The children are the innocentist children I've ever seen. They trill "Sabadeeeeee!" ("hi") when they see you. Everybody in Laos was sweet and friendly, and they didn't seem very resentful when they heard we were Americans, even though the US bombed the crap out of them during the Vietnamese war for no reason whatever.

The Laos people are ethnically the same as the Thais, and their language is a dialect of Thai. However their country is far less developed than Thailand. I got the feeling that the Thais consider the Laos their country bumpkin cousins.