Birthday petanque

Thanks everyone for birthday wishes. There were not internet available in Nong Khiew so the answer is a bit late. Most important thing was to find my first lao petanque game and I succeeded! At the local bus station group of men were playing doubles and after a while watching they invited me to the game. Great. So we played doubles and I was playing as a placer (not sure if this is english word for a player trying to place the ball as close as possible to target ball). Well it took a while to understand each other as they did not speak english and I did not master lao. Eventually roles were sorted out and I did decent play but eventually we lost by couple points. Damn. But to our defence local guys were truly magnificent at shooting - I assume that in this small town bus station people have lots of free time :-) Now I am already looking forward for new games. Hopefully we find some from Luamg Nam Tha which is next destination from Oudomxai where we are now staying.