Toom's brother drove us to the airport to catch the plane for Luang Prabhang. The domestic air terminal in Vientiane is quite spartan and unpretty. It was also the first place that I was reminded that this was a communist country, as the hammer and sickle was flying outside.
Actually, it is reasonable that Laos is a communist country. Rick and I talked about this a lot. Communist, associated with the word "community" is what the Lao people naturally are: A communal people. They defer to a central body to determine what is best for the community and they all work together to achieve those goals.
Additionally, if you walk around Laos, there isn't much to make you think "communist" in a fashion that Rick and I came to term "KGB Communist". Everybody works for themselves. Everybody seems to be perfectly free to come and go as they please (as evidenced by Toom and Da getting on a plane to Luang Prabhang with two foreigners without the slightest of questioning). There was never a moment where some official looking person stepped in front of us wanting to "see our papers" or something like that (although I'm sure that was primarily a function of being in heavily touristed areas all of the time).
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