Spikeball (AKA White People be Crazy)

Coworker/ resident "Thor" Seth has determined Sunday afternoons be official "Spikeball time". At 4pm every week a group of us head down to the riverbank along the Mekong, Seth sets up his Spikeball net (like a mini trampoline you hit a ball on), and we play Spikeball for hours.

This is awesome! Except for two things:
1. 4pm on Sundays in June in Vientiane is effing hot. It's nice if it rains earlier that day, but otherwise all of us are chugging down water.
2. I am crap at organized sports. I don't know if it's because of my lack of co-ordination or what, but Spikeball gets considerably less competitive when I'm playing, mostly cuz the 6- 8 guys who play kind of have their game figured out, and I'm still the 3 year old kid who's ecstatic about hitting the ball until I realized I just scored a point for the wrong team.

"Beach time"- note that the beach leads to a nasty river, and there is trash and metal everywhere.

 Griffin's a super muscle-y bad ass Spikeball player. 

Seth, observing his Spikeball minions hard at work. Pretty sure he's a covert salesperson for whatever company creates Spikeball. 

One of my favorite things about Spikeball happens around 6pm, when the locals start coming out (many of them go down to the river and hang out as their social time, when it starts to cool off). We're this loud, crazy group of white people who are wearing, for the most part, very little clothing, and some of the guys see it as a contact/ tackle sport and take down other Spikeballers... it stands out a lot from the Lao groups around us. Many times we have groups of young Lao men who ask to stop what we're doing; next week, I think some of them are planning to join us.