I can't quite place that accent

On we moved, ever east winding through the jungles of Lao until we came to Sam Neua (we never did quite figure out how to pronounce it, each time we said it to somebody leading to a blank stare). Walking into town from the bus station felt like we stepped through a portal into a different world. The red communist flags lining the streets and large block monument at the city entrance gave us the feeling that we must have accidentally crossed the border already into Vietnam.

Exploring Sam Neua was fun. We found the most interesting market I;ve seen so far. The smells we mesmarizing (we had to walk down the pork aisle twice to get the full effect, and try to identify the different parts of the pigs, the head was obvious). At the clothes market Tina set her sights on a shirt with Lao writing on it, not know what it meant. Our failed attempts to find out only led to hysterical laughing and teasing by the ladies running the stalls, to the point where they didnt even try to sell her the shirt. We got it anyways, and later found out it says something along the lines of "Happy Songkran, please don't dump water on me". Something that would have been useful a week ago.

By dinner Tina had the brilliant scheme to don our best worst accents, seeing as nobody in the entire town could understand us. She went Australian, while I went with a cross between German and Bostonian. Needless to say, it lasted until the first person we actually had to communicate something to, our waiter at dinner, who stood there unfazed and uncomprehending, and we had to go back to the tried and true method of pointing we had been using before.