The Good, the Bad and the Downright Horrible

Yes, I'm still happy as a clam at high tide up here in this sweet, sultry Shangrila, but I think you have perhaps tired of all my rhapsodising about how wonderful it all is and thirst to hear of the nasty negatives that you suspect must exist even here...
Well, yes, there are things that make me mad, sad and jest plain disgusted, so I'll get them off my chest right now and get it over with.
Lao dancing, while a graceful, gentle sight when done with skill and enthusiasm, and quite watchable for, oh, minutes at a time, is downright boring and insipid. And so , I fear, is the music that accompanies it. Plinky, plonky monotony, to put it brutally. Tiny mincy steps in an unfathomable order in a circle, whilst twirling one's hands as if limbering up for playing the accordion. Yes, that, too. And always at full blast. Weddings are particularly painful with vocalists churning out wailing, warbling tunes far into the night with loudspeakers so that everyone for miles around can hear it. As the resident large farang lady, I am usually asked to join in and they absolutely will not take no for an answer when I demur and then they look pained or laugh when I relent and can't do the damn steps.
And the pop version of the above, as encountered in one of the discos here particularly often, is even worse, a sort of sugary-sweet, pre-teen confection and it drives me nuts when I'm for a night of good ol' Beerlao-fuelled, sweaty, I-don't-know-who-I'm-dancing-with rock'n'roll.
What's worse is the line dancing that they do to it! The whole place moves in unison twirling their hands like demented taffy pullers and executing this labyrinthine series of steps.
Luckily the other disco, while relying rather too heavily on rap for my liking, offers more of the slam bam stuff that one prefers.
Well, I feel really wicked, but it's refreshing to get that out, so I'll go on.
Ok, well, there's the usual Asian bugbear of the hawking and spitting and manual noseblowing that all you backpackers know about. I've seen entire sweet little families on a motorbike, Dad driving, one kid on the back while mum in the middle holds infant or toddler, plus umbrella, and casually gobs one into the street as they trundle past. And in some places, the open drains, the rubbish in the Mekong, the totally unabashed public nosepicking....
Allright, that was awful, so let's go back to music. Monotonous plinky plonky doesn't even begin to describe the popular Thai love song crap that they play at full volume in the restaurants that line our street, at parties, on ipods of passing motorcyclists at 1 AM, and pretty much whenever they feel like it. It wails and it thumps and it whines and it all sounds the same, with plenty of accordion backing. The accordion or the anthill? I'd go the little biters every time.
Oh, I could go on, but many of my quibbles would be petty---like the shoddy building standards---Scotty, you will need to be sedated when you examine my renovations---but I have one lollopalooza to finish with that I really feel I must do something about. (And Fran...Darling...now is when you should leave us and go feed your puppies. Just don't read any further, sweetie...)
Across the road from my heavenly little house, there is, of course, the little patch of garden that my neighbour Meena and I take turns to nurture. Then to the right there's a little restaurant of rickety tables and haphazard tarpaulins where our neighbours serve wonderful noodle soup with a bit of pork and veg etc and we often order breakfast from them. $2 feeds me and my two hungry boys. Wonderful stuff, nice folks.
BUT, next to them along the banks of the river, are now three establishments that look much like the noodle place except that they serve dog.
Yep. BBQ bow-wow and hot dog stew. And they are hugely popular with what appears to me to be the rougher elements of local society, jolly, but rather prone to very loud drunken singing from time to time. And eating dog.
OK, so some of us eat cute little lambkins and fluffy chickies and even doe-eyed veal, so I cannot be hypocritical here. But the problem is not the noise of the diners and drinkers, their music or their hollering, it's the fact that the dogs are kept and killed within a few feet of where they are then served up. And this, dear reader, is not being done under the auspices of the R.S.P.C.A.. It is often done by some teenage menial with a stout stick, bad aim and a heart of stone. And possibly no ears, as the noise of the pups prolonged passings is soul destroying, not to mention the frenzied barking and growling of the caged, crazed animals who are sold to the restaurants by impoverished up-country folk and kept in a revolting kennel just over the river wall.
None of us in the neighborhood, Meena, the Noodle People and I suspect anyone ese who is not actually running one of these places, is very happy about it at all, especially when the doggers get up early and start to knock off a few pooches at say, 4 or 5 AM to get ready for the rush.
I have rhetorically announced that I will buy the bastards a freezer so they can just do their killing once a fortnight at a specified time and keep their supplies therein rather than reaching into the kennel every time they need another chop. So we would be spared the unholy racket. Added to which is the fact, unavoidable, that our own two doggies, Jacko and dear little Louie ended up in their pots. So we are thinking of going to the village headman and asking for some sort of intervention. After all, such cruelty just ain't Buddhist...
Right, had enough? Back to the rhapsodising....