Lao Steam Bath

The American Red Cross steam bath is in an old two-story LP colonial building.

Frequented by tourists. One buck.

Changing cubicles, storage lockers, bathroom outside, interior wood floors, massage available for $7, hot tea, separate male and female steam rooms, rest area benches and a blaring television with obnoxious Thai music programs.

Loud and Lao Der.

A bored man plays with the remote like at home.

Goodbye quiet meditative, healthy healing place. 

Women caress skin with yogurt and condensed milk.

You step inside the broiling room. Steam heat provided by burning logs below. You enter a high speed Japanese language bullet train conversation as young men discuss SEA travel stories. We started in Thailand, then Cambodia, now here, then Vietnam.

Sweating invisible men are packed together tighter than a thin girls' episodic vagina monologue in a sweltering cardboard room lost in a warren of bored poor neglected Kip currency seekers.

Below a yellow moon all the stars fell down.

One afternoon an Italian, his face obscured in melting heat said, Fear is the global problem. His voice whispered through rising herbal heat. Moisture collagulated on a single yellow bulb forming stars.

Fear is universal, he said, Fear contracts hearts.