Too Clever By Half

Getting ready for a holiday .. how good is it ?

it's almost as good as taking a holiday .. i've been saying to TRHE that since the last two weeks everything has been All Good. In Capital Letters ! even more all good than more gooder.

Exams finished, we find a money changer with American dollars, in small notes, outside my work, my brother's wife doesnt have the baby yet, we're going to a doof and TRHE is fully ramped about this cos she's wanted to go to a doof for soooo long, our holiday becomes very "real," and more than something we've just been waiting for ..

the holiday planning thing is just so much fun .. we (mainly, I, but with TRHE receiving full briefings ) plan and constantly alter itineraries .. one early draft had us going deep into Opium growing territory in the north of Laos, near the border with China. This idea featured long, hard days of driving on the worst of Lao's very bad roads in pick-up trucks .. i also got around ( eventually ! ) to telling TRHE that at this time of year, some parts of Laos can be cold. Her face told me, that was the end of that idea ... and again, that was all good .. cos that itinerary was hard-core. We could never have done it. It was more travel than holiday .. we want the travel thing for sure - cos as i've always said, "It's not the travelling, it's how you get there " .. but we do also want a little destination. A rural, utopian, smiling destination ..

And that's one of the reasons why we have practically decided to go to Cambodia and bypass Phnom Penh .. cos we are intending fully to "go plaid" as they say in Spaceballs .. this holiday will be huge .. TRHE and i wanna go find our own fully cred version of Alex Garland's The Beach. Somewhere in the South of Laos .. in the country side .. it's a no beach holiday.

I'm so fucking psyched, i wanna scream .. really, i can't wait. It's like i'm a kid - waiting for Christmas .. this is gunna be soooo fucking coool ..

now, where was i ...

We finally settled on a concentrated whip, as much as an itinerary, around the north east of Cambodia and the South of Laos .. with no capitals, bar bangkok, that we were transitting through ...

It's a great itinerary .. and we'll probably change it after day one ..

Now ... In an example of how TRHE and I are devoted to the concept of life long learning, with the emphasis on the second syllable , we are even learning some key Lao words .. it's a great rolly-polly language .. honestly, if i was language that wanted to lay about just being and not much in the way of doing then i'd be Lao .. the tones of the language and there are tones, boy, there are tones, are a mixture of "I can't be fucked" and "why, would i be fucked?"

Listening to the old lady (and you can tell she's an old lady - i picture an old lady selling roasted grasshoppers on a stick to passengers of a bus through open windows) say, jao seu nyang ? You can't help but think, what a kickback place this must be and you'd be right ..

http://www.seasite.niu.edu/lao/LaoLanguage/spoken_lao/spokenlao.htm

, tells it like it is.
Also, en passant, ...........(betch you didn't see that coming) ... I am fascinated by Cambodia. No, really ... no other country, on such a scale, has ever been experimented on, to the extent the Cambodians have been. The Khmer Rouge were the closest a political movement ever went to eating its young .. no, really ... but the Cambodian have the most courageous fatalism about them .. it's very endearing ... it also means they are a very short people. most men are little more than 5'6" cos, as the moto drivers will tell you .. " me small, small .. pol pot, no food,me no grow ..."

anyhow, a post eventually gets to that time when it needs to be posted ..

sabaii dii .