Lao P.D.R. stands for Lao People Don't Rush

...Or so goes the joke, as they proudly tell foreigners here.

This week the boat racing festival takes over Vientiane, marking the end of the Buddhist Lent. Teams come from all over southeast Asia to compete on this stretch of the Mekong. I watched them practice, and it's startlingly ferocious--long, narrow boats with a few dozen people, two per row, growling and thrashing in unison. This is the first year of mixed teams, half Lao and half foreigners. (I wish I had known; you might remember that I was, in my time, an accomplished five-seat on the Andover JV2 practice boat.)

The normally calm riverbank is frenzied, now, with a ferris wheel and a blue-tarped labyrinth of market stalls. The street is lined with simple carnival games, but they had me baffled until a Lao friend confirmed, with a shrug--they are all the same. Truly, one after another--strung down the road more than half a kilometer--each is a board with brightly colored balloons tacked on and a small pile of toys you can win if (I think you see where I'm going) your dart pops a balloon. Even now, my amazement outweighs my embarrassment at reacting to something so trivial: not one person thought, hey, maybe I'll get a few more kip if I target the throw-the-ball-at-the-can market?

The lack of innovation (and the indifference to it) is a by-product of Laos's untroubled pace. I see it everywhere: Unnamed homefront shops boast identical glass cases, proffering the same phone cards, whitening soap, moto tires and dried banana peels. Generic internet cafes, each claiming the fastest connection in town, each charge exactly 100 kips per minute. Linguistically neurotic English speakers teeter on implosion to see the glut of "so unique lao crafts! ".They are so indistinguishable that I can only justify going to one instead of another by making sure to alternate each day. It horrifies my capitalist sensibilities, but I seem to be the only one bothered. And as long as I'm happily buying into the rest--meandering without being hounded by tuk-tuk drivers or shop owners, taking leisurely lunches, preempting the slightest symptom of stress with a post-work massage, and spending hours unproductively padding between the pool and the sauna--I'm not in much of a place to judge.