Buddha Buddha Buddha Rocking Everywhere!

Vientiane doesn't have a lot on paper to pull travelers in to visit except that it is the capitol of Laos. It's relatively small and doesn't have a lot of attractions. But it's packed with pagodas! Like most tourists I only spent a couple days there. I think if I had spent another day there it would have been to visit the Beer Lao Brewery and a water park. 

Nom nom nom

A boy and his cricket?

Some weird stuff going on.

The next day we went out to this park outside of town that's full of statues and a big reclining Buddha. It was called Buddha Park. And wandering around looking at the statues made me wish I knew more about the various religions in SE Asia. These statues had crazy things going on. A guy with a big round head and mermaid fins eating some other round head. A woman getting eaten by a serpent. A boy and what looked like his massive pet cricket. A big King-Kong-looking beast holding a woman in his massive hands. I took a lot of pictures. If you think you could explain any of them to me, I'd love to hear about it. Some of them were so crazy.

Just as we were leaving, a group arrived with some big fancy cameras. Of course we had to stay and see what was going on. It looked like they were some sort of acrobatics group or something that was there to do a photo shoot. So it of course became a photo shoot for most of the tourists in the park too. They spoke fluently in Lao, but would say "1, 2, 3, Go!" and also swear in English. I though I was mishearing, but they definitely dropped a couple f-bombs quite clearly.  The word is more versatile than I could even imagine.

Doin' flips

That night after an amazing Indian curry dinner, we headed to Diary Queen. Yep, that's right. I ordered a mini Chocolate Extreme blizzard. And it was EXACTLY what I expected it to be. I call that a win. So many western dishes over here are somewhat like they would be in the US, but still different enough that it doesn't quite satisfy the craving you had. But not with Dairy Queen! They are also apparently instructed to demonstrate that the blizzard is really thick because they turned it upside down as a demonstration before handing it to us.

Even if it comes in the form of a tiny fast food ice cream, it was so nice to have something so familiar.

Someone put the flower in her hand. Cute.