LOL, so common in America though. I think Alexandra Bounxouei's mother would qualify as obese.

Very rare to see obesity most places in Asia. Here in the USA, it is very common and I hang my head in shame at the citizens of my own country.

Admin Saovaluck wrote on 5^th Aug, 2009 at 12:19am:


Very true admin. I always lose weight when staying in Asia, but gain it back when staying in the US. I am not heavy by any means, but I see a difference in my weight depending on where I am living.  

When I went shopping in the "Dalat Saow" in Vientiane, I was looking for jeans and shirts for my brother and brother in law and they are like big boys but not as fat as some of the fat asses that you can find here. They are around 5 feet 8 inches tall and weigh around 190 lbs with waist sizes of around 34 inches. So I was looking at some jeans and they were all below 30 inches and I asked them for larger sizes like 34 and they asked me who are these for, what monsters are they? It was like they couldn't believe people could be so large even though I myself was a 32 waist and thought that to be normal. Then I tried on a medium sized shirt and almost couldn't get my arms through the holes, but I will admit I do work out but these clothes were designed for smurfs. Clothes were very cheap there, I bargained for a pair of fake jeans that they wanted 200k kips for and got it down to 120k kips which is like $12 US. I felt bad for them so I didn't bother to bargain too much, it seemed like their life depended upon making their quota for the month and surviving. They also praised me for my ability to count money efficiently even for being someone from outside of the country. Oh yeah, get used to counting a lot of bills, even to buy simple things cause I felt like I had robbed a bank when I went to exchange my money for kips. Someone told me to bring a bag which turned out to be a good thing, cause I needed it to carry all those bricks of money. I hated carrying money while I was in Laos, it was so inconvenient, I had to bring a man purse with me cause of the amount of bills I had to carry, and when you pull that huge wad of cash out, everyone can see it, baller!

120,000 kips isn't alot of notes to count if you had 50,000 kip notes.

Maybe you had small notes with you?

The highest denomination note in Laos is now 50,000 kip. Most places hand those out.

The smallest note is 500 kip, that used to be alot of money 15 years ago.

$100 US is now only worth 850,000 kips.

I think it would be more convenient if they made notes in 1 kip, 2 kip, 5 kip, 10 kip etc. Big numbers is pointless.