Hot, but not sexy

32 degrees Celsius yesterday afternoon. The only reason we still decided to go running was the promise of rain Grey clouds darkening the bright blue sky, a light breeze cooling down the heat of the day. It hasn't rained yet, after all, but we all hope that it will today. The rice fields are too dry and even if this is not the hottest season of the year, the heat is hard to bear. I've never sweated so much in my life like after the run yesterday, it was just dripping off me and even after taking a shower my skin felt all sticky again in less than ten minutes.

Laos is quite conservative so I didn't even bother to pack my sexy running shorts but brought an almost knee-long pair. My roommate also wished she could wear what we call "impolite shorts" for running. Although my younger students would wear hotpants to school, what women wear here traditionally are "sihns". I wrote about these traditional skirts last year already, I quite like them because they make you fit in a little more in Laos. I already have four of them but I really wanted to get some new ones. To get them, our friend took us to Pakses big "new" market on Saturday.

There are just too many to choose from! I don't really like the shiny ones, I prefer the woven cotton which feels much cooler and doesn't crinkle. I like mine with a pattern just at the "foot". The two I ended up buying are at the seamstress' now and I can pick them up today or tomorrow.

One of them was more expensive than usual because it's hand-woven. You can get a cheap, factory-made sihn for 20 000 Kip, plus tailoring 28 000, which is 6 Swiss Francs in total. We looked at hand woven silk sihns that cost 600 000 Kip - about 75 Swiss Francs! The more expensive one I bought was still cheap, compared to that, I paid 115 000 Kip. Including tailoring it costs me about 17.50 Swiss Francs.

I'll take my sihns home this time because I don't want to risk my clothes to disappear again... By the way, I got my teaching shirts back. They were in a bag with clothes that were supposed to be brought to poor people. Well, poor me if they hadn't turned up - it's almost impossible to find western-sized clothes here...