Day of No Day
Yesterday was a very wet day, though it didn't rain one drop. Yesterday the youth posted themselves by the side of the road equipped with huge buckets and pails and constantly flowing hoses, dousing each other and every passerby. I got a bike again and road throughout the town, got completely soaked in jeans and a polo, and the super absorbent flipflops I bought in the castro made from beer-cosy foam, I left a trail of water--usually by midday most days I am soaking with sweat anyway from hoofing it around town, and it was a particularly warm day yesterday so the cool water was welcoming. There were roaming bands of teens, boys and girls, dressed in matching t-shirts or matching Hawaiian print shirts either posted at water stations or roaming around on motorbikes or on the backs of pickup trucks, school clubs, civic youth organizations, gangbangers? After riding outside of the old city I returned to the street along the Mekong with it's row of guesthouses and riverside patio eateries where most of the action was. I was lucky up until that point, not getting smeared with much more than some perfumed bright pink grease along the left side of my face. But here along the Mekong it was a decidedly more boisterous scene, at the stations they were downing big bottles of beer Lao, blasting ready-for-the-airwaves mixes of black-eyed peas and Gwen Stefani and Lao music from mega-woofers(The Lao music sounded like something off the Broken Flowers soundtrack--swirling minor key organs, a 60s groove). Along this last stretch I was accosted by a youth carrying a blackened wok, excuse me, he yelled, happy Lao new year, rubbing his wet hands on the burnt pot bottom he smeared my face with the soot and almost got a finger in my eye, others were throwing bags of talcum powder or maybe it was rice flour, the better to make a sticky goopy mess, at the end of the strip where my guesthouse was,a mob of farang had amassed, some shirtless, some of the girls in spandex sports tops, all armed with huge fluorescent squirt guns, shooting anything that moved. Up until then, most of the hosing down and dousing seemed to be done in a relatively considerate and dutiful manner (possibly it was because most of the stations I passed were attended mostly by younger girls and they were simply showing respect to their elders by not getting me in the eye or up the nose or in the ear if they could help it), I would slow down on my bike and they would jog alongside of me and pour water down my back or splash my pant legs. Along the Mekong, there were mostly hordes of boys--better to give them buckets of water than assault rifles to work out all that bottled-up sexual energy--so the splashing was done somewhat more aggressively, if they missed the first time, they ran after you and tossed one big bucket on your back. When I got to the farang mob at the end of the street, it was like a melee, I hopped off my bike and immediately got squirted in the face by two french boys--allo, allo, I think you have some powder zer, oh no there eez still more powder, let me get it off for you--I splashed back with what little water was left in my water bottle. Your welcome, you're welcome the french boy said. I had a beer and then took a long afternoon nap, when I woke up just after five I could still hear screaming and chanting and banging on pots and buckets.
Today seemed more mellow, or at least the dowsing got off to a later start. I went up to the top most temple of Pou Si, the sacred hill in Loung Prabang, that seems to rise suddenly above the old town (kind of like that hill in El Cerrito, a geographic anomaly) At night this topmost temple is spotlighted by klieg lights, it's gilded stuppas glowing, hovering in the dark air above the town--it's like the mansion on the hill in Edward Scissorhands or Phil Spector's mansion hovering above Alhambra. So this morning Imade my way up to Pou Si and bought a couple of flycatcher birds, these small brown birds the size of chicks, kept in a cage made from palm fronds. The idea is that you get karma points through various merit-making acts: giving alms to monks, leaving flowers at altars, or freeing small animals like turtles or birds. So I climbed up and up to the top. I thought it would be packed with both locals and tourists given the holiday, but there were only a couple of boystowatch mecash in my buddha points. After some wrangling with the palm fronds, getting birdshit on my fingers and for a second thinking I would get SARS, I finallygota sizeable opening. First one bird darted out and then the next,I was startled by how quickly they alighted on a tree some 20 meters away.
I descended on the other side of the hill facing the Royal palace of the long dead kings and watched a parade that didn't feel too different from the town fiesta parade I saw in the Philippines, except that the parade participants were all getting wet from a lineup of women with buckets, even the most venerable monks riding atop a float were getting water poured into their laps, which seemed somewhat sexual: a bunch of celibate men getting ritually bathed by a host of women.
Later that afternoon the waterfights reached peak frenzy, but this time situated along Thalong Falong, the tourist lane. After walking down the street without getting too wet and escaping getting potblack in the face, I found a bench next to a guesthouse where the women of the guesthouse and one rather fay boy were getting drunk and dirty, they were all soaking wet, their faces smeared with soot and powder, downing beer by the crate load. They danced in their lao way almost like a hula arms slightly raised rotating the palms at the wrist like tai-chi movements and splashing water on the slow procession of pickups and tuktuks all crammed with drunk kids. An old beat-up convertible bombed-out in multicolored hastily drawn spray paint marks passed by and the driver was waving a wooden dildo (that was hanging from his rearview mirror) at the guesthouse women. The drunkest of the guesthouse women, she looked to be in her late thirties if not older, wore a pail on her head like a valet cap and danced barefoot in the middle of the street. Playing the consummate flirt, she would throw herself onto the hoods of cars, and said probably scandalous things to the passing military men who were also getting their fair share of wet and potblack. On the other sideof the street from me was Louang Pabang bakery, packed with a whole peanut gallery of curious and some of themanxious farang watching the natives get more than restless--at onepoint a truckbed with hellbent teens doused the farang gallery with huge sheets and ribbons of water. Periodicaly the fay boy would walk over to me and the couple of other passive spectators in my vicinity and pour water down our shirts.
Earlier that afternoon at the Scandinavian bakery I overheard some knowledgeable-by-the-hushed-tone-of-his-voice farang explaining the whole water thing to a couple of dutch women in their late 30s--he told them how he thought the whole thing was really a mating ritual, how during this holiday--the Lao being a very demure and modest society--things became more permissible. He told the ladies how one time a girl in a crowd grabbed his crotch. I guess she wanted to know if the stories were true, he said.
And maybe Mr. Anthropologist was right, because from what I saw, there was some kind of raunch going on, maybe not quite like bare boobs and crotches on Bourbon street, but more like the rain scene in a bollywood production, squeaky-clean fun.
Today seemed more mellow, or at least the dowsing got off to a later start. I went up to the top most temple of Pou Si, the sacred hill in Loung Prabang, that seems to rise suddenly above the old town (kind of like that hill in El Cerrito, a geographic anomaly) At night this topmost temple is spotlighted by klieg lights, it's gilded stuppas glowing, hovering in the dark air above the town--it's like the mansion on the hill in Edward Scissorhands or Phil Spector's mansion hovering above Alhambra. So this morning Imade my way up to Pou Si and bought a couple of flycatcher birds, these small brown birds the size of chicks, kept in a cage made from palm fronds. The idea is that you get karma points through various merit-making acts: giving alms to monks, leaving flowers at altars, or freeing small animals like turtles or birds. So I climbed up and up to the top. I thought it would be packed with both locals and tourists given the holiday, but there were only a couple of boystowatch mecash in my buddha points. After some wrangling with the palm fronds, getting birdshit on my fingers and for a second thinking I would get SARS, I finallygota sizeable opening. First one bird darted out and then the next,I was startled by how quickly they alighted on a tree some 20 meters away.
I descended on the other side of the hill facing the Royal palace of the long dead kings and watched a parade that didn't feel too different from the town fiesta parade I saw in the Philippines, except that the parade participants were all getting wet from a lineup of women with buckets, even the most venerable monks riding atop a float were getting water poured into their laps, which seemed somewhat sexual: a bunch of celibate men getting ritually bathed by a host of women.
Later that afternoon the waterfights reached peak frenzy, but this time situated along Thalong Falong, the tourist lane. After walking down the street without getting too wet and escaping getting potblack in the face, I found a bench next to a guesthouse where the women of the guesthouse and one rather fay boy were getting drunk and dirty, they were all soaking wet, their faces smeared with soot and powder, downing beer by the crate load. They danced in their lao way almost like a hula arms slightly raised rotating the palms at the wrist like tai-chi movements and splashing water on the slow procession of pickups and tuktuks all crammed with drunk kids. An old beat-up convertible bombed-out in multicolored hastily drawn spray paint marks passed by and the driver was waving a wooden dildo (that was hanging from his rearview mirror) at the guesthouse women. The drunkest of the guesthouse women, she looked to be in her late thirties if not older, wore a pail on her head like a valet cap and danced barefoot in the middle of the street. Playing the consummate flirt, she would throw herself onto the hoods of cars, and said probably scandalous things to the passing military men who were also getting their fair share of wet and potblack. On the other sideof the street from me was Louang Pabang bakery, packed with a whole peanut gallery of curious and some of themanxious farang watching the natives get more than restless--at onepoint a truckbed with hellbent teens doused the farang gallery with huge sheets and ribbons of water. Periodicaly the fay boy would walk over to me and the couple of other passive spectators in my vicinity and pour water down our shirts.
Earlier that afternoon at the Scandinavian bakery I overheard some knowledgeable-by-the-hushed-tone-of-his-voice farang explaining the whole water thing to a couple of dutch women in their late 30s--he told them how he thought the whole thing was really a mating ritual, how during this holiday--the Lao being a very demure and modest society--things became more permissible. He told the ladies how one time a girl in a crowd grabbed his crotch. I guess she wanted to know if the stories were true, he said.
And maybe Mr. Anthropologist was right, because from what I saw, there was some kind of raunch going on, maybe not quite like bare boobs and crotches on Bourbon street, but more like the rain scene in a bollywood production, squeaky-clean fun.
posted by JGLuzifer at 9:37 PM
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