You can take my bread away.

(This is the Lao interpretation of that classic Enrique Iglesias tearjerker, Hero, which has the lover crooning, "You can take my breath away." Seems to me the Laotions have it right, though--isn't bread the better gift? Jack, the song's for you.)

I don't quite know where to begin here, but if I let many more days accrue in my pipeline, I'll give up this travelogue before it's begun, so here goes...

Before I came, I was warned repeatedly (by my reproachful Travel Clinic doctor) that "Laos is not a developing country; it's undeveloped." As I struggle to get a sense for this place, I do feel that distinction, but I can't figure out on which side Vientiane lies. It's poor by our standards, certainly. The air is visibly polluted, the water not potable. The roads are rutted and unpaved; the concept of public transportation is ludicrous; there are few cars (and fewer that work). Most restaurants are open-air or three-walled, with cracked cement floors and a few rusty fans that the mosquitoes learn to work around. Nice, new houses (for expats) have spotty electricity and a gas tank, but no stovetop or oven. Cable and Internet access are not to be had, except along the main street of town--it's too expensive to run the wires any further out. Voyeuristic glimpses of Laotian homes yield images of bare open rooms, mattresses on the floor, dirt illuminated by swinging fluorescent bulbs. It's hot and wet but despite the rain (or maybe thanks to its wind), everything is coated in dust.

Even now, though, I squirm to present it that way--being here, you don't get a sense of desperation. Everyone is laughing, everywhere. No one has asked me for money or even pushed to give a tuk-tuk ride (and if you were going to beg, my reflectively white skin makes me prime pickings). The people are poor, but they are content. A grand generalization after one undigested week, I know--but it's discussions with colleagues here that reinforce my superficial conclusions. Strong, unusually (for Laos) educated women, they shake their heads and laugh--ruefully, almost--to talk about how people here feel when they see the wealth and advances of their neighbors, like Thailand: "They don't care! It doesn't bother them." I think I'm being gracious when I say, isn't it refreshing not to need the restlessness of Bangkok or Saigon--Lao people are as mellow as rumored. No, mellow, it means they don't get stressed, they take what comes and are always relaxed. "Yes, but too much. They just want enough to eat and drink and live, then they stop--that's it! No one works to get more, so we all stay the same." But--I falter--if they don't want more, they must be happy, right? Crows of laughter: "Ohh, yes!" So...

To whatever extent that it's all true, I am left feeling abashed--the flushed hero who sees the dark from above and swoops in for the rescue, only to realize these "victims" have happily formed their own party by moonlight.

I guess it's that broader paradigm that characterizes what I've seen of this place so far: splashes of sweetness where there shouldn't be. Electric sunsets reflected in the dirty Mekong; lush green springing from dusty streets and tangled powerlines; merry, spiky-haired schoolboys nested three-deep on a rusty motorbike; a bobbing train of orange umbrellas, as the monks maintain their deliberate pace in the monsoon. I laugh, but it's this sly whimsy that keeps Vientiane alight. That's the coyness of the city: it frustrates me with its anarchic traffic and alienates me with its indecipherable codes, but in the next breath winks and reels me back in with a jungly maze of temples, or a sudden army of fifty jerkily choreographed old women, doing step aerobics to thumping Lao pop on the banks of the river.