The Southeast Asian Games have taken over Vientiane, but it seems you have to be someone or know someone to get tickets. Last week, I begged my Lao language teacher (who is a third-grade teaching assistant at VIS) to let me tag along with her to the Laos-Singapore soccer match. The next morning, she stopped by my classroom to give me a T-shirt that said “Cheer for Laos!” in Lao. Very cool. We agreed to meet at the staff lounge at 4 p.m. to catch our ride to the stadium.
You may be thinking, “YOU wanted to go to a soccer match?” I know, I know, I’m the least sporty person ever. I was in it for the cultural experience.
One of the SEA Games mascots, Champa, playing soccer. He’s so cute! The other mascot, Champi, is a sporty girl elephant.
When I showed up at the staff lounge wearing my T-shirt, Mai was speaking Lao on her mobile phone. My language skills are limited to asking prices of bananas and telling time, so I couldn’t follow her conversation, but she didn’t look too stressed. When she got off the phone, she said, “We have a problem. We don’t have tickets.” She hadn’t told the other Lao girls who were coming, including the one who was on her way to give us a ride.
The co-dependent, type A, intense Sharon who moved to Laos in August would have gotten a bit upset. After all, Mai had said she could get tickets. However, Laos has a mellowing effect. Everything moves a little slower with a lot less urgency. I consciously decided to enjoy the evening, regardless of how it turned out.
Mai and me looking quite nonplussed that we don’t have tickets to the match.
Mai explained that her friend’s mom’s friends, who were supposed to buy the tickets for us, came up empty handed. They told her the tickets were sold out. Mai then took another call from a friend who was out at the stadium. She told us not to bother driving out there as nobody was selling tickets, not even scalpers. Weird. Before I realized it, the school’s receptionist was calling a woman who has two kids in our school and often substitute teaches. Her husband works for Tigo, a mobile phone company and SEA Games sponsor. She informed us that her husband was quite frustrated because, for some unknown reason, government officials had confiscated all the tickets. The plot thickens.
Mai broke the news to Ton, a teaching assistant who had also hoped to attend the match. The three of us walked dejectedly out to the school gate to meet another friend of Mai’s. Keo is a lovely little wisp of a woman who writes for the Vientiane Times. Her brother pulled his Toyota truck up to the school gate, and we all piled in. Mai rattled off some Lao, which again didn’t seem to involve fruit or numbers, so I didn’t understand it.
Keo’s brother drove us to a market, where we found an unmanned SEA Games ticket counter and shopkeepers who just shrugged their shoulders when we said we were looking for soccer tickets. As we pondered what to do next, Mai and Ton got distracted by street food. They bought grilled beef-and-veggie kebabs and some absolutely delicious lettuce-wrapped snack, neither of which I would have dared to try on my own. Mai said the lettuce wrap is very time-consuming to make and involves cooking sticky rice, leaving it outside to dry in the sun for a day and then cooking it again. Kinda glad I didn’t know that before I ate it.
Here we are hanging out at the market, from left: Mai, Keo, Ton and me (the gigantic white Amazon woman).
Nobody selling tickets!
Mmmm… street food!
Back in the truck, we all agreed it was hopeless to go to the stadium. Instead we drove to a Mekong-side restaurant called Moon the Night to watch the match on the big-screen TV.
I asked the girls if they knew the meaning of “moon” as a verb. They were quite surprised to hear the definition, and they made me use it in sentences for different situations. “Hey, that guy is mooning me out his car window,” I said. “Or maybe you’re in your university dorm room and you see some drunk friends down on the street, so you moon them.” Why did I feel compelled to start this discussion? It only went downhill from there.
The match was arguably the most boring soccer I’d ever seen. Final score: 0-0. Nevertheless, I had a great time getting to know my new Lao friends. We finished off our street food and then ordered from the menu. Mai told the waiter to go easy on the chili, but I still had to drink a liter of Beer Lao to put out the fire on my tongue.
