Saad kun kai

Laos is a nation of shopkeepers...who all sell the same thing. 

Beer and Mama Cup

I live down a small side street (street is actually a bit grandiose) that ends in a field.  Despite that, there’s a shop only three doors away.  There’s another one on the corner and another one across the road from that and another one a couple of houses from that and...well, you get the picture.
It’s pretty handy assuming I want to buy beer and pot noodles which is more or less all they sell.  Mostly, I want to buy beer and pot noodles, so it works out quite well for me.  I had only ever eaten one pot noodle before I came to Laos but now eat them almost daily.  Not the Golden Wonder kind but a spicy Thai variant thereof.  My favourite brand is Mama Cup but I’m kidding myself if I think they’re made of anything other than the same MSG and fond wishes that go into a Bombay Badboy.

I digress. 

Shop wise, there are also the many beauty salons which seem to specialise in late night ear cleaning (seriously) and the agricultural fertiliser shops where you can also buy a handy snack (not advised – unless you enjoy glowing like a Ready Brek kid).  I have developed a finely tuned sense of which shop/market stall I need to go to get what I need most cheaply and also know exactly where my favourite shopkeepers hang out.  This inevitably means my shopping involves several circuits of the town which undoubtedly uses more money in fuel than I save at the till but it passes the time and if my eggs arrive home slightly the worse for wear, it means I get to eat eggy bread for breakfast.

Espadrilles pre-funeral

Clothes shopping is more tricky.  I recently managed to break my flip flops just as I was setting fire to my espadrilles.  It was deliberate; they’d survived the worst of the wet season but had finally succumbed to the ravages of the constant soaking and drying cycle so I gave them a Viking funeral.  That left me with only a pair of Converse and although my Sinh and Converse combo fits right in with the teenage Lao girls, I’m a 27 year old volunteer civil servant who struggles to cling to my dignity at the best of times.  New flip flops were therefore sought.

Looking ridiculous, as always!

15 flip flop shops later and I have seen the same pair of size 39 flip flops 15 times.  Fair enough but in my obsession I’ve noticed that there are actually quite a few Lao women with feet larger than size 39 who hobble around in shoes which are too small.  Never fear, I know exactly where to buy screws and electrical tape and although looking a tad dishevelled, my Havaianas are soon to be back in business.

A volunteer who is based in another province came to stay last weekend.  His placement is much more rural than Pakse and from his description is almost completely lacking in services of any kind.  He’s currently struggling with food, as the local diet is mostly insect based and he’s not keen.  He was discussing the hospitality of his neighbours and said that he found that as long as he arrived at a house with a couple of bottles of Beerlao he was welcomed anywhere and that conversely he could arrive anywhere and find that they had beer to give him in replacement for the insecty treats.  Needless to say, he’s on a more or less entirely liquid diet.

Now this is what I find confusing.

Brewing beer is a complex procedure of biotechnology utilising modern techniques and equipment.  Admittedly it doesn’t have to be, but in the case of Beerlao it is.  The Lao Brewing Company is jointly owned by the government and Carlsberg.  They have two large, modern and shiny breweries, one in Vientiane and one in Champasak and the Beerlao brand has an absolutely extraordinary hold on the market with some figures quoting a 99% share; remembering that 80% of all statistics are made up and in Laos I suspect the figure is somewhat higher. 

Spelling mistake?

The beer is produced with hops and yeast from Germany, malted barley from France and Belgium and some local rice.  Once bottled, it enters into a really efficient distribution stream, including a collection and rebate system for used bottles.  The whole thing is incredibly sophisticated and means that it’s possible to buy Beerlao in the most far flung and remote destination in Laos, including the places where they’re mostly eating insects.

Brian Ferry's favourite t-shirt

How the bloody hell do they do it?  Actually, why the bloody hell can’t the same application be used to supply other products and why haven’t secondary industries sprung up to support LBC e.g. bottle and label manufacturers etc?  Or, why not piggy back on the distribution system to provide people with slightly larger sizes of flip flops?  I find it puzzling but it’s probably quite a nice metaphor for Lao organisation in general that they can do something so complicated, so well and yet struggle with the basics.

On a final note, amongst the range of easy to source products in Lao shops, are some quite imaginatively inappropriate t-shirts.  I’m on the fence as to whether the messages and images are deliberate or just misguided but I intend to stay ever vigilant for new examples so I can chuckle quietly to myself as I limp round the market in my ill fitting and slightly singed shoes.