We were turned down by monks

We have now been travelling for over three months and we are already finishing each other's sentences. There is really no need for us to speak with each other anymore as we think about the same things at the same time and often express ourselves with the exact same words at the same time.

We took a nightbus from Hanoi to Vientiane and this was the first (but not the last) of our many buses  that broke down. There were two buses that left at the same time from Hanoi, a sitting and a sleeping bus. The both buses made it through the night, but in the morning when the buses had to drive in the hot Lao weather, the sitting bus broke down and everybody packed in to our sleeping bus. A few hours later our sleeper bus broke down aswell. We were in the middle of nowhere so we really didn't have any other choice than to wait for the bus driver/mechanic to fix the bus. Luckily this only took a little over an hour. Still we arrived in Vientiane six hours later than we were supposed to, which really wasn't a surprise to us as no buses have never been on time here :)

Vientiane is a tiny capital city which resembles a miniature size Paris minus the Eiffel Tower. The city is filled with cafés, french restaurants and baguettes. Even the architecture is similar. There is also a Scandinavian Bakery in the city that sells snus and swedish ginger bread! :) (we however only bought ginger bread) We have even managed to save the ginger bread for Christmas Eve and we´ll enjoy it tomorrow.

A monk in Vientiane

We took a night bus (a king of bus) to southern Laos. The bus was the nicest bus we have had so far with beds instead of seats. We had the front row seats (or beds) in the upper deck and it turned out that the first bed was for four people. We didn't mind it but the monks who were supposed to sleep next to us were only giggling and pointing at us. They were really embarrased and didn't know what to do. Finally they had to ask someone to tell us to move so that we wouldn't have to sleep next to men but we didn't want to move cos we had the best seats in the bus. That's when the monks switched places with two local guys. The guys told us that monks are not allowed to sleep in the same bed with women and that's why they couldn't sleep next to us. We later found out that monks are not even allowed to touch women, or women are at least not allowed to touch them. We don't know if it works both ways :)



King of bus :)



Our seats in the bus