Observing

• The monks seem to be more active lately, walking around town, riding in the front seats of tuk tuks or song teeos, taking their bowls door to door asking for alms of rice. I saw one the other day using a weed whacker to mow the lawn of the temple down the street. The rainy season has started and Lent is only a few weeks away; I’m guessing that they’re busy now so that they can retreat in the near future.
• I sometimes watch the street below Vientiane College when my students are doing silent reading or some other task that doesn’t require my constant supervision. Thursday, I saw two monks in their saffron robes walking one direction and three well-to-do teenagers (shopping bags, iPod headphones, brand-name/probably-Thai clothes) walking the other direction. As they passed, the three teenagers’ heads bowed automatically and they kept right on talking, as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary had happened. And it hadn’t.
• I never get tired of the feeling of riding on the back of Maggie’s motorbike when there has just been rain, so the air is cool; and when it’s evening time, so the streets are empty. The ride up Lane Xang toward the lit-up Patouxay with the warm air on my face and my arms around my girl… it’s the very stuff of happiness.
• We re-discovered one of our favorite restaurants last night. It’s a French place that used to be a French-style cave (but they’ve re-done the ceiling now) – the owner is even from my corner of France, or at least cooks like she is. Maggie ordered a buffalo steak with vegetables and soufle on the side and I ordered a three-course steak meal with onion soup as a starter and a fruit platter as desert. We shared a carafe of house red. The total was about $35.
• Yesterday was rugby day, and we spent it running a special session of Champa Ban rugby. There were several activities (relay races, coloring, team-building games) in addition to the usual touch rugby, and everyone was served lunch (Indian, Western and Lao food; a neon-rainbow of sodas) afterwards. I took the photographs, floating around the whole event, and tried to capture the fun of it all.They’ve been posted to the Lao Rugby Facebook page here.
• There’s an unspoken rule of the road here, that when there is a big vehicle that wants to pass a little vehicle, the big vehicle waits for the little vehicle to acknowledge it. Motorbikes usually fly down the roads at double the speed limit and triple the speed of cars, so this mostly applies to bicyclists. And so, whenever I hear a car or truck behind me, I instinctively look over my shoulder at it and let the driver see that I know he or she is there. The car then passes by, often within inches of my bike, assured that I won’t startle and swerve.
• I’m amazed by how active the town is early on the weekends. Saturday, I left home at quarter to 8 and there were a dozen family members gathered across the street to help mow the grass. As I turned the corner, I saw another family of at least 10, working together to move what was either a very sick person or a recently-deceased family member into the back of a van. And Sunday, at just past 7, we drove down Nongbone, the “backbone” of the town (it runs parallel to the commercial/financial Lane Xang); it was as busy as I’d imagine it at 3 on a Tuesday or 9 on a Friday. Once we got to the office on Setthathirath (usually populated by hoards of tourists and ex-pats), it was back to Sunday morning: streets deserted, shops closed, windows shuttered.
• I heard a story the other day of a woman who, as a girl during the revolution of 1975, had been offered a ride on a raft across the river into Thailand and eventually to repatriation in an anglophone country. On the night of the voyage, she and her two siblings had their papers checked and stamped and were packed onto a boat with the other lucky children. As it set sail, she yelled and cried to be taken back to her mother, but the boatman refused to turn around. So she, the 7-year-old, dived into the water and swam all the way back to her war-torn country, where she still lives, nearly 40 years later. Her siblings are New Zealand and Australian citizens.