1. A large, very large, grasshopper-like creature was sitting in my kitchen for a day or. Since it was doing no harm I let it be, merely joking with friends that if they were hungry it would make a fair sized snack, since I know that they are quite well regarded as a food source. On Saturday I cooked breakfast, went back downstairs, and found the creature helpfully sitting in the oil in the wok. It did not actually carry a sign saying "fry me' but it might as well have done.
2. A Novice monk has taken to visit me. He has no English beyond "hello" and "goodbye", so I cannot tell you much about him, He may be a friend of a friend, or perhaps I knew him when he was wearing his hair long and dressed in lay clothes, but right now I do not have a clue who he his. But he arrives, late morning usually maybe after his lunch, sits down, sends some messages on his mobile phone, clips his nails, and then maybe wanders off to the bathroom where there is every indication that he takes a shower. (One cannot be sure with a monk as there is no tell-tale wet hair !) Then after a short while, having made no further demands upon me he says goodbye and wanders off. I guess my sitting room and my bathroom make a congenial change from his normal domestic facilities, though what has brought him into my house I have no idea.
3. I have lost a day..totally lost. Has anyone seen it? It might answer to the name of Friday, but I am not wholly sure. There was been so much rain here....it is bucketing down as I write this, that I have not been getting out a great deal. Just pop to the village shops between showers and go back home to write, read, play music or whatever. That seems to have led to a situation where I totally lost track of the days. Certainly I called a meeting for Saturday, believing it to be Friday. And I seem not to have attended the opening of an art exhibition on Friday to which I had been invited...so I think it is Friday 16 (aka 15 ?) September that I missed. Please let me know if anything important happened while I was away....
Although there has been no noticeable clamour for further information on this topic I shall mention that the rains have totally washed away the repairs made to the pot holes on the man road. Indeed they are now worse than before. Happily my eggs remain secure in their much admired yellow plastic box. Across the country the roads remain in a terrible state and with no end to the rains yet one must assume that they will get worse before they get better. I think that last time I wrote about the state of the Mekong I was concerned about how low the water level was...that seems a long time ago now. At Paxse in the South it has officially reached flood level today. In Luang Prabang it is still well below that level but the accumulated annual rainfall (1440 mm) has at this point exceeded that of 1981 when there were major floods here. In that year there was heavy rainfall in the first 2 weeks of October; we must hope that the rains soon abate to avoid any repetition.
Oddly, despite the rains, on maybe 8 out of the last 14 days I have had no water in the taps at home and I have to collect buckets of rain water to flush the loo and do the washing up. Personal hygiene is courtesy of the Red Cross sauna, whilst the dirty clothes pile higher.When water does trickle through the pipes it is an earthy brown colour. We are not as troubled by insects this monsoon as I think we were last year. I keep up a constant and futile battle against the ants, and my friends the geckos do a pretty decent job with small flying creatures. But there is seldom a morning when I don't wake up and have to reach for the 'after bite' cream to deal with some bites on those bits of the body that have been sticking out of the bed.
One effect of these damp conditions is that some clothes and books, stored too closely together I suppose, have attracted mould. The clothes have washed out OK but some of the books are noticeably damaged by damp. One of the most badly affected is a book written and given to me by one of the regular readers of this page. I guess now that it has no resale value I shall have to read it. Oh no ! (Actually it's quite a good read. ) The loaf of bread I bought yesterday seems either to be suffering in the same way, or else I inadvertently bought a penicillin culture
I checked the pace at which my beans are growing; the plants are climbing about 5cm a day and the beans themselves are growing up to about 2cm. I have a few chillies coming through, but my chilli needs are quite small, so a small crop will suffice. The rains have washed out my tomato, pepper and basil seeds, so I need to start again there. Coriander is waiting in the wings.My flowers though are a joy. Apart from the orchids in their hanging baskets upstairs, I have red, yellow, pink and purple flowers in full bloom around the outside. Apart from the roses I have no idea what flowers they are, but I suppose I should find out.
One of our students, Kheak, has discovered Bob Dylan among my CDs He had not previously heard of him, but has now taken to trying to sing along in a deep Dylanesque nasal voice....I leave it to your imagination. But he can only take the songs at their face value, and as soon as I try to explain that some of them are 'protest songs' I lose him. Clearly the concept of political protest here is so aliaen that he can visualise let along think why anyone might engage in it. Certainly he is rightly amused that 45 years ago I felt that by chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho ChiMinh" through the streets of London I might bring an end to war in his country and in Vietnam, but somehow "The Times the are A-Changing" seems even less apt in Laos than in the US or UK. However the recent riots in UK have been widely covered here, however that may be simply to demonstrate that capitalism is in its last throes and that the workers are throwing off their chains.....and looting shops at the same time.
The student who had malaria is now pretty well recovered, and went back to work yesterday as well as attending the first day of classes in the new academic year. He did have a relapse a few days back, but I understand that that is wholly normal with some varieties of malaria. I look forward to the return of my clothes in due course.
Among my invitations this week was one to (another ) Hmong funeral. It was as well that I declined it as it made it a little easier to politely decline the request for a 'loan' to help defray the costs of the event. I assume that they would have been considerable given that the body was flown up from Vientiane...er, flown by plane I mean, not by any shaman induced means. It was I understand a relatively small occasion; just a 3 day/2 buffalo and 2 pig function.
The turkey family next door have rather taken over the role of wandering forager that the goat had a year or so ago; although they do not eat my flowers they do occasionally occupy my balcony and taken as a group they are quite a big affair. Including Mum and dad I think they are 11, plus the duck who thinks she is turkey, but who might change her mind come Thanksgiving or Christmas.
I shall now pop the mouldy bread into the toaster and see what emerges. I have bought some Thai marmalade...but the sugar content is 62.5% so I am not expecting the best breakfast ever.
Bye for now
Alan
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