Alone. I love bike!!!!!!!!!!!! Roach Attack.

Today is my first day in Laos without So and Ramsey. They went to Bangkok to run some errands and I decide to deposit myself in Pakse for the two days they're gone. I don't have a sense of Pakse yet, so I decide to rent a bicycle ($1.50) at the hotel I'm staying at (for $8.50/night). It's my first time on a bike since I left Toronto. The bike is way too small for me and the seat is at its lowest point on the post. I feel like one of those clowns in a circus riding a tiny child's bike. It is also candy pink. Despite these setbacks, I can't help but smile stupidly as I ride around. Man, I am always surprised at how I am always surprised at how much I love riding my bike...if that makes any sense. I love cycling, but don't know how much I love it until I'm not doing it for a while. I'm wary of the many unpredictable motorbikes swerving around the streets and this adds a bit of fear spice to my ride. I have a heightened sense of my environment. As I ride around Pakse, that cool thing happens where the brain begins to draw a map of a new place as it becomes more familiar with it. (This doesn't often happen at home because I don't usually go far from already familiar neighbourhoods.) Pakse begins to take shape - I slowly begin to figure out the orientation of the main drag and accompanying services, the ATM machine, bank, food and hotel establishments, the post office, the market and grid pattern of the city, and the waterway that shapes the town into a cul de sac. My bike route is like the lines of an etch-a sketch populating the screen and drawing me a picture.

I manage to find the market and spend an obsessive-compulsive three hours deliberating and haggling for handcrafted textiles. Textile laden, I don't look forward to my uphill ride back to the hotel on little pink pee wee, so I take the bike to a nearby motorcycle repair shop and pantomime my need to raise my seat at least nine inches higher. The mechanics look at each other and laugh. To my defence I point out to them that I am taller then all of them, and damnit, I need my seat raised. I think they felt a bit embarrassed, like it's beneath them, as if they are brain surgeons being asked to lance a boil on a buttock...but one guy finally does the job.

On the way back I stop for the BEST PAD THAI eveh! It's not slathered in sickly sweet red sauce.

I stop at that "Best Indian Restaurant in Pakse" to get an ice-cream. I've come to the conclusion that an Indian restaurant is a sound business idea in any part of the world where you have Western tourists. Most big Western cities have Indian restaurants and Indian food has become a well-loved cuisine for most cosmopolitan palates. Many of the tourists here forego the more unfamiliar (and therefore scary) Lao food for the Indian food. Every seat in the house is taken while Lao establishments across the street look empty in comparison. The owner said he came here eleven years ago from India and has Lao relatives in Vientiane.

I'm at the internet cafe now and this is not worth mentioning except that my emailing is accompanied by a giant two inch flying cockroach dive-bombing me and causing me to scream and make a complete fool of myself. Some of the other internetters laugh at me, but I can't help it...I'm now really hyper-sensitive (two levels below hysteria) and my startle reflex is on high. The giant flying roach has flown by me a couple of times and now it lands and scuttles and hides and scuttles in and around my computer terminal. I try to concentrate on my typing but I step on a piece of plastic and hear it go crunch and I scream. A loose strand of hair brushes by my bare arm and I scream. I can't take it anymore, my nerves are on edge and I get the internet owner guy to come remove the creepy arthropod and he laughs and just steps on it. It's so protected in its tough exoskeleton that it doesn't even squish; it just flops on its back with its shiny sectioned legs akimbo. I keep on eyeing it periodically to ensure it's dead - I have this paranoia that unless you see a roach's guts splattered about, they can always reanimate. After twenty minutes, I see its antennae begin to move about and it's somehow moved from its last "dead" position. Is this the immortal soul of the grasshopper I ate in Bangkok come back to avenge itself? Damn Southeast Asia and Karmic Buddhism! I'll take the four inch spiders, scorpions, ants and moths I've been sleeping with every night in the library over these two inch flying (flying!) cockroaches any day.

Phew...safe in my bug-free hotel room...I hope.