Vientiane Shopping Excursion

My fantastic EAL coordinator, Carine, invited me on a shopping excursion last Saturday with our new school counselor, Leslie, and our new special ed teacher, Barbara. We went to Home Ideal, a smallish version of a Chinese K-Mart; a rattan shop, where I bought a shoe shelf; the “Morning Market,” a crazy collection of Laos handicrafts and Chinese crap; a pharmacy; and then a lovely Mekong Riverside restaurant. So civilized!

Lovely Light Fixture

We had been living in this house for more than a week before I really noticed our living room light fixture. Its awesome-ness simply can’t be captured with a camera. The center looks a big like a bunch of grayish grapes. Five large beige scallop shells surround the grapes, but the extra long fluorescent lightbulbs stick out the ends of the shells. The most truly fabulous part of all is the rope lights with colored Christmas-y twinkle lights inside. Pink, green, yellow, orange. You really cannot imagine how truly hideous it is. But it makes me happy every time I look at it … which is a lot. I just keep picturing our landlady at Home Depot, thinking, “Ah ha! That is exactly the most perfect fabulous light fixture I ever saw! I must have it for my house!”
Lovely light fixture