I am wondering whether I should buy her to preserve her from the pot?
It has been a busy week here, we have celebrated International Rabies Day, (I am unsure what activities were involved , but maybe 101 recipes for cooking a mad dog?), Older Peoples' Day (again, my food parcel and woolly mitts did not arrive), a Buddha day and today is Teachers' Day once more; how quickly a year goes when you are having fun.
On Buddha day I was taken to a rather remote temple to give alms; there appeared to be just one elderly monk and 4 young novices. I suspect that they do not get so many falang visitors, since the monk ordered the boys to prepare us a snack of sweet sticky rice and hot coffee, which was as touching as it was surprising.
My trip to the capital was mildly eventful. The bus journey took 12.5 hours because of landslips and craters in the road. But it did provide another lovely glimpse into the Lao psyche. After 2 millennia of Buddhism and 30 years of Communism, the Lao people can sometimes appear rather complaisant and overly respectful of authority ( a trait I am doing my best to challenge), but sometimes their natural and hilarious anarchic streak appears, and organising them to sit in their correct seat on the bus is one such moment.
The rules are quite complex....if your ticket says Number 3; you should endeavour to sit in seat Number 3; are you all still with me, or has it already got overly complicated?
But if you have ticket 3 you will probably sit in seat 18, thus obliging the holder of 18 to sit in 25, but then the owner of 25 arrives and insists on his rights under the Lao Constitution to sit in his allocated seat ( see article 37,clause 14c, section 1002, sub section 94a;.as amended by the Party at a special conference in 1998, and confirmed in 2002.) Since rights under the Lao Constitution are few and far between, this can provoke a crisis.
Then you have some Lao 'wide boys' (Thai and Lao readers please proceed to footnote )trying to convince gullible falangs that they have to give up their good seats in their favour. This particular gullible falang deals with such requests in rather a brusque fashion, using an international language...no, not Esperanto...but just using one finger; this soon overcomes any possible misunderstandings. But the bus probably starts 20 minutes late by the time all the seating moves are undertaken and signed off by a party official ( OK, I just made that last bit up)
I was in Vientiane, as regular readers ( ohhh; how I wish !) will recall, mostly to attend a graduation ceremony. I have attended many, far too many, of these events in my life but this was the most delightfully chaotic.As ever in Laos, little regard was paid to the tine, but somehow, despite the apparent chaos there must have been a semblance of order as most students (though ironically not mine) received their correct certificates.
Thong waited for me on the Lao side with his bike, and we headed back, going via Wat Phonesay to give alms to the Abbot there. It was as well that we were engaged in an activity generating Merit, rather than just going for a beer, since we had a rear tyre blow-out and on the wet road we briefly went all over the place, before Thong managed to get control back and kept us upright. It was all over in a couple of seconds but a bit scary nevertheless. But demonstrating good karma, we had the blowout right next to repair shop, and then while we waited a brief but heavy storm broke, so we were in the dry rather than being out on the road in the storm.
Although not on the tourist route, I would urge any visitors to VTE to make sure to go to Wat Phonesay. I have no religious views (well, that is not quite true, I do, but most of them are hostile to religious practice) but meeting the Abbot is always a spiritually uplifting experience. He is quite a young man who combines obvious spirituality with intelligence and humour.He is studying for a Master's Degree and will be lost to the temple in a year or two but he will be much relieved to put down the burdens of his office, of which interfering laypeople seems to be one of the most annoying.
If I had a narrow escape, then my Hmong friend, Khamphone did not. About a year ago he had an accident when a van he was in on the way to a wedding came off the road and plunged down the mountainside. This time it was an accident on his motorbike which left the bike a write-off and him hospitalised for several days. In the last 12 months, that is 2 accidents, 2 burglaries, two family deaths, and one flood; I think the village shaman needs to get to work....fast!
I flew back to Luang Prabang, a journey lasting 35minutes by air. The plane was packed.Mostly with a tedious Chinese delegation of some sort. ( I assume they had come because someone had discovered that through an administrative oversight there was a last vestige of our rivers, forests or minerals that they they had not already stolen, and were anxious to correct this unfortunate error.)
The one example of egalitarianism I have found in our socialist paradise is on Air Lao, where there is only one class of accommodation, so even the suited ones had to sit with us peasants and workers. I had no checked-in baggage, so on touchdown with a couple of Lao people in a similar situation I made my way to the exit to ensure a swift getaway. One of the delegation with a movie camera was anxious to elbow past us, a move which we collectively resisted; I even used my little bit of Lao on him to explain that he should calm down.
Thus as the doors opened I and my new Lao friends emerged to be greeted by what I assume was the Chinese Anthem and a reception party of two lines of solemn looking in men in ill-fitting suits holding flowers, backed up by a cavalcade of limousines with police outriders. A tentative move to present me with flowers was swiftly corrected when it was judged that there had been a cock up and that the plane appeared to be occupied by peasants, workers and running dogs of capitalism rather than the Leaders. I did not hang about long enough to see how they unscrambled things,and and since I had my own motorbike outrider waiting I was away from the airport long before the delegation completed its formalities.
It is a small, almost imperceptible move to switch from talking of Chinese officialdom to discussing crime, so I will add one more story here on the latter topic. Some months ago I mentioned my anxiety about the large family who live in a small house opposite mine, where the kids, perforce, are often left to fend for themselves all day. The teenage boy has been in police custody for the last week charged with stealing what sounds like about $700 or so from the Vietnamese temple just down the road. I have no idea what the arrangements for youth custody are here, although someone did tell me that his teenage step daughter had been quite well cared for after being arrested for drug related offences.
Yesterday my village school must have had physical fitness day. the kids were dressed in shorts and tee shirts and stood in lines clapping their hands, stamping their feet and occasionally raising a fist and giving a chant. This took the whole of the day ! A moron with a whistle stood at the front for a full six hours (with a break for lunch) and the kids responded to his whistle. A deeply disturbing occasion, not least because they do no games or PE for months on end. I assume this was revolutionary PE; but of course, PE teachers across the world know no philosophy; they are a strange breed that the world could manage perfectly well without I am sure. Oh dear....imagine being reborn as a PE teacher; what a scary thought.
Since I have been away for a few days I cannot report much further on my visitors. However, as I write this I am expecting the student-who-cleans who call by. He rang yesterday to check if 'the house was dirty'.So as not to dishearten him I have done my best to ensure that it is, and I have left as much washing up as possibly can.
No culinary triumphs or disaster to report this week; I have been too busy to experiment in the kitchen, but I do feel a Chocolate Mousse coming on.
There is not yet any sign of the hurricane or typhoon or whatever was supposed to hit us; even the weather is late in Laos it seems. The dry spell I reported last week has not continued but the rains have abated somewhat, so maybe we are looking towards a swift end to the monsoon period.
Despite some of what I have written above I do have a suit and I did get some flowers......well, briefly anyway.
(Footnote; "wide boy" does not refer to size, but to an over eagerness to gain any possible financial or other advantage)
Alan
Dear Alan,
ReplyDeleteI just realized that you are Law expert as well.
Good job...
Cheers,
Teng