to phonsavan july 25

we got to phonsavan, maybe 10 hours on the bus, more people vomiting. we stayed at this guest house called sabaidee (the lao word for hello). the sight to see here is called the plain of jars. we were thinking of renting a motorbike instead of paying for an expensive tour. but the guest house guy told us some tourists had crashed the day before. and that night we went to eat dinner and at the restaurant, guess who we saw! we met the couple who had crashed and had their arms all bandaged. so i asked about it because fast things without seatbelts make me nervous. and they said it was the first time they had ridden a motorbike. and they hit gravel and the driver got nervous and somehow they crashed. and they had to go to the hospital (which is not a thing you want to do in laos) and get stitches. the boy said it was the worst day of his life. awesome. so guess what we did! we rented a motorbike! we rented one and both rode on it, and drove to the plain of jars. the plain of jars is this mysterious, well, plain of jars. the jars are all huge and made of stone. they're like three feet tall. and very old. like ancient old. and no one really knows what they are there for or who put them there. there's no organic material in them so there's no way of dating them. so just hundreds of large stone jars all over. the jars were sort of interesting, and the land is pock-marked with bomb craters, but the highlight of this city was the motorbike rental. neither of us has ever ridden a motorbike. so foo learned first and drove to the plain of jars. then she taught me to drive and i drove us around for a while. it was really fun! we drove around more to use the gas we bought, because we weren't trying to donate any gas to the guy who was already overcharging us, then we ate chinese food for lunch (delicious). the guy said that since foo speaks chinese, we didn't have to order off the menu, she could order anything she wanted. so we ordered tofu hot plate, and a few minutes later the owner/cook leaves the restaurant on his motorbike. and comes back 5 minutes later with a bag of tofu! he actually went out to buy ingredients for our meal!
as far as motorbiking goes, the only injury occurred when it started raining so we went back to the guesthouse and were trying to put the bike on the covered porch so it wouldn't get wet. and we were lifting it up to the porch and the tailpipe hit my leg. so now i have a red blistered burn on my leg. but it's not too bad. it doesn't hurt anymore. and it's not bad enough to get infected.
then we had chinese food again for dinner, but at a different restaurant. we always get awesome chinese food when we travel because chinese people live everywhere and because foo speaks chinese so the people are always like 'we'll make you whatever you want because you speak chinese'. and i think they make extra good food because they know they're cooking for someone who knows what good chinese food is like. and we don't get overcharged by chinese people, unless we're in china. when we get overcharged almost everyday. so sometimes when we're feeling really tired or like that day kicked our asses, we eat chinese food. it's almost guaranteed to be good.