Monthly Archives: April 2007

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Is Vientiane the Canberra of Laos?

I arrived this morning, and slept most of the day. The time difference is only six hours so I’m hoping to avoid really bad jetlag, though I’ll try and stay up to 1am tonight to reset my body clock. I didn’t sleep much on the flight from London and didn’t sleep enough before I left London so hopefully that will help.
So far I’ve met some random people, including a guy who was just in Uzbekistan (working) and a guy who used to work in the newsagents down the road from Mum and Dad’s. I’ve had French buckwheat crepes, a giant rum ball at the Scandinavian Bakery and a beer Lao. There aren’t loads of tourists around but I’m about to go to a bar that’s full of them to read my book and work out an itinerary.
In some ways I suspect Vientiane is the Canberra of Laos but it’s nice to have time to relax before we start travelling and being proper tourists. It’s going to be a mild 28 degrees tomorrow. There might be thunderstorms when we fly into Louang Prabang, which could be interesting. It’s going to be New Year’s on Friday through Monday. I wonder how throwing water on people works if it’s already raining?

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Of all songs, Phil Collins?

I’m catching up on email before I go away, and came across this post I never published:
I listened to the Kleptones for the first time though they’ve been in my iTunes for ages. The Phil Collins one (Crazy Tonight = Strong Teeth) was the first time I’d heard that Phil Collins song since I was a very young teenager and it drove me crazy because it reminded me of all kinds of things I couldn’t quite remember. My memory is particularly skatty at the moment – I’ve been a bit too busy with work and some outside projects, and had a cough/cold since Christmas, but I have the weird feeling it should bring back the memory of a particular mood. Maybe it was just young teenage girl dreams I’m too old and cynical to access now.
So, there you go – things I thought I’d never do – I just blogged about Phil Collins.

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Walt on the wild side
Disney are “…throwing open the gates of Cinderella’s castle for same-sex partnership ceremonies. Gay and lesbian couples can, for the first time, stage their own commitment ceremonies anywhere on Disney property, a privilege heterosexual couples have enjoyed for decades.
“We are not in the business of making judgements about the lifestyle of our guests,” said Donn Walker, spokesman for Disney Parks and Resorts. “We are in the hospitality business, and our parks and resorts are open to everyone.””
I’ve never had any interest in Disney or theme parks, but that makes me go ‘awww’.

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Preserve public spaces on the net

“The services we are all using and increasingly dependent on, like Flickr and YouTube and FaceBook, are not there to make our lives better or enhance the quality of public participation. They are there to make money for their founders and owners.
Just as the purpose of commercial television is not to make good TV programmes but simply to deliver an aggregated audience to advertisers, so the real point of social networks is not to transform our ways of life but to find new contexts within which we can be exposed to approved commercial messages.
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However, in the process of privatisation we have given up an important third space, somewhere between the university network and YouTube, a space which we can all use equally and which is dedicated to the public good.
We have lost the online equivalent of parks and roads and shopping streets, where the limits on what we can reasonably say and do are set by society as a whole and not by the commercial interests of one company.” BBC