Luang Prabang is my favorite part of Lao, my favorite country on this trip. I’ve been exposed to some more scamming recently, but overall it’s still very low pressure. Not quite Vientiane’s food variety, but still plenty of baguettes and laughing cow cheese and all the other French leftovers (I suppose they could have left roads, a working bureaucracy, or other things the British liked to leave instead, but you can’t win them all). The scenery (augmented by some karst formations around Vang Vieng enroute) is much nicer, though it won’t come out so well in pictures—it’s hard to capture the number of different shades of gray from the distant mountains.
Today I saw a flier for drop-in English teaching and spent an hour and a half trying to help a monk distinguish the ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds—a hard job, but that’s what he wanted to work on. I think we made some progress… he has “pray” vs. “play” vs. “pay” down pretty well, though “word” vs. “world” is not so easy. Consonant clusters like “ld” and “ts” and “sk’d” are understandably troublesome.
Someone with a CELTA was trying to get across tenses, using irregular verbs. I hope she had fun with that one… heh. Kept doing some cringe-worthy things like asking monks what they have for dinner (nothing) or if they like to play [soccer] football (they would love to but they aren’t allowed)… not so cringeworthy except she kept trying to get them to pretend instead of just asking what was for breakfast. So much for the CELTA.
I have been asked to blog more about food, but I really can’t do it justice as I don’t even properly understand it thanks to the dominance of Chinese and Thai knockoffs (and delicious French leftovers) which dominate the English (or French) language menus here. There is a (Western-owned, oddly) place called Tamarind which has a lovely menu insert explaining everything, but I can’t remember it all. More herbs, less soupy stuff, more sticky, less steamed rice. None of the uniquely Lao food I’ve tried has been a fantastic revelation (like my first Thai red curry in Hong Kong) but it’s all pretty good. The one Lao dish I’ve had a couple times is laap, a mortared-and-pestled bunch of meat and herbs and lime that tastes pretty good. And of course, Beerlao (and the Tigerhead drinking water also produced by the Lao brewing company) are good to the point of being unavailable in Thailand for fear that they’d destroy the Singha and Chang markets.
Enough writing about food, it’s time to eat some. See you in a long while… possibly after Christmas, as I doubt the slow boat to Huay Xai / Chiang Kong via Pakbeng (which I expect to board on the morning of the 23rd) will have Internet access).