Arrived, phew

Hello from Laos! (It's actually said without the S, by the way)
After a marathon day of airplane rides, Miles and I arrived in Lao last night. We decided our first night to splurge a little, and split a $25 hotel room, complete with a courtyard filled with tropical plants. After reaching our hotel, we of course went out for a Beer Lao, which was pretty tasty. I'm sure after 8 weeks of light beer it will probably be a little less tasty. The city at night felt fairly safe, and people are generally friendly.

Vientiane (pronounced "wain tchein") is the capitol city of around 300,000. Tourists have definitely found the city, by no means is it over-run with them. Due to the tourists, enough people speak enough english to get by fine most of the time. That's lucky, because we're finding the lao language to be pretty difficult, being a 'tonal' language where there are 6 main tones or voice inflections- they are important to get right or the word will mean something completely different.

Tomorrow we're going to start this bike ride we've been waiting for. We'll head from Vientiane to Paxse, which is either 88 km or 88 miles, we're not sure. I'm sure we'll find out tomorrow though.

Evan