boopyourface

lets see…

my camera, which i just got for christmas (thanks alika), fell out of my pocket in a tuk-tuk in phnom penh.  less than a week after i had taken my first picture with it. 

my shades were forgotten in an internet cafe in phuket.  next to the keyboard.  they were the longest lasting pair of shades i’ve had since college — a record seven months.  in the past 2 and a half years i’ve gone through a pair of dragons, electric, spy, hoven, fox, and arnette shades.  unfortunate.

i also thought that i lost my pants last week.  not while i was wearing them, but i couldn’t find them while packing last week.  found them yesterday.  turns out they were just wrapped inside my sweatshirt.

so yesterday, as we were walking down the street, i remarked to anh that “i seem to lose all of the most expensive stuff i brought with me,” to which i amended, “oh wait, i still have my ipod.”

now, i didn’t lose my ipod, but whilst my favorite apple product had the highest monetary value of anything remaining in my bag, i forgot to include those things that are, how-you-say, worth more than money.  such as my passport.

when we purchased our tickets from luang prabang to hanoi yesterday, they asked for our passports.  my favorite storage location — anh’s purse — came up empty in the search.  un poco problemo. 

at this point i started calculating how much physical and nasal pain it would cause if i were to ride the reverse route of the bus/vomit-wagon we had taken the day before and go back to vang vien, and then continue on to vientiane and the US embassy.  my calculations did not return promising results.   

after racking my brain, and nearly despairing after tossing the contents of my travel bag, i figured that i must’ve left my passport in the internet cafe where we had purchased our bus tickets the day before.  next to the keyboard.  surprise.

luckily, along with passports, anh keeps pretty much everything in her purse.  including the receipt for our bus ticket which had the phone number of the cafe handily printed on the bottom.

a short phone call later, my passport was en route to luang prabang via courier/bus-driver.

today, i spent some time hanging out in the bus station.  i finished crime and punishment.  i discussed the musical intricacies of the song “come into my heart” with the guys shilling their hotels/guesthouses to the arriving bus-passengers.  we got as far as the first name of the artist — i’m pretty sure it’s ricky (“ree-shee”).  i played the game where you start counting to 60 when the second-hand is at the top of the clock, and you look up when you’re done and see how far off you are from one minute.  and i queried every single arriving bus driver as to whether or not he had my passport.

finally, approaching 2 hours (it really seemed like longer, maybe 12), i had my man.  he handed me my passport.  i handed him some scrill.  we parted company.  it was a beautiful scene.

and that’s that.  our day was pretty non-descipt.  lunch and the passport rescue took up the entire afternoon, and i walked about 2 hours and maybe 4 miles in the morning searching for a working ATM (there isn’t one.  i ended up at the lone bank in town.  not like there were that many ATMs — 3 to be exact — but people kept pointing me towards ‘western unions’.  which apparently equate to ATMs in their mind).  my one word summation of the morning would be hot.  no, sweat.  HOTSWEAT.  and then i couldn’t even get money because they needed my passport to withdraw money at the bank.  anh was back at the room, reading.  typical.

have i mentioned that luang prabang is fantastic.  it seriously is.  the most asthetically pleasing town we’ve been in.  and the people are very friendly.  even if they can’t differentiate between a western union and an ATM.