Sunday, March 16, 2003

Buddha Park

We got up about 9:00AM, had breakfast,bought and mailed some postcards, then headed off to teh bus station to go to Buddha Park, a park with a bunch of bizarre concrete statues from the Buddha and Hindu religions. There's some really weird stuff here, including a huge pumpkin-type conrete thing, that has what looks like a tree growing out the top of it, and inside this thing (it's, perhaps 30 feet high), are a few floors of really strange things, like people stabbing other people, skeletons, and weird monsters and other wild images, it kind of looks like things you might see in a childrens nightmare. Very cool.

Finding the correct bus was fun. When we got to teh bus station, our Rough Guide said take bus 14, but someone approached us, and asked us where we were going, and he said take bus 45. Well, we figured he was screwed in the head, because the board even indicated the Buddha Park was bus 14, so we headed over to where it told us to go, and waited for bus 14. There are dozens of buses around, so we're walking all over looking for bus 14, but it's nowhere to be found. Finally it hit me. We want Route 14, not bus 14. Every bus has a unique number, but many buses run Route 14. Once we had that figured out, we went to get on a bus that indicated Rotue 14, and Courtney asked a woman on the bus if the bus is going to Buddha Park, and she said no. quare one again. As we waited, another guy started talking to us, and he said, ya, route 14 is the one you want, then the bus that we were on, that the old lady told us wasn't going to Buddha Park, pulled up, and this guy told us to get on, it is going to Buddha Park, and it was Route 14, so we got on, and sure enough, it got us to Buddha Park. It was 3000kip for teh bus ride, which was 29km out of town.

To get into Buddha Park was 2000kip and another 2000kip to take pictures.

We got back about 6:00, had supper (actually found a relatively cheap restaurant!), then back home, then to the internet. Yesterday we had seen an internet place that advertised 64k upload, 1Meg download speed, so we walked for, like, 45 minutes trying to find it this evening, eventually we did.

Central Vientiane is small, easy to walk around, but it's hard to remember where anything is, because it all looks the same, and there's not much for landmarks to use as reference points, except a fountain.

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