April 25th, 2024.
I’m sitting in Dam Dam, a café on a backstreet that leads to a Buddhist temple. The space is part café, part gallery, part work studio. When I come inside, David, the owner, greets me and with a big smile. They just installed an air conditioner in the café, and he is joyous about it. With good reason, the heat is intense in Vientiane right now. Today the temperature reached 41 degrees Celsius. Tomorrow, 42 degrees.
We chat for a while. He shows me the works for a new art exhibition of Co-Mo, the art collective that he is part of. The exhibit focuses on 1950s to 1980s architecture in Laos, and it’s part of a larger architecture research the collective is working at the moment.
At the Café area, I tried Laos coffee beans for the first time, David recommended I tried them with the AeroPress. Apart from attending World AeroPress Championships, he also hosted the 2023’s Lao AeroPress Championship.
I knew about Dam Dam, but bumped the place by chance. It is on a little backstreet leading to the Wat Chan Buddhist temple.
On this trip I started top consciously explore the backstreets of cities and towns, and Vientiane is an ideal candidate. Here, every backstreet is an invitation for an experience. “Hello, come here! I give you beer” yelled a woman when she saw me entering her alley. She had just come out of a random door. “I don’t drink!” I shouted back in an attempt to escape the alley.
“Lao barbecue! Lao barbecue!”, another men proudly stated as I enter his alley. The alley ended in his house, and his family was cooking meat at the entrance.
