Vientiane, Laos - 5th Feb 2010: Public pools and bowling alleys

Our first proper day in Vientiane turned out to be a lot better than expected! Initally, when you look at what to do in Vientiane you realise that, actually, there isn't much to do here. It's a small capital city, with few landmarks, some restaurants and lots of government looking buildings but not much else. Over breakfast at Jom Cafe (nice scandi bakery that seems to popular in South East Asia), we decided to firsly go out and buy our plane ticket to Hanoi for the following day. Unfortunately, seats on all planes were full so we had to stay one more day in Vientiane before we could head off to Hanoi. Once we got the ticket sorted, we decided to check out the local swimming pool, which I think was also the pool they use for national sporting events! It wasn't much to look at but it was 25 metres long and very heavily chlorinated, so at least we didn't have to worry about catching anything in the water! While we were sunbathing and swimming, we got chatting with a couple in their 50s who came from Chesterfield of all places, and the gentleman loved talking about how much they enjoy eating roti canai in KL. It was great to have some pool time, as it seemed to get hotter by the minute in Laos! Next stop was the local bowling alley, which looked like an alley that you'd find in a 60s film, quite old but pretty decent lanes and mainly frequented by local guys and girls. We donned our bowling shoes and Leon taught me how to bowl properly, at the age of 26! It becomes a much more exciting game when you actually start knocking the pins down(!) so we ended up playing 3 games and I think I even almost reached 100... almost...
After 3 games we thought that enough was enough, our arms were starting to hurt, so with our new-found energy we decided to walk down to a market in search of a headphone splitter! Once we were there we entered the labyrinth that was the market which sold everything from jade figurines to toasters, refrigerators and yes, our splitter. With our task fulfilled, we headed back to our hotel (a new one, as we needed to move to save money!) and had a rest before dinner. We ended up in a great Indian restaurant which was cheap, authentic and pretty spicy! To end the day, we took in some live music in the centre of town where we met another couple who were also on a round the world trip. It seems that this travelling thing was a band wagon that lots of people our age were jumping on, and after exchanging some stories over a few bevvies, we headed home, satisfied that we had actually been fairly active that day!