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Here are some general travel tips I’ve picked up over the years. I’ve tried to avoid things that are well-known or just common sense.
Get the special meal–Have you ever been on a flight and wished you could get your food before everyone else? Well, you can either fly first class or request one of the special meal options when buying your ticket. If you select kosher, halal, low-sodium, etc., you get your food before they start passing out regular meals. I can’t understand why more people are not aware of this. My favorite is low-sodium because it comes with a packet of salt. I generally avoid kosher because I figure I’d have a hard time explaining that I’m not Jewish if the plane gets hijacked.
Get the more expensive bus–If there are two buses you can take from point A to point B, go with the more expensive option. The air-con, comfortable seats, on board bathroom, and lack of livestock are more than worth the extra $5.
Backpackers, leave the gadgets at home– I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s a mistake many people seem to make. If you’re staying in a hostel (or anywhere else where security is a concern), don’t travel with a laptop, ipod, $700 camera, etc. You either have to haul all this shit wherever you go or worry about the very real prospect of it getting stolen. A good compromise would be bringing an iphone or ipod touch–it can play video and music as well as connect to the internet for email and other applications. The device is small enough to keep on you without any inconvenience. Internet cafes are everywhere in case you need to do any significant typing or upload pictures.
Digital cameras should be small and cheap–If photography is your hobby, by all means get a nice digital SLR. Otherwise, you want a camera that is compact so you can shove it in your pocket and relatively inexpensive so you won’t be heartbroken if you lose or break it. A small drop in image quality is a small price to pay for the pictures you’ll be getting from bars/clubs/boats/whatever. Besides, you can easily find pictures of landmarks that are 100x better than anything you could do.
I’m sure there will be additional travel tips as I think of them.
I have a fairly significant project to finish by the end of August (nothing Laos-related) so I’m not sure how much writing I’ll get done this month. Hopefully I’ll have a burst of creativity and be able to put up one or two things.
I was listening to the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil” and something I had never thought of started to bother me. Near the end of the song Mic Jagger sings “just call me LUCIFER” like it’s supposed to be some major revelation. The only thing is that the previous lyrics make it painfully obvious who the speaker is and the song is titled “Sympathy for the Devil.” The “ha, gotcha” ending really only works if you’re so stoned you forgot the first three minutes.
It must be terrible being a Hollywood makeup artist. I’m sure the job itself pays well and is interesting, but you must be constantly harassed by people wanting you to transform them for parties and other events. I’m sure the following happens all the time:
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m a special effects makeup artist.”
“That’s awesome! Hey, I’m going to a costume party in two weeks, can you make me look really fat?”
“Um, that would take over 20 hours to make molds of your face and color the prosthetic pieces.”
“I could pay you like $100.”
“That’s less than $5 an hour and my work schedule is really busy…”
“So, can you do it?”
note: I started writing this several months ago
I have a column half-written about how much I hate Lao New Years (pi mai lao or Songkran in Thailand) but I’m too happy today to finish it, mostly because I got plenty of sleep last night, it’s sunny, and the streets aren’t filled with assholes waiting to douse me with filthy water as soon as I turn my back. So culturally what can we learn from the whole ordeal?
I think one reason people like the holiday so much is that, as one Lao friend put it, “everyone’s head is on the same level.” Before I get to anything else, I need to explain about Lao culture’s inane obsession with head placement. Despite being a communist country (at least officially), Lao culture is extremely hierarchical. Status depends on age, gender, profession, and whether a person is a monk (monkness?). Except for brief moments, your head should not be higher than someone of greater status and Lao people put a lot of effort into ensuring this. For example, if you are standing and a maid or child has to cross in front of you, they will bow at the waist to ensure their head is noticeably below yours. I find the whole thing embarrassing and mildly distasteful, sort of a body language equivalent of being called “master.” As a foreigner, you won’t usually have to pay attention to these head placement conventions, but as a general rule you shouldn’t be standing when the people you’re talking to are sitting.
Getting back to my original point, the pi mai holiday allows for a suspension of normal social rules. It’s perfectly ok to show mild disrespect to authority figures like monks, teachers, and generals (well, maybe not generals). In western culture, it’s not unusual to go drinking with your boss, but asians seem to find this same sort of familiarity liberating.
Watching pi mai, it becomes immediately apparent why we lost the Vietnam war. The Lao people are probably the friendliest and most generous I’ve ever met, but anyone who’s lived here knows they’re not especially motivated, creative, or disciplined. But when the new year rolls around, they start plotting elaborate ambushes and are able to hurl water balloons through the windows of moving cars. It’s nerf guerilla warfare ant there’s no reason to think the real thing was much different.
