Before sunset we made it to Vang Vieng and we were ready to celebrate the new year! Yeay! We even bought some fireworks and poppers for midnight... I felt like I was back home in El Salvador.
Vang Vieng is beautiful! Our hotel is by the river and we have a pretty nice view, it reminded me of Halong bay! Here is Sophia in our terrace :-)
The weird thing about the hotels in Laos is that they do not have a proper separate shower! The head for the shower is in the middle of the bathroom and when you take a shower everything gets wet, including the toilet! Very uncomfortable!
For dinner we went to a restaurant where our waitress looked fourteen and was wearing Minnie Mouse pajamas and the cashier was clearly a 10 year old girl. After dinner I asked OLeang about the restaurant and she said that the mother cooks and the other 3 kids help. The boy chops the vegetables, another kid is in charge of the wok, and the other one is the waitress and helps in the kitchen in between, and dad... Sits and drinks beer! Awesome role model!
In Vietnam we also saw a lot of that... Useless men drinking beer while the women worked at the restaurants managing, cooking, serving! In one restaurant the man's responsibility was to hold the money while the woman went around doing the math with each costumer and he would just grab the bills and give back whatever the woman told him!
After our dinner we had the typical orientation walk around Vang Vieng. While walking by the bar area a guy approached us and gave us vouchers for a free drink 7-9 and happy hour until 10pm at Gary's Irish pub!
We kept walking, and stopped at one of the many fatty but delicious pancake carts. Sophia, OLeang, and I were the last ones and we barely made it to Gary's by 9pm to claim our free drink!
Luckily, the rest of the group got there way before we did and got a table right at the entrance of the pub. Gary's happy hour was buy 2 drinks get 1 free so we really took advantage of the deal. Lukas had told us that since he didn't have to pay for an entry visa to Laos ($30) he would buy a round of drinks.. He got all 12 drinks for less than $15! With such a deal we would be fools not to drink, right?
Little by little our table kept accumulating glasses! It got to the point that probably each of us had 3 full mixed drinks waiting in front of us! It was extremely funny to see people entering the bar and staring at our table full of glasses! Some people even asked to take pictures of it!
By the end we had over 120 cups lined up and we wanted to take a picture at the end of the night but Gary, the owner, said we couldn't because they had run out of cups and needed to reuse ours :-(
We had a fabulous night in Gary's Irish pub, they had great live music, fun people, and cheap drinks!
We all received the new year singing, popping our party poppers and giving each other big hugs! It was a really fun time and Vang Vieng was the perfect little town to celebrate it!
By 1:30am we made our way back to the hotel and to our amazement pretty much every other house in Vang Vieng had a karaoke machine and they were hardcore partying and karaoking outside their house, shop, or restaurant!
Also, another very interesting thing in Laos, and more so in Vang Vieng, is the high number of lady boys! It is even hard to tell them apart! They put on a lot of make up and dress with very short dresses and tight clothes! We now have a game of spotting the lady boys! Most of them are hard to distinguish!
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