a laotian halloween

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Teacher Ryan and I left BKK the evening of October 30 on a bus headed for Vientiane, Laos. The trip was fine, a bit strange as it turned out we had booked the wrong bus for where we actually wanted to go, but just fine once we sign-languaged and facial-expressioned our way onto the correct bus. it was beautiful getting to watch the sun rise over the hills of northern thailand. and they gave us lukewarm boxes of rice with ground pork and fried eggs for dinner (I actually love that stuff) and soymilk and cookies for breakfast, so that kept me happy as food has a way of doing for me. We ended up finally making the border crossing by late morning on the 31st. we staggered, sleep-deprived and blinky in the midday sun, out of the immigration checkpoint and into a taxi that a couple old British guys offered to share with us. Into Vientiane, with no plans for where we would stay and no idea where the Thai embassy (to which a visit was the reason for the trip) was, we ended up finding a great hostel (Mixay Guesthouse, I think) for an economical 40,000 kip (about $4 usd) each. Turns out the price included a massive breakfast of toast, eggs, rice, curries, laotian sweets, tea, coffee so - both of us in shameless backpacker mode - we ended up taking full advantage of this perk and stuffing ourselves early each morning before heading to the embassy to take care of visa business and then again right before they closed it down in the late morning. This gluttony, combined with the fact that there were several lovely french bakeries, a good cheap sushi place, a tex-mex restaurant and an indian food place along the very street on which we were staying resulted in what was quite possibly a weight gain of about one pound. PER DAY. for the 5 days we were there. awesome.

Returning to Halloween day and our arrival in the Laotian capital.. after the taxi ride and hostel hunt, we sat down at a riverside (this description is far too flattering in reality. it was more like mudflatside) eating establishment along the bank of the Mekong - the river which creates much of the border between Laos and Thailand. Sipping a fine Beer Laos, we looked around to see what the locals were eating (usually a good way to figure out the best thing to order) and saw them all with bowlfuls of whole eggs on their tables and eggshells littering the ground. So we ordered these "hatched eggs" as the menu described them, which we foolishly believed to be harmless hardboiled eggs. Ryan was the first to crack open one of the eggs and lift a chunk of shell off to reveal...


*** please finish eating, or abandon plans to eat anytime soon if you decide to continue scrolling down ***


seriously.

happy halloween from laos!!

We didn't actually take this picture, but it's just about exactly what Ryan's egg looked like.. though i think his had a few more coagulated blood clumps hanging off the fetus head.

This is the first food i've encountered in Asia that i've been utterly unable to even consider tasting. After a confused, then shocked, then horrified, then nauseated pause, we awkwardly stood up, left our beer glasses and fetuses on the table along with a generous tip, and returned to the hostel for a fetus-free meal of bread and cheese.

In the end, with only a few paperwork disasters, we finally got our visa issues worked out and were able to catch an international bus direct from Vientiane to BKK's Suvarnabhumi airport and be back in our neighborhood by 7am... just in time to leave for school at 7:20. it made for an awful day at school, but well worth it for a chance to check out our neighbors to the north.