Lao New Year
I've been here in Louang Prabang for 5 nights so far, and now it's Lao New Year. It's a 3-day event: (1)the last day of the year, (2)the day of no year--inbetween days as it were, (3)and then new year's day. Like in Thailand,which also has their version of Songkan, people throw pails and buckets of water on each other to wish them good luck, supposedly it's done without malice, but doesn't fun always have some element of malice?
Yesterday I rode a bike around town and at first the kids with the pails would pass me up in favor of other kids on motorbikes, you see lots of kids riding around town drenched. Finally when I got to the old city I got doused and I couldn't help but laugh.
This morning while I was walking to the dry goods market to buy some sausage for lunch a group of farang on bikes with water pistols caught me by surpise from behind--from what I've seen the people doing the wetting are clearly stationed and you see it coming when you get to it. There were three or so farang on bikes, a guy and the rest of the horde girls, I heard them giggling as they approached, but suspected nothing, farang are always laughing at some dumb thing or another. It was the guy that wet me, got me at the nape of the neck and yelled Sabai Dii, I flinched, it wasn't all that hot today because of the morning rain, when he saw that I wasn't amused, he made a little sheepish grunt, maybe he thought oh he's a tourist and maybe doesn't know that this is the local custom--I wasn't that angry, but still I wanted to half-seriosly chastise him, get ethnic studies on his ass: you fucken farang, you're not supposed to ambush people, you give them fair warning, what? do you think you're fucken hunting down Hmong in the jungle. But he didn't strike me as a fratboy, a geeky bespectacled boy with curly hair. La dee da.
Went to the small village across the river, which was all mudded over, saw some abandoned temples up on the hill that I always saw from the other side of the river, all the trails were mudded over from the rains and the temples were further from the boat landing than I realized. a little boy of 8 or 9 from the village took it upon himself to be tour guide, he showed me a snail shell deposited on one of the weeded-over stuppas, and a strange grotesque figure at the back of the building that smiled like the cheshire cat, then when I asked for Wat Long Khoun, he lead me down a steep, muddy trail, bounding down like a jack rabbit, at one point after he saw how slow I was descending--I didn't want to slip and break a leg like in the short film made by some California film maker I saw in a gallery the other day--the little boy who I probably outweigh by some 150 pounds, held out his hand like he was a boyscout and I was an old lady.
Later that evening at the riverside restaurant of my guesthouse (and by restaurant I mean a shack with a wok over burning wood and plastic chairs and tables with table cloths--this is not to say there aren't fancier places further up stream, like one restaurant has a modest selection of wines (possibly for all the frogs in town) and the cook is dressed in whites and a chef's hat) like every other day I've been here, I watched the sunset, polished off a huge lao salad: eggs, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, and some homemade kind of sweet dressing. I was finishing off a big bottle of beer lao. The skies because of the rains were less hazy than they've been, and so it was a longer, more beautiful sunset, and a longer more protracted dusk, watching the lights come on across the river in the village I'd been at earlier, the evening boats coming in, the picturesque silhouettes of the boatmen standing with bamboo in hand poleing towards shore, the stern cabins of the slowboats lit by candle as they come downriver making sharp fast arcs as they head to shore turning about face. And I thought what I wouldn't give so my friends could be here right now for just these few minutes, no one saying a word, I only brought one cigarette so I wouldn't chain smoke at dinner--it's too easy to--but I can run back to my room and get more to share, the guesthouse keepers aren't rushing us, there's no second-seating here, just people drifting in and out, and then I wonder maybe only the tourists, maybe only the wealthy "blue-blooded" Louang Prabang families, maybe only irresponsible derelicts like me can enjoy the sunset, or maybe everything really does slow down at day's end, evening repast, and for a few minutes we can forget that life is hard and even harder for other's, forget that there are things we wish to forget, be lulled by the soft lilacs and the pale pinks of the quickening dusk before the resolute dark of night sets in--the french lady next to me just asked me if I know how to type in an "arabesque" a what I said? she went and asked the attendant showing him an "arabesque?" drawn on paper--she broke my mood--good thing too, I was probably getting cheesy sentimental in a filipino kind of way. ciao!
Yesterday I rode a bike around town and at first the kids with the pails would pass me up in favor of other kids on motorbikes, you see lots of kids riding around town drenched. Finally when I got to the old city I got doused and I couldn't help but laugh.
This morning while I was walking to the dry goods market to buy some sausage for lunch a group of farang on bikes with water pistols caught me by surpise from behind--from what I've seen the people doing the wetting are clearly stationed and you see it coming when you get to it. There were three or so farang on bikes, a guy and the rest of the horde girls, I heard them giggling as they approached, but suspected nothing, farang are always laughing at some dumb thing or another. It was the guy that wet me, got me at the nape of the neck and yelled Sabai Dii, I flinched, it wasn't all that hot today because of the morning rain, when he saw that I wasn't amused, he made a little sheepish grunt, maybe he thought oh he's a tourist and maybe doesn't know that this is the local custom--I wasn't that angry, but still I wanted to half-seriosly chastise him, get ethnic studies on his ass: you fucken farang, you're not supposed to ambush people, you give them fair warning, what? do you think you're fucken hunting down Hmong in the jungle. But he didn't strike me as a fratboy, a geeky bespectacled boy with curly hair. La dee da.
Went to the small village across the river, which was all mudded over, saw some abandoned temples up on the hill that I always saw from the other side of the river, all the trails were mudded over from the rains and the temples were further from the boat landing than I realized. a little boy of 8 or 9 from the village took it upon himself to be tour guide, he showed me a snail shell deposited on one of the weeded-over stuppas, and a strange grotesque figure at the back of the building that smiled like the cheshire cat, then when I asked for Wat Long Khoun, he lead me down a steep, muddy trail, bounding down like a jack rabbit, at one point after he saw how slow I was descending--I didn't want to slip and break a leg like in the short film made by some California film maker I saw in a gallery the other day--the little boy who I probably outweigh by some 150 pounds, held out his hand like he was a boyscout and I was an old lady.
Later that evening at the riverside restaurant of my guesthouse (and by restaurant I mean a shack with a wok over burning wood and plastic chairs and tables with table cloths--this is not to say there aren't fancier places further up stream, like one restaurant has a modest selection of wines (possibly for all the frogs in town) and the cook is dressed in whites and a chef's hat) like every other day I've been here, I watched the sunset, polished off a huge lao salad: eggs, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, and some homemade kind of sweet dressing. I was finishing off a big bottle of beer lao. The skies because of the rains were less hazy than they've been, and so it was a longer, more beautiful sunset, and a longer more protracted dusk, watching the lights come on across the river in the village I'd been at earlier, the evening boats coming in, the picturesque silhouettes of the boatmen standing with bamboo in hand poleing towards shore, the stern cabins of the slowboats lit by candle as they come downriver making sharp fast arcs as they head to shore turning about face. And I thought what I wouldn't give so my friends could be here right now for just these few minutes, no one saying a word, I only brought one cigarette so I wouldn't chain smoke at dinner--it's too easy to--but I can run back to my room and get more to share, the guesthouse keepers aren't rushing us, there's no second-seating here, just people drifting in and out, and then I wonder maybe only the tourists, maybe only the wealthy "blue-blooded" Louang Prabang families, maybe only irresponsible derelicts like me can enjoy the sunset, or maybe everything really does slow down at day's end, evening repast, and for a few minutes we can forget that life is hard and even harder for other's, forget that there are things we wish to forget, be lulled by the soft lilacs and the pale pinks of the quickening dusk before the resolute dark of night sets in--the french lady next to me just asked me if I know how to type in an "arabesque" a what I said? she went and asked the attendant showing him an "arabesque?" drawn on paper--she broke my mood--good thing too, I was probably getting cheesy sentimental in a filipino kind of way. ciao!
posted by JGLuzifer at 5:41 AM
1 Comments:
Oh what I what have given to be there. The little boy was so cute, I love that he wanted to help you. You're so brave for setting those birds free - you know how birds scare me, with their eyes going off in different directions and their dinosaur claws. Neil Sadaka is on Fresh Air right now, he sounds so fey, talking about how when he was on American Idol his catalouge sales went thru the roof.
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