By Cam
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Hello and welcome to yet another chapter of the hectic life of Jam and Cam! After recent doubts regarding our ability to actually pull it off, things have somehow managed to turn around again and we`re in high spirits once more about our school! Until lately things had started to turn sour and we were beginning to worry about our financial situation. Our original idea to order furniture from China backfired as the chinese furniture turned out to be far more expensive than we`d first realised! I believe the boss at the store was trying to make a little extra on the side by charging us more than the usual rate. In the end we only ordered a sofa and some chairs from the Chinese store and were very worried that we wouldn`t be able to find anything nice for a decent price. I Visited a signmaker and glasscutter who does very nice signs at a reasonable price and quite professionaly, too. He has a machine that can cut out stickers in any shape at all, printed straight from a computer! We`re having a small sign made, 1m tall by 1/2 m wide which has our logo and simply says `coming soon` in English and in Lao script. It also has my phone number which I`ll rub out if I get innundated with calls! We can remove the `coming soon` section if we would like the sign to be there permanently. The glass, however, was another issue altogether!
We had no idea how expensive glass would be. The problem with living here is that you expect everything to be dirt cheap and when it isn`t, you start to suspect people of cheating you, particularly as a foreigner. This isn`t the case for glass, as we found out later, it is expensive no matter what. The standard price is 1000 baht per square metre and we have a lot of square metres to cover!! Unfortunately for us, our building has three giant roller-doors which will need to have glass behind them, meaning that we have to basically wall off the entire front and part of the side of the building with floor-to-ceiling glass.
Things started looking up this morning when we visited the lady who we`re renting the house from. She told us her husband might know some people who know some people in the government that can help get our documents pushed through and stamped quicker. Of course we`d heard this before, however we tend to believe this woman because she is related to the director of a very distinguished business in Laos and we actually met him and have his business card. In other words, we know she`s fair dinkum! Earlier in the week I made a backup copy of all our documents and had the originals bound together into one book. It`s nice to see all our work over the past months in one book, it looks quite professional! This we took to the house-renting lady to have a look at. She said it all looked in order and gave it to her husband to look at. He seemed pleased with it too. He said we must hand it in ourselves but then once we have done that he`ll put the word out. It turned out that the father of a friend of his is the boss of the whole department of education! He said (this is translated directly from Lao so it sounds flowery) not to worry and that there are many paths to choose from which will lead us to the right place in the end.
Having our documents in good hands meant one less thing to worry about. We still had the furniture issue but that soon sorted itself out also. The chinese shop were trying to sell us metal desks and chairs for $42-50 a set. We thought this was a total rip-off since it was factory made and coming from China and decided against them, even though they looked nice. Today we visited a street near china-town which is filled entirely with furniture shops. The first one we visited was occupied by about twenty people all sitting and eating at one of the tables in the store. This was very odd to begin with but after waiting around five minutes nobody came to serve us so we left. We saw a nice looking table out the front of one shop and decided to have a look. The guy there makes his own furniture and can knock something up from any design! We showed him the designs we`d come up with and he said it would be no problem and the price is about half that of the chinese stuff! We were very pleased indeed! This means we can have our funky furniture afterall! Our theme has a slight 60s mod/pop-art twist to it and we`re very happy that we can have this stuff made! Ugly tiles aside, our school should look very interesting and attractive! That goes a long way here in Laos. Our other worry was that the furniture would not be available in time, however the guy at the shop reckons he can make it very quickly, so we`re overjoyed! Our documents are going to go through and our furniture is taken care of as well as a sign. Now we just need to install glass, find some nice decorations, have a couple of sinks put in and finally hire some staff! When the documents are ready we`ll begin advertising and promoting and then we`ll be ready to open! It`s all very exciting indeed!