I had more to say last entry, but it was getting long enough already.

I don't have any photo evidence of this, but when we were in Vang Vieng last week, we had a really fun time "inner tubing" down a very calm river. We got a late start, about 3pm I think, and the whole think is supposed to last about 2 1/2 hours. Well, of course around 5pm the sun started going down and we got COLD. Finally we came upon a "tuk tuk" (kind of like a taxi in the back of a truck bed) parked on the side of the river that offered to take us back to town for $1 a person. We only had 2km left to float, but it wasn't getting any warmer.
The tuk tuk didn't want to drive to town until he had like 9 or 10 passengers, so we had to wait a while for it to fill up. Now most people who travel to Vang Vieng are "backpackers" and also "partiers". Vang Vieng got a reputation for being a good place to get weed and 'shrooms, and who knows what else, but some of the restaurants offer "special" foods like fruit shakes with drugs in them. That is slowly changing, and having been to VV in 2003, I can say that it has improved A LOT and is way more family friendly than before.
So anyway all of the other tourists who were tubing down the river were boozing and some of them were tokin' (if you know what I mean), so it was that kind of people who slowly filled the tuk tuk as we waited. Most of them were British or Australian, and there were 2 Irish girls. The first guy that got in (besides our 2 friends and us) was a dark-skinned British guy with rather large black hair. Not exactly a "Fro", because he looked more middle-Eastern than African decent, but it was a big black mass of hair "style" that you might expect someone on drugs to have. Well, Jonas has this thing when he sees tall people or people with large hair, he shouts out "BIG MAN!" in kind of a "spooky" voice, like "OH NO, BIG MAN!"
Except when he says it he kind of pronounces "BIG" like "BEH".
I knew he was noticing the guy's hair, as he had said "BIG MAN!" to someone with dreadlocks the night before, and of course he said it about the psuedo-fro as well.
The "big man" said, "Uh, what did he say?" and I KNEW he thought Jonas had said "BLACK MAN!" but I just explained how he says "big man" about tall people or people with big hair. I don't think he was convinced, but that is the truth. Jonas doesn't even know those words for calling someone "black" or "white", he has never heard that to my knowledge.
His school is very diverse, with him being one of only 3 or 4 white kids. I know he used to think of himself as having dark skin, because he would point to pictures of our neighbor who is about his age and say that it was Jojo. Now he spends a lot of time admiring himself in the mirror so he doesn't make that mistake anymore.

The rest of the tuk tuk ride was weird too, with everyone going on about the drugs they did last night and the drugs they were going to do that night. The Irish girls had some theories about why one shouldn't do shrooms because it opened up a new path in your brain which can eventually explode if you do too many shrooms. Typical paranoid conversation of people who do drugs. I would like to see the medical journal where they got that information.

A bad thing about the trip was Jonas had been suffering with a mild case of diareah ever since we left Chiang Mai. Thankfully he is potty trained so it just involved a lot of pulling over on the side of the road, but after we got home, we had an "incident".
I think it was our first night in our own bed...Jonas sleeps in our room in a twin bed. He sleeps in a cloth diaper b/c he still wets the bed about 5 times a week (although last night he actually woke up and said he needed to go pee...first time ever!!!) Usually after he wets the diaper he crawls over to me and I'll take it off and he sleeps the rest of the night without incident, diaperless.
Well.
We had our first incident. I woke up in a pile of diareah! It wasn't mine! It was all over my shoulder and (brace yourself) on the side of my face! GAHHHHHHHHH!
I got up and got Nick and Jonas up to change the sheets and give Jonas a shower (I think he was still "going")I took of my poop shirt and washed my face about 15 times. Then I changed the sheets and sprayed linen spray on the mattress pad to try to forget the horrible memory. My sense of smell is very sensitive right now due to the pregnancy. I couldn't even open the fridge for a few weeks because all the different smells would assault me at the same time. And my crowning smell moment was when I knew my friend's 10 month old had spit up...and she was across the room with her back to me.

I thank you in advance for your maternal sympathy.

Just thought I'd share.

Saturday, Feb. 17, 2007 at 11:53 AM