A day of reprieve: we seem to be languishing in Vientiane for one more waking cycle in order to get ourselves to the 8:30am bus, rather than stumble onto the realisation we've missed it by 2 hours already before even waking up. Like we did today. Sleep is good if for nothing else than novelty value, that's all I can say.
Looks like I'll be trying some culture today and getting my arse into my first South East Asian museum, it's been a whole week and a bit now in a brand new country and I'm getting the typical snoopy bigoted tourist withdrawal symptoms; I haven't come up with a sweeping generalisation about these people or this country yet at all!! 
So before we manage to go see some stuff and check out an allegedly genuine Mexican restaurant, I might just try to get this short assimilation of crude observations and naive deductions down for ya'll to come have a look-see at up in here. Yes I've been tainted by the American language a little. No, no-one with fewer than 16 brothers and sisters talks like that in the US. Unless they ate some of their brothers or sisters, of course.
As an aside, the theme of finding a true Mexican food joint has been - and is - a bit of a running theme. It seems that to people from the 'States - particularly the Southern and Western states - almost all Mexican food outside of Mexico or the US is just one huge train wreck of gastronomy, not even worth sullying your fork with as it is all just too traumatic.
The exceptions of course are Genuine Mexican Restaurants but even I, in my limited thirsts for burritos, quesadillas and a good chilli have noticed that these are a highly prized and rare breed.
Almost every single `mexican` place abroad is staffed by native cooks who haven't really got it; and it is a very subtle cuisine in its execution; and that more distressing still when you see the `mexican food` section of a multi-cuisine restaurant the proper procedure is to exit the restaurant immediately and abruptly, without thought to selfconsciousness, snapping your limbs wildly about your convulsing frame while screaming something about "the pain, the pain" and hope that continual practice of this over a period of years will eventually stop these places from believing they can get away with it.
Right, well we need to go get our bus tickets for tomorrow morning's 08:30 bus to Oudanthani, our first stop on our only slightly epic trek across the smaller side of Thailand's main landmass. It's only 2 hours to Oudanthani then another 7 or 8 hours to Khorat, a town in fairly cental Thailand that I'll know more about when I get there, and then another 3 or 4 hours or so onto the Cambodian border crossing at Aranya Prathet which leaves us in good striking distance and with easy transport routes to our actual target; the town of Siem Reap, and the Ankhor Wat.
You lovely lot should be pretty pleased that you can vicariously have a butcher's at Ankhor Wat because it is the largest collection of Buddhist temples in the world (and Buddhists are really bloody good at making masses of temples), containing some of the largest single temples in the world in the middle of it all. It is, apparently, really quite something, so I'll be taking a few extra spare batteries and a blank memory card when we go there.
When we do, even to the hardened and relentless tourist (perhaps even to my own Mum & Dad who managed to see most of bloody Rome in 5 days AND have at least 15,000 cups of tea 
) it is supposed to take 3 days to see just on its own. Yup, it's that big 
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Back from walkabout; bugger me it is hot today. I have no idea of the reading yet, but the mercury seems to be rising at an impressive rate. Dogs and small children are often getting stuck while crossing the road! I'm therefore laughing and often eating popcorn 
The state museum here, or national museum, or whatever it is, was very rewarding. Not so the bus station, which refused to dispense tickets to us for the 8:00am bus tomorrow until after 4pm today, familiar bureaucracy seems to be part of the part of the global experience, but at least we can get them today, and not have to wait around until 15 minutes before departure...
That museum, and that mexican place, were superb. Both expensive, and both justifiably so, just about. Never before have I seen so much weaponry and armaments in relation to a building's size outside of my own home before :lol: - yeah you see why I liked it, huh? In truth though it was pretty sobering; Laos, like all the other countries in this region has been battered relentlessly by bloody local wars for centuries, right up until the start of the 20th Century, and also has suffered the aftermath of America's intervention in Vietnam, and further South in Cambodia, the horrific and savage leanings of Pol Pot's twisted little mind and lamentably effective dictatorial machinery.
The museum is largely filled with firearms; hugely long rifles from the Sino-Japanese wars in the 19th Century, First World War trench rifles and clunky French small arms (of all their beautiful aesthetics and impressive technology in many fields, the French really didn't, and still don't, have a clue about how to manufacturer a decent gun) there are an awful lot of American infantry weapons in there as well of course, ranging from the time of WWII to the Vietnam War, and also many historically local weapons, swords, sickle blades, crossbows, spears, axes - tools for farming and providing as much as for warfare.
That much is great, as far as I'm concerned. I have an innate interest in the technology and aesthetics of all kinds of personal weaponry, I'm unashamedly influenced by Hollywood and fiction and all the media in every way. Never denied it and don't ever intend to (more people could stop denying it too, in my view ) but there is something that turns my stomach despite this; bombs, landmines, and all kinds of military explosives.
There is something noble and fair about equally matched people doing what, perhaps, they think is the only thing they can do. It very often isn't, but I'd argue that to save the world from a raging dictatorship (see: WWII) it is the only way to proceed, and therefore there are some circumstances in which it makes sense, and under which it should at least be honourable. Bombs change all that and make it murder, for the most part, and if there's one thing to bring an amateur armourer like myself down to Earth again it's the sights and stories of what cold, cruel things we can manufacture to wipe out our enemies from afar, from a safe place, out of harm's way ourselves like the worst kind of coward.
But enough of that melancholy nonsense because there are good thing ahead, we have little to do but get to the internet, get back to the bus station, and get a good night's sleep.
The mission continues tomorrow, and I hope to have some more pictures on the way.
It's been about a week in Laos, or 168 hours, and despite its charm, its friendliness, its tranquil take on hustle & bustle and the rather nice internet facilities, it is time to go and see a little more of Thailand and rather a lot more of Cambodia
