Hayden's Missionary Blog: Bus Rides are Just the Best

Beautiful waterfalls in Luang Phrabang

Eating with Elder Eckersley's cousins

Hello everybody!

Welcome to this week's installment of Communist Adventures with Elder Ridd. This week has been pretty wild, but it was definitely a good time.

The bus ride back from Savanakhet was definitely interesting. There were random Lao girls around us who kept taking pictures and facetiming their friends to show them that there were white people on their bus for the whole 10 hours. Not annoying at all lol. Also the buses like to stack as many people as possible into the bus. So we had a normal bus load of people plus stools placed up and down the entire aisle with some sitting two people to a stool. Good times. The majority of Lao people apparently get really car sick easily too, so it's pretty much the perfect recipe for disaster hahahahaha. It was a really fun trip though.

On Sunday, the 1st branch had two baptisms, so that was pretty neat. Early Monday morning, we once again donned our best disguises and hopped on a van. We took about an 8ish hour van ride to get to Saiyaburi, which is where Elder Eckersley’s family resides. We got there and were introduced to a bunch of his family up there. The next day we went around the village and saw his grandparents and some more uncles/aunts/cousins. We also got to visit a cool English teaching school run entirely by a really good English speaking Lao guy. Those kids were the best English speaking Lao people I've ever met. We did a cool Q&A with them about America and learning English.

Then his cousins decided it would be fun to drive us three hours away to Luang Phrabang, which is the biggest tourist area in Laos. It is a wayyyy beautiful town. It's got a lot of French architecture there and it has huge night markets too. It's also in the middle of the jungle surrounded by massive mountains. We got to see some really cool massive waterfalls there. Pretty neat. I got a very nice communist shirt there. After going around the city and eating some sausage on the street, we went to bed in a nice Chinese guesthouse full of smoke.

The next morning we got up and hopped on yet another bus. This one was definitely nicer and full of random European tourists. Then we had a lovely 13-hour bus ride home through the mountains.

This bus ride would probably be the bane of my mom's existence hahahaha. It was pretty much going through these huge mountain passes right on a cliff for the majority of it. It also had switchbacks the most of the way with big potholes and no paved roads haha. It was way fun.

Then on Thursday and Friday we did the usual visiting members. Always a classic.

Today we will be going to a funeral because one of Elder Phasay's 94-year old great-uncles passed away the other day. I've never seen a Buddhist funeral, so it should be pretty interesting.

Welllll, that's pretty much been my entire life for the past week.

I hope you've all had fairly interesting times! Keep being the besssst.

Comrade Ridd