Happy Thanksgiving!

Our first night in Vientiane was very exciting. I had read in the Lonely Planet guide that there was a bowling alley in Vientiane and I was anxious to get my bowling on. This is not to say that I'm at all good at bowling (any score over 40 is pretty great for me) or that I really like bowling - it was just really exciting to have an entirely new activity - with the bonus of the fact that it would give Doug and I something new to talk about.

Well, bowling was a blast. We bowled a set of 4 games - the best set of mine where I got a magnificent 98! Plus we had almost 3 hours of entertainment without starring at each other trying to come up with something new to talk about. This is one of the biggest issues we face. We you spend all day every day with someone for over two months, the sources of conversation tend to run dry - so it's always a bonus if we have something to distract us and to talk about.

The next day given that we are rather Watted out from Angkor and that there isn't that much else to do in Vientiane, we opted in for our favorite activity - Motorbiking! There was supposed to be a sculpture garden about 25 km outside of the city with some guy's collection of Buddhas amongst other random sculptures and it sounded like a great day trip.

We hopped on the motorbike and headed off. Vientiane and it's surroundings - like pretty much every city we've been to so far - has no real map. This makes it rather difficult to go see things outside the city. We knew the garden was along the Mekong so we tried to follow it up the river to the best of our abilities and hoped we would make it there. We got rather off track from the highway and motorbiked through some random paths and small towns. We did our best to follow the river, but we had gone far more than 25 km and still found nothing. Eventually we made it back to the highway and went by a "cultural center" and decided to stop. The price was right (5000 kip) and we thought we had made it to the right place.

The cultural center was, to say the least, very very odd. We walked in and there were some random animal sculptures and then we came to about 5 dinosaur sculptures - including one dinosaur eating another dinosaur. We walked along further and then came to a random Buddha display which was adjacent to some live monkeys in an outdoor cage with some birds in a cage not too far away. As we walked around further there were more religious oriented sculptures which were really quite bizarre.

We sat and chilled by the river for a bit before heading back on the motorbike and back to town. As we followed the highway back it became clear that we had gone out of the way and hadn't made it to the Buddah garden, but were content with our sightseeing nonetheless. We stopped off at the public pool on the way back which was totally empty so we were able to get a great workout in. I even gave Doug some drills to work on his freestyle -which is coming along nicely.

The next day was Thanksgiving and we decided to take it slowly. During breakfast I noticed that one of the hotels was having a Thanksgiving meal special. Thanksgiving is a big holiday in my family and this would be my first year spending it without them so I was anxious to try to create our own Thanksgiving feast.

After a lovely one hour Lao massage ($8!), I headed over to the hotel to see what the deal was with Thanksgiving. For $35 you could have the fixed price Thanksgiving dinner - Salad, turkey (virtually impossible to find in Asia), chestnut stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and steamed vegetables with a glass of red wine and pumpkin pie for dessert. While I knew this would be no Landsman prepared feast and no Grandma Mary pie :( - it could be a potential substitute. However $35 was going to be a tough sell on Doug. Given that we had collectively spent under $20 on dinner the night before - $70 on dinner for two plus tax, tip, etc was rather outrageous.

I came back to our room to discover Doug lounging on the balcony. "I have to tell you something that's going to make you poop your pants," I informed him. "Thanksgiving dinner is thirty-five dollars a person."

He looked back at me and tried to judge how important this one was to me. "I'm on the fence too," I explained. "It's a lot of money for dinner for something that's going to end up being disappointing."

He took the opening and agreed heartily - we could have the most amazing dinner every for half that. It would be silly to waste $70 on a lame dinner.

So we spent Thanksgiving playing Gin on the balcony. While overall I lost 4 sets to 2 - I won the two most critical sets. The first set for who had to go down and buy bus tickets and the 3rd set for who had to go down and get dinner. Doug came back with samosas, naan, and vegetarian tikka malasa plus a bottle of red wine. We laughed at how we had Indian for Thanksgiving and for only $20 total!