The Pineapple Seller

"They'll rip you off, those Vietnamese street-sellers!" we'd been warned by a friend.  So I felt a bit cross with myself when I paid 20,000 dong for a bag of fresh pineapple from a woman the other morning.  She'd wanted 30,000 for two; mulling it over as I munched, I thought I really should have got her down to 15,000 for one.

We'd just finished licking the juice from our lips when we reached the Women's Museum down the road.  Henry and I sat down to watch a short video, entitled "The Daily Life of a Street Vendor".

One woman explained how she rose at 2am to get to market to buy her fruit.  On a good day she'll have sold it by 5pm, on a bad day it's 7pm.  Every fortnight she hopes to escape the city to return to her local village, and give the $18-20 she may have earned to her husband and children.

I attempted the sums in my head, gave up, and did them with a calculator back in our room.  5,000 dong is about 25c.  About 0.3% of my salary.  About 5% of hers.  Yes, yes, yes, I do realise that her living expenses will be a fraction of mine.  But a 17 hour day is a 17 hour day, whatever part of the hemisphere you live in.  So if the street sellers do rip you off, it figures.

Only eight hours to go. 

John

Fairy Tale

Palace

Once upon a time, in a far away land of rivers and mountains, there reigned a King and Queen.  They lived in a palace with their beloved son, the Crown Prince.  They slept in sheets made of the fairest silk, and dined from fine dishes around a long teak table.

One day, there was a Communist revolution, and the six hundred year old Kingdom of Laos was abolished.  Three summers later the King, Queen and Crown Prince were sent north to live in a cave, and labour in the fields, where they eventually starved to death.

I'm afraid I'm not sure about the details in the second paragraph.  The Royal Palace Museum that Henry and I just visited didn't spell them out.  There were royal portraits, and wooden boards explaining which room was which (the scarlet and crimson Throne Room spoke for itself) but my foolish hope that there might be a little board explaining why they're not living there now was left unfulfilled.  A modicum of research since suggests the unhappy ending outlined above may not be too far from the truth.

A reminder to me, as I headed back into the dusty streets, that this is the People's Democratic Republic of Laos now, and it is the People that live happily ever after.

Cave

Insecurity Guards

You may be bigger than me, but I'm the one with SECURITY on my t-shirt

"Just look and act the part," I said to myself, again and again.  "Just look and act the part, and nobody need ever know."

I suspect just about everybody in the crowd at the Elephant of the Year Procession knew instantly that Henry and I were not, by profession, security guards.  Our T-shirts may have declared it, but I'm quite sure our body language did not.  It's not easy to tell Lao people, in a language that is not theirs, at a Festival that is, not to reach out to touch their national icon.

But we muddled through.  The elephants (for the most part) ignored the spectators who came just that bit too close.  The crowds (for the most part) shuffled back a bit when Henry or I mumbled "back, back, back!"  And I (for the most part) wondered whether next time I come up against a security guard in a black t-shirt and absurd hat, he'll be more nervous than me.

If your trunk's not on the list, you're not going in...

Too Many T-Shirts

Let's see if we have your size, sir. 

There were too many t-shirts.  Red, turquoise, green, pink (lots and lots of pink), navy, black.  Small, medium, large, extra large.  Different logos, different styles.  My task at the ElephantAsia Stall was to get them organised for sale.  I mulled it over for a bit.  Display one of each, I thought, and have all the rest in boxes by colour for people to rummage in.  Sorted.

Then the two American volunteers got involved.  "Let's meet!" they cried.  They grasped my hand for a "unity moment", before declaring where they were going with this. "I'm thinking ..." murmered Gina, "we could have a viewing area here, soften that ugly corner with that banner, stack boxes verticle below eye level, sorted individually in rows by size, style and colour, under a table, perhaps -- can we get some more tables? -- or maybe... "  They were going quite a long way with this, it seemed.  I scolded myself for my lack of vision.

An hour after we'd opened for Lao business, shirts were scattered to the dusty winds, boxes thoroughly rummaged.  But they were selling fast, and I had learnt another Lao lesson.  When shifting T-shirts at a stall in South East Asia, a lack of vision can be a good thing.

John

Scenes from the River 1: The Dinner Party (with apologies to Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Terrence Rattigan et al ...)

Henry didn't have his camera on him to show you what it was like,
so here's a photo that shows what it wasn't like. 

The Scene:

A bamboo curry house after sunset, in the mountain country nine hours by slow boat north of  Luang Prabang, Ancient Capital of the Kingdom of Laos.  Chinese Lanterns hang from the beams.  Thirteen travellers sit around a dimly lit table, dishes of rice and sauce amidst the bottles of beer.

The Cast:
Sean: 29, from Toronto.  Laughing eyes, full of stories, a broken engagement behind him.  We'd got chatting on the boat, bumped into him the next day, and had just spent an exhilarating afternoon kayaking with him.
Jana: hippy dippy from Munich, grasping my arm to reassure me that no, really, my German is very good.
Dom: 30, we'd met him an hour ago in a herbal steam room, discovering that he's an old boy from the same school as Henry, a good ten minutes before the lemongrass steam cleared and we discovered that he actually looked like one too.
Alex: from Kentucky USA, showing us all some time lapse video he'd caught on his iPad.
An Aussie: didn't catch his name, learning Mandarin and running two hotels in China.
Emily & Jennie: both Welsh, off to Cardiff University soon, lapping it all up before they hit their early twenties,
Adam: their friend, English, a bit under the weather.
Another Aussie: mid twenties?, arrived late, declared he'd be climbing a tall mountain the next morning.
Cory & Chris: both from Vancouver, young enough to be our sons, and making the most of it thousands of miles from the Lion's Gate's embrace.

The Action: 
These thirteen people, many of whom barely knew each other 48 hours before, chatting as if in the university canteen.

The Point:
Next time Henry and I host a dinner party and some of our friends can't make it, perhaps we should just pop out into the street and see who can.

Scenes from the River 2: The Lunch Party

There was no seating plan 

The Scene:
A slowboat on the Mekong.  Twelve backpackers sit one behind the other on hard wooden stools, in two rows of six.  Their lunch consists of  fried rice and vegetables, served in a polystyrene tray.  They eat in silence because of the roar of the engine at the rear of the boat.  The journey so far has taken six hours; there are seven more to go.  Their destination is an Elephant Festival in the south of the country.  They've heard that all the guesthouses are full, but that they should be able to find a place for the night on the living room floor of local Lao families.

The Cast: 
Andy and Bella, from Hampshire, in matching bead necklaces.
Cassie and Dom: she's in a turquoise strappy top, he's reading his Lonely Planet travel guide;
Ed, faded Nike baseball cap and a few days' stubble.
Fiona, a shiatsu instructor, baggy tangerine pants.
Georges, French Algerian, now in Amsterdam, Star of Vietnam on his cap.
Helen and Iain, both unemployed right now, from Manchester.
Julia, a photographer from Germany, in supertrendy sunshades.

The Point:
The average age of the group is actually 56.  (I conducted a survey.)  The real names are Maureen, Mick, Phil, Lynne, Jim, Tracey, Djamel, Jon, Paula and Rosa.  They're the only facts I changed.  Half the group are retired.  Maybe Henry and I will still have the spirit to do this all over again in twenty years' time, after all.

App-alled

In-app-ropriate thoughts

We had twenty minutes to pack and be ready for our voyage by slow-boat down the Mekong, and disaster had struck.  My attempt to download the latest iPhone software upgrade had taken more than an hour, and appeared to have deleted 17 apps from my phone.

No more Currency Converter app, so handy for calculating the Lao kip!  Farewell BBC News app, indispensable for keeping up with the Coalition Government! Goodbye First Direct app, great for personal banking on the go!  Adios to my Gym Fitness App, helping me fend off the effects of 44!

I was appalled.  At myself.  We'd made it to the jetty, were gliding past children squealing in the water, rock-faces soaring from the riverbank, purple-draped mountains in the distance.  All this before me, and I was fretting about how to get those apps back.  Getting away from it all on the other side of the world?  Not now.  Not yet.  Not when there's an Iphone in your pocket.

Three things ... 

... I ...

... missed.

Words by John
Photos by Henry
Hair Styling by Lee of Luang Prabang

English Test

You have five minutes, and you may start scrolling down now.  (See the foot of this entry for Answers and Assessment.)

Questions:
1.  What is the past participle of the verb "to read"?
2.  What is the subject of the sentence "the ruler is on the teacher's head"?
3.  Is the statement "I am learning a very great deal" Present Simple or Present Continuous?
4.  What, if anything, is wrong with the following sentence:  "He didn't use to go to the shop"?
5.  Why does "twenty" end in a "-y" and "twentieth" contain an "-ie"?

Answers:
1. "read", as in "I have read this blog entry".  But it's pronounced red, not read.  Clever, eh?  I've been using the word for about 42 years and only just noticed.
2.  "The ruler." ("The teacher's head" is the object, "is" is the verb, "on" is the proposition.)  I found myself placing said ruler on said head in class yesterday by way of demonstration.
3.  Present Continuous.  "I learn" is Present Simple.  The English language has two present tenses.  I learned (Past Simple) that last week.
4.  Just about everything, as far as I'm concerned.  But it appeared in the text book from which I was teaching last week, and I decided to grit my teeth, avoid chaos, and put it on the board.
5.  Don't ask me. (Unlike the Lao English teacher who insisted there must be a reason, and seemed to hold me personally responsible for the fact that there wasn't.)

Assessment:
5 correct:  Well done!  Log off  immediately.  You're needed over here.
2-4 correct:  Fair enough!  You can speak it, after all.
0-1 correct:  Say a silent prayer of thanks, as I have done, that you were born an English speaker, spared the pain of hour after hour of evening study, whilst holding down a job in a cafe, and raising a family -- in the hope that you might just grasp enough of this perplexing language to reply politely when a tourist, unwilling to learn a word of Lao, complains, as I have done, that his coffee isn't hot enough.

So much to learn

John

Seeing the Sights

This weekend's sightseeing -- free of charge:

• An ice-cream trolley, tinkling along a dusty lane.
• Three monks, saffron robes caught in the breeze.
• A small boy, flying a kite on a riverbank.
• Another waiter, coming to tell me the lunch I'd ordered isn't on today.
• A spider in our bathroom, the size of my hand.
• A vegetable garden, greener than a bunch of coriander.
• Grilled fish on a barbecue, sparkling in the Night Market.
• Our lovely fruit shake lady, in a pale yellow shawl.
• A slender ferry, skuttling across the Mekong.
• Henry's blue T-shirt, too big for him now.
• My bicycle, still leaning on the wall I'd forgotten I'd left it -- and ready for tomorrow.

John

Cover Girls

Old Loas

It took some detective work, but I found her in the end, embossed in gilt on a temple wall.  The golden girl with the squiffy eyes who adorned our guide book to Laos.  They reckon she'd been on that wall for about five hundred years.

New Laos

But I suggest for their next edition, Rough Guides pick another cover girl.  Henry and I have christened her the Lovely Shake Lady.  We spotted her on our first night in this gentle city, smiling at us broadly as Henry ordered a banana confection, I picked mango and pineapple, and she prepared to add the condensed milk and hit the blender button.  Her modest grace reminded me of my Auntie Evelyn, her smile as warm as the evening breeze.



It is the breathing people that symbolise this charming country, not the ornate icons on its sacred walls.  Move over, Golden Girl, and make way for something lovelier.

John