Les digestifes sont arrivee

Thank you Nick!

The weather has been pretty much the same as last week; wet, very wet, but without storms, and heatwise , not so bad except mid/late afternoons.However,a  few drops of rain don't worry the children playing fotball on the school field.

I am going to scale down mentions of Buddha days as they come so often...one a fortnight except when there are extras. But, there was one this week, in which a party of monks from my village temple were taken to a trip to the waterfalls and got into a road traffic accident with 11 ending up in hospital. This was regarded by the locals as totally hilarious, and to my embarrassment I was soon joining in the mirth, though I can't think for the life of me what is funny about it. I suppose it's slightly Pythonesque with an overturned tuk-tuk and saffron robes all over the road, but initially at least I would not have seen the funny side of it had I not been inducted into the Lao sense of humour.
Next Saturday we have the Festival of the Dead which is followed a few days later by the the Boat Racing Festival; In relation to the former, I asked a couple of friends if they would be sleeping out in the temple grounds next to their  ancestors'  remains; I was assured "yes" they would, "unless it is raining"...which seemed a nice Lao compromise.

Along with the evening rains we have had swarms of small flies which leave a trail of thousands of dead ones in the morning. I don't know if they only live 24 hours or somehow contrive to get killed by the rain They seem to be attracted  by the light  If I am foolish enough to leave any clothes out on the washing line overnight, in the morning they are not only wetter than when I put them out but totally covered in a film of dead fies.

The dead moths and butterflies that I gather up in the morning are rather more attractive. See below;

What is curious is how Lao visitors are totally fascinated by my little and very temporary collection. They pull up a stool and examine each of them closely as if seeing them for the first time, rather than having lived their life alongside of them. I guess only a falang would be crazy enough to keep and display them When I explain that I propose to eat them for dinner, they say   "No, no..cannot eat...well, can eat that one,and that one...but not that one or that ". With the elephant teeth and the butterflies, maybe I just need a few bones and a fossil or two and I'll be able to open the house as the local Natural History Museum. (Thank you, Peter, your remarks about fossils will be taken as read.)

I had wanted to include a photo of my new friend Abou, who is a 3 month old monkey, but I never seem to have my camera with me at the right time. However, he and his owner have promised to call round to see me sometime. The owner has just given up being a Chemistry teacher after 16 years, to become a gardener. The reason for this switch is that he was "bored" . I suspect that lack of facilities for teaching a relatively expensive subject may be  a factor, but it is a shame that someone so  obviously intelligent and articulate has been lost to teaching. The life of a pet monkey here normally seems to be "nasty, brutish and short", living life on a short chain, and rapidly becoming ill-natured and vicious. For the moment Abou is free of shackles, able to move as he wishes, and certainly free to leave his owner and come and sit with me. I am told that he sits on his owner's forearm while being driven abound on the motorbike. Whether on a Monday he is equipped with a crash helmet I am not sure; he is certainly well looked after, so maybe he is.

By the time you read  this schools will have re-opened here. This weekend the little boys are spending their last days of freedom and last of their pocket money setting off small firecrackers with the evident purpose of frightening the little girls. Needless to say, the latter remain studiously unaware of their role in this exercise.

Nick, the donor of the biscuits  (Branston pickle now tops the want list) dropped in a couple of times while he was visiting LPB. It was only after he had gone that it occurred to me that he is the first English  person I had met in two months. I was hoping to meet some French today to move the tale of the elephant skull forward, but it will now be next weekend before they arrive.

This is not  really to do with Laos, but the other week I switched my email account to Gmail. It has taken me those weeks to discover how sinister it is; (maybe all email providers are the same.) Clearly it scans the content of incoming and outgoing emails and provides matching sponsored links alongside. It will give you some idea of how interesting my emails are when I tell you that currently the links are for
Hotels in Vientiane, Educational Opportunities, overseas taxation, how to become a Chartered Accountant, grants for Asian students, ink jet printers and Test Match Special. Oddly it has not provided links to Shakespeare, Katooey bars in Vientiane, the  weather, or housing costs in Southampton; I guess it is very particular in its choice of links.

I wonder what is it is about equality that communist regimes find so hard to understand? Whenever some small time, probably corrupt official comes up from Vientiane he sits in the back of a big saloon while outriders clear the road ahead in case some member of the proletariat, who has  now cast off his chains of course, wanders across and slows down the progress of the mighty one. Today some petty tyrant was holding a party at his rather grand  house, which required the entire street to be closed with a whole host of armed police and soldiers in place to make sure that any ordinary citizen of People's Democratic Republic is put to major inconvenience whilst going about their business. I think someone should start "anger management " classes here, teaching the locals how to do anger, at which they are clearly deficient at present.

No breakfast today, unless it's warm milk and the the last of the digestives; power cut for the last 9 hours. Oh how I would have killed for one of those on my first day back at school!

Alan