Health and Beauty

It took awhile, but unfortunately I started running out of toiletries, mostly conditioner, soap, and toothpaste.  So last weekend, I went in search for them. Luckily, a little market on my street had a ton of options at first glance.  Once given a closer look, all soap, body wash, and cream advertised "white" or "become lighter", etc.  To me that screams bleach, and I prefer not to douse  myself in bleach when I take a shower.  Similar to in India, it is seen as very beautiful to be fair skinned here, and I've noticed it in a lot of the pictures my coworkers post on Facebook.  They really like to use Instagram and other tools to alter their photos to make them look pale. After staying about 30 minutes in this tiny store and reading almost every label, I found Pantene Pro-V conditioner, Dove body wash, and Vaseline soap.  And I found a loufa, nail file, and q-tips! Of course I had to pay top dollar for these products, but I think my skin will thank me later.

Last Saturday night I went to go get a message with my new running buddy Julie!  Julie is my coworker Karin's sister-in-law.  Karin's brother also works in Laos for several months of the year so his wife decided to join him for 9 months since she recently finished her PhD program.  Luckily for me, Julie loves to run, she has done several marathons and half-marathons, and she is training for the Luang Prabang half marathon that is in 1 week.  Julie told me that Laos is a great place to train because of the cheap massages. There are a few different tiers of massages:

• High - the nice hotels have great massages and it is supposed to be comparable to a massage in the US. These are about $60 for an hour but will range based on the hotel.
• Medium - Hibiscus is a place in Louang Prabang that has very nice massages and it less expensive than the hotels.  An hour long massage will be about $10
• Low - There are many many massage places along the Mekong River that are hole-in-the-wall places. You can get an hour long massage for $4 - but you don't quite know what you are going to get and the people giving you the massage are definitely not trained.

Julie had been to one place on the Mekong River with her husband and she said that it was very good for what you pay for (aka one of the cheap places), but she wouldn't go alone because you are in one big room and she prefers to know the person next to her. Even though that kinda sketched me out, I still wanted to try it so we decided to go that night.  The place we ended up going to was called Mekong River Massage.

Everyone who works there is outside in the front, so you just tell them what massage you want off the green board. The Lao massage is pretty intense and I think it is when they stand on you. Julie and I opted out for that and chose the oil massage, which is as close as you can get to a Swedish massage. We had to go up the stairs and go to the room on the second floor that had about 10 "beds" like the ones below. The ladies who own the shop put down the curtains between the beds Julie and I would be on and the rest of the room to give us a little bit of privacy.  There is also no place to change either so we just had to strip down to what we felt comfortable wearing in the room and put a towel over us.

We were kindly asked if we would mind having men, and we both didn't have a preference.  The two guys came in and started on our legs and worked their way up.  As you can see from the picture above, the beds Julie and I were on were incredibly close to each other. At several points the guy doing Julie's massage was touching my right hip and arm and felt like he was sitting on me. I had to stop myself from laughing several times as they maneuvered around the beds to work our various muscles.  You could tell they were not trained masseuses as sometimes I had different movements and massage techniques done on different sides of my body (ex right leg vs left leg) but I can't complain that much because I had someone giving me a massage for a full hour! We tipped them very nicely, aka $2 US dollar which brought us up to a grand total of $6 USD each. So crazy that this is available! But I agree with Julie, I will not go by myself.