Possible scam and hour-long massages

After another cool shower this morning, Tracy and I went with Jen and Iain to the massive “computer mall”. While Tracy and I hung out in the food court, we received a phone call on our temporary cell phone from an unknown number.

Now, I really don’t want to get into too much detail, but basically the night before we met a Scot named Mark, who was on a year-long honeymoon with his wife, Claire. They had recently visited Laos and had a ton of currency left over, which cannot be exchanged outside of the border. We told him to give us a day so that we could check out the conversion ourselves (we’re not TRYING to get scammed, after all).

So we received the call, told him where we were at, and it turned out he was in the same building (roughly a 20 minute cab ride away from where we had met him the night before). We had one moment of “wait, did he follow us here? Is this how Brokedown Palace started?” but then told him to come find us in the food court. He ended up exchanging it to us for roughly half its value, then proceeded to hang out with us for the next half an hour and give us tons of good information regarding places to go and things to see.

So after leaving the mall, Tracy and I went back to take a riverboat tour. We can finally add pictures! Here's the boat Tracy and I had to ourselves (apparently, sponsored by Pepsi!) :






Here's a shot of a floating market woman:




We had decided not to buy anything from the woman until she asked us if we wanted to buy a beer for our boat driver. Well, you can’t turn down an offer like that, and you can’t let your driver drink alone (poor alcoholic driver, toasting us in the shot below) so we bought two for ourselves as well.

After this clearly exhausting day, we needed to relax, so we had an hour long traditional Thai massage for roughly $5 US. That will definitely become a more regular part of our trip.