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- Friday, October 08, 2004. On this day: BBC, Wikipedia, HowTo
- Kip Rules Everything Around Me, K.R.E.A.M.
It's kind of hard to not feel like a total gangsta living in Vientiane. The biggest bill you can get in Lao Kip is 20,000 Kip and that's worth about $2.50 canadian. The 20,000 bill has been a pretty recent addition so it's still a bit harder to come by. I changed money this week and decided to change 2000 Thai Baht (which is roughly $70 canadian). That gave me 528,000 Kip and the biggest bill they had was a 5,000 so I got a huge stack of 5,000 Kip bills (a bundle of 100 bills and then some loose ones).
A bag of pop (yes, they keep the bottle so they can get the deposit back) costs 2,000 kip, a Tuk-Tuk ride to just about anywhere in the city will maybe cost 10,000-20,000 depending on the driver and how well you negotiate (although some try to rip off foreigners and charge 30,000 to go anywhere). A good meal at an "expensive" restaurant is around 30,000 kip (unless you go to a really upscale foreign place). Cheaper local places are a lot less. I had an amazing Phat Thai yesterday for 10,000 kip.
My stipend from cuso is pretty low (maybe $500 canadian a month) but is a lot more than most local Lao salaries so it's really easy to live well. The really nice 3 bedroom house that I'm sharing has air conditioning, 2 bathrooms and satellite TV and costs $250 US a month (which is paid for by CUSO seperately from my stipend).
# Posted 8:09 AM
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Dude, in Vietnam $2.50 CDN is 30,000 Dong. But their biggest bill is 1,000,000 Dong though ($100 CDN).
Bag of pop? Man that's funny; is that like the bags of juice that we have here? Can't you just return the bottle after you drink it? I guess that teaches you a lesson -- always bring a cup.
So what have you been eating there? Pad Thai is pretty good ... nothing too fishy.
Man $500 bucks is pretty good .... you can live pretty well for that much there.
I'll probably be in Vietnam in February -- maybe take a side trip to Thailand as well.
# posted by tcube : October 19, 2004 10:43 PM
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