Sao Lao

It was one of those days that anything that could go wrong went wrong on the day of my flight to Laos. I didn’t get any sleep the night before since I was finishing up my assignment and went to turn it in a few hours before leaving NL. On the way back Johan called me to tell me that he needed the spare keys to get into his apartment because he locked himself out on his way to pick me up and couldn’t drive his car since he has no key. We met up at a train station and walked to a grocery store to pick up what is left on my shopping list for Laos. Then something unexpected happened. My bank card didn’t go through for some reason. Just to make sure I tried to take out some cash at the ATM machine at the grocery store but the card was useless. The ATM was not able to read the card.

What was I going to do? I had only a couple of hours left before leaving for Schiphol airport. I only had a few Euros on me because the plan was to take out cash at the ATM in Vientiane when needed. My uncle was already in Laos a few weeks and told my mother to not take much cash with her since she can easily withdrawl money in Vientiane and so my mother passed on the info to me. Johan was kind enough to give me some Euros so I can survive in Vientiane, while waiting for my parents to arrive a week later.

Before leaving for the airport I asked Johan to call the airline to make sure that I’ve met the weight limit on the suitcases since the information on the website was not quite clear. I was told that I could take two suitcases with 20kg limit on each of them. However when I went to check in I was told that I could only take 20kg, based on the limit on the tickets I’ve purchased online. Anything over the weight limit would mean 30 Euros for each kg over the free allowance. I had to re-pack everything into one suitcase. My suitcase was at 23.2kg but a different girl at the counter (Indian) didn’t make a fuss and let me get away with the extra weight.

After the rough start, the rest went rather well. I arrived at Suvarnabhumi Airport safe and sound and had four hours to spare. After doing some walking around I spent the rest of my spare time surfing the net.