Please; just make yourself at home.....

..just pull up a plant and sit down...another rose, maybe ?

Since I last wrote, we have celebrated International Older Peoples' Day...that was a lot of fun as you might imagine; Chinese National Day, which lasted 6 days, and Teachers' Day, which seemed to last for 3 days. The schools were closed and the kids encouraged to give gifts to their teachers.Many corner  shops and stalls have given themselves over entirely to selling wonderfully gift wrapped parcels; see below.

Did any of you have teachers to whom you would have wished to give a heart shaped gift wrapped package? I fear that had I done so the loud ticking noise would have given the game away.

The weather is heading towards a change soon I think. We have only had rain on one day in the last week and the mornings are cooler. Nevertheless the little digital thermometer on my balcony has several times gone on strike and refused to register anything above 49.9 degrees, so it's still getting pretty hot ! There is obviously a lot of rain around in the region; I see there are bad floods in Vietnam and I have heard of people losing their rice crop in southern Laoswhen the fields flooded. It doesn't bear thinking about the life that those families will have over the next 12 months.

People are starting to collect and saw logs with "winter" in mind. I fear that I am acting like an "unwise virgin" and have given no thought to trimming my lamp and getting ready for the cold mornings and evenings. Oddly, insects, who have not featured here recently, are becoming more obvious, although I have an excellent team of geckos who work day and night to keep them under control.

One visitor this week was a snake. Hard to say how long it was, as it moved so fast and was always zizagging. But maybe about 2/3 of a metre, about the thickness of my thumb and with one of those nasty hooded heads that always seems to suggest trouble. It arrived early evening and scuttled away when I went to open the door. I mentioned its presence to a friend who arrived an hour or later; he went an unhealthy shade of green and asked where I had seen it.  We looked again, and it was still there among the plant pots. While my friend retired into the background, saying that "we" must kill it, I fetched a large machette and set to chopping it up; a task at which I was totally inept, The machete had a curved blade and while I made excellent contact between the toe of the blade and concrete, I made none at all with the snake. At this point two passers-by stopped to see what was happening. One was even more scared than my friend. So we had a team of 4;  two totally petrified, one highly nervous, and happily, one who took charge. Handing me the large tongs which I had discarded, I was told to drag  the snake out of the undergrowth where it had gone to hide. I managed this after a fashion, whereupon our leader set about the snake with a good deal more distinction than I had managed. He chopped it into several bits and after checking that none us wanted to eat it, flung them into the roadside undergrowth.  Yuk.

One more note on the origin of the nice apples; I bought some  from a lady selling them on the back of a truck and I asked her where they from from and she assured me that that they were Lao, but as I left she called me Madame, so I am not sure that she was a wholly reliable witness. I have however found a source, albeit irregular, of fresh milk so muesli and tea are back on the menu.

I have probably mentioned, ad nauseum how cool the girls here look riding sidesaddle on their boyfriends bike, with no crash helmet, their hair flowing in the breeze. But for ultra cool, how about this girl who Teng and I came across in Vientiane..reading on the way home.

The response here to the loss of my phone has been sympathetic but unsurprised. It seems everyone has experienced casual theft of phone, bikes, or motor bikes. Such thefts seem endemic here, and of course nobody bothers to inform the police, since they are far too busy developing new ways of squeezing more money out of the public at large to have time to investigate theft. I felt it was quite illuminating when in the Vientiane Times the other week, instead of the usual turgid report about a speech from the Deputy Minister of Agriculture it carried a   headline "Police Catch Thief:; obviously a pretty rare event. I wanted to get some idea of how big the police force here is; the impression is that it is vast, to judge from the numbers who are available to close off the streets when some Party hack is coming to town.   Interestingly,  when you Google "Lao Police'" consistently the next word that comes up is "corruption".  I wonder why.

But the other response has been shock and horror when I say that  have not replaced my phone, and given the amount I use it, I might not. The idea that one can lead anything resembling a normal life without a mobile phone  is quite unthinkable. However did we get by before we have mobiles?

There is evidently a bit of a problem with security and banks here. I have just had another 1400 pounds removed my my accounts through "unauthorised transactions"..ie someone going to an ATM and taking money from my UK accounts. That must bring the total up to about 5,000 over the last 6 months. One of the most recent examples is especially impressive;  they managed to get money from the ATM using  a card which has not yet been  activated and remains in a sealed envelope in the UK. I get the money back, but its a real bore chasing it all up and filling in more and more forms  I think I have exhausted all the security procedures that I can employ, so it's really down to the banks here and in UK to sort it. Fortunately, little of the money is "mine"; it was taken from credit cards...and indeed taken well in excess of the formal financial limits....all very strange.

As I started to write this we had a power cut. It's the first in several weeks so I was a bit taken aback. I had just decided to give up and go into town for dinner when it came back on. I guess it was a planned event since it was not a peak time, but the school kids enjoyed it anyway; they had the last 90 minutes of the day to play in the school field rather than in class.

This is blog number 26, which, somehow feels like a milestone, though it is not really, as originally the Letter was an occasional event rather than a regular weekly one. Indeed, when I started out, the Letter was written  when I had something to say, whereas  now I  have to find something to say in order to write it.  However, in order to reward your patience I have decided to give myself   a 2 week sabbatical.  Over the next couple of weeks I hope maybe to do a bit of travelling. We shall also be celebrating the end of Lent with the "festival of light" which is broadly similar to the Thai Loy Krathong festival, and there will be more boat racing and more dodgy food.

Alan