New Friends

Almost everywhere I go, as a foreigner in Asia, I get asked to take a picture with someone. These are pictures from Julia and my trip to Xieng Khouang. These are only a quarter or so of the pictures we took with random people on the trip. 

 Notice my jacket and how cold I look? The weather was wondrously chilly!

Plain of Jars

Because I didn't write at all last year, I'm using some of my old pictures for now.

These are from Lao New Year, which is in April. For Lao New Year, Julia and I went to Xieng Khouang, a province up north in the mountains. In Xieng Khouang, there is a plain of jars that are made from stone. Some of the jars are 6 or more feet tall and 6 or more feet across. They're huge!

No one really knows what these are from. Some legends say that giants used to live here and they made the jars to keep their rice whiskey in. Another one is that they were made to collect rain water to use during the dry season. Who knows?

The weather was so nice and cool up in the mountains!! It was a high of only 70 or so for a couple of days. In Vientiane the temperature was right at a hundred, so it was a welcome relief! 

 The road getting there was very dusty though! :P April is towards the end of dry season, so there was dust everywhere! Not so fun.

New House

I flew (for $60 round trip!!) to Savan (my new city) last weekend and found a house pretty quickly! It's less than 2 km from school, which will hopefully be great for having students over.

We live on the edge of town - across from beautiful rice fields.

We have a pink house!

One of the three bedrooms.

Nice spacious kitchen with lots of cupboards!

A little gaudy entertainment center/bookshelf/doorway to the kitchen.

Nice big living room/dining room.

And it has two bathrooms. He will clean the house for us and add a few things that we need. We move in the end of September. :) I'm excited to be in Savan and start teaching!

What a blessing it was to find the house so quickly and from a landlord who seems to be on top of things. The original price was $400 a month, but after my boss talked to him he lowered it to $350. Not bad for three people.

Trees in the Temple

After spending a month in Phnom Phen, the capital of Cambodia. we headed to Angkor Wat, which is a bunch of Hindu temples built between 900 and 1200. 

This temple was my favorite. It was kinda forgotten about for a couple hundred years, so when these trees began to grow, no one was around to pull them out or to kill them, so they kept growing and growing. And now there are huge trees growing on top of, in, through, between, under . . . the temple and doors and windows. Pretty cool, huh?