*** Check out the companion photo album called "Vientiane"

Mission accomplished! We found a new guest house with a clean room and bathroom, and we are muuuuch more comfortable. It is amazing what a little cleaner and a sponge can accomplish. :)

Our new guest house is in a more energetic section of town, although, we have to use the word "energetic" loosely. For a national capital, this is one quiet town. The town barely is moving by 7AM, and most everything shuts its doors at around 10PM. The pace is just very, very slow.

It is a good town to mellow out in. We walked around the sleepy town, peeked out onto the Mekong, and tried to figure out our next travel steps.

While there were several things to see such as a historic wat and a city museum, the most interesting part of town was Patuxai, the "Gate of Triumph." Resembling the Arc de Triomphe on a smaller scale, the arch commemorates the Laotians who fought for their country's independence.

Workers began construction in 1960, and they completed the project with concrete donated by the US twenty years ago for the city to build an airport. Instead, the government chose to build the arch. Annoyed locals call it their "vertical runway." It isn't clear how the locals really feel about the arch itself. Check out the photo album from Vientiane to see what the Lao inscribed at the base of the arch.

We walked around the arch, hung out in the park surrounding it, which has turned into a gathering place of sorts and a good place to soak up modern Lao life, and then walked back on the main road heading back into town.

It was dead quiet. Again, this was so different from any other capital city we've been to. We were walking in the middle of the main road out of town and taking pictures and hardly any cars came by, much less came close to us.

Before we turned off the road to head back to the guest house, a novice monk from the nearby wat stopped us and chatted us up a bit to practice his English. This happens more often than you would expect, and it is a great way for the monks to try out their language skills and get exposure to foreigners. I think it is the informal version of the monk chat experience we had in Chiang Mai.

We spent more time than we would have liked trying to plan our next steps from Laos to Cambodia. So far, our flight options are severely limited, and we are unable to get accurate travel information quickly. A slow city makes for slow access to information. We wasted hours in Internet cafes trying to plan, so we agreed to make some adjustments soon and try to plan a little further out where possible.

We have heard nice things about Luang Prabang, about 350 km north of Vientiane. We will go there by bus (a nine-hour ride) and then try to iron out the next leg of the trip, which will likely be Siem Reap, Cambodia to see Angkor Wat. We decided to take a quicker VIP bus, hoping to make the long ride a bit more comfortable.

Next stop…Luang Prabang, Laos!