish sticks, and lots of sweetened condensed milk. We know this combination of sweet, savory, and seafood sounds too good to be true, but the kids loved it. And so did we. So much we nearly vomited.

We visited "Buddha Park" outside of Vientiane. Basically a park full of all kinds of beautiful and strange statues of the Buddha and an assortment of various other gods and creatures. Here two novice monks are posing inside a statue. The park was full of novice monks looking for fun on a Sunday afternoon. This was a photo they were taking of themselves and we just asked if we could take a snap, too.

Novice monks trying to take a photo of us on their cell phone. Even monks have camera phones.