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If you leave something outside overnight here you are basically holding a yard sale. A free one. If the thing you leave outside can be lifted or wheeled away, it will be taken. If you’d like to retain something, say your bicycle, your motorbike or your lawn chairs, you have to lock them to something or bring them inside. Cars are OK to leave out, as it doesn’t seem as anyone has yet figured out how to physically steal a vehicle like that. Who are these common thieves? Most people believe them to be young men addicted to yaba, a close relative of speed, and the major drug in Laos.
Another great thing about Laos is the abundance fresh fruit. Sold on the streetside, from trucks and from blankets, everyday and every night, it’s tropical fruit, it’s fresh and it’s cheap. People here take advantage of this and eat loads of fruit. You see locals stopping to buy fruit all day and all evening. Giant stacks of fruit turn in to small mounds as the day progresses. A half-dozen varieties of lychee-like fruits, mangos, star fruit, mangostein, apples, pears, guavas. Generally about 10,000-15,000 kip per kilo. Or 60 to 90
cents per pound. Push carts full of fresh coconuts wheeled around town, and chopped open for you to drink the milk inside for 5000 kip, or 60 cents. Tables full of healthy bunches of bananas, in all sizes of miniature but never as large as ours in the US, about 60 cents a pound. Whatever the season, there is a fruit in abundance.
Sometimes you’ll walk by houses, look inside, and see an entire front room filled nearly to the top with pineapples or oranges. People will come in to town with their entire fruit crop and dump it in a family member’s front room. Or sell six thousand oranges to someone with town frontage. Or dump the contents of their truck, packed full of pineapples, on to a big tarp on the sidewalk, and then stay with that fruit for however long it takes to get sold. The seller will stay day and night with the fruit until it is all sold, as it’s too much to move twice and they can‘t leave it alone at night or it‘ll get stolen.
A funny difference between Laos and America, and perhaps Asia and the West, is the comfortable
link in Asia between live animals and meat, as well as the consumption of every part of the animal. In the US we like to imagine our meat is made somewhere, perhaps in a small family shop. Sewn. Or woven. We buy packages of chicken breasts, chicken wings, chicken thighs. We purchase beef steaks, pork tenderloins. Usually we buy our meat at supermarkets, where we are presented with rows of sterile, saran-wrapped, pre-packaged meat. The actual animal is nowhere in sight. Our meat is boneless, skinless and bloodless meat. It is clean and hygienic. It has no feathers or fingers or beaks attached to it.
In Laos, the meat you purchase is often still a live animal. This is considered necessary to ensure optimal freshness. Lao people would probably be appalled at our pre-packaged meat, as one can’t tell when the animal was actually killed. How many days old is this meat? The fish in the morning market here are sometimes still swimming in large tubs. If you purchase a fish, you can take it home, live, in a plastic bag, or have the vendor hack it in to pieces, also live.
The meat section of the market
The Interiors
Rhambutan and Mangostein contains a dozen tables, coated with blood and nasty bits, women seated atop the tables, surrounded by every piece of every animal. Customers come and pick up or poke at the pieces of meat. The vendors fondle the meat, moving it around, weighing it for customers. A lot of raw meat is touched in this area. There is no hand-washing. There are tubs full of raw blood to be sold. The women, or someone in their family, butcher the animals early each morning, and come to sell the meats in the market around 5-6 AM. By 9 AM this area stinks. By 10 AM most of the meat has been sold, but what remains smells strong and terrible. By the way, by 9 AM its about 90 degrees here. It’s quite a shock, after a lifetime of sterile American supermarkets, the first time you come upon the Lao meat department, and it’s bloody and smelly and full of weird and scary parts you’ve never seen.
Leaving the already butchered meat department, there are blankets spread on either side of the path through the market, where squirm live lizards, two-feet long, hands and feet tied together, like little alien prisoners.
Vendors dump water over these animals from time to time to ensure they appear fresh. Just next to these live lizards you might find dead lizards, a big pile of hacked up pieces. One square piece might have a little foot sticking out. Another piece, a face sticking out. Probably someone wanted only part of a lizard so the vendor agreed to split it up.
Rows of chicken carcasses lie upon a table, their bodies pale and rigid, their feathers already plucked, their legs sticking up in the air. Many people prefer their chickens fresher, and so will buy a live chicken at the market, take it home still alive, and then butcher it themselves, at home. Chickens are carried live from the market upside down by the legs. Some women breed big, fat frogs to sell, bringing them to the market in a wide, round tub with a net covering to ensure the frogs can’t jump out. The frogs are bought live by the half dozen. Strangely enough, people also sell defrosting, sterile packaged bags of shrimp, squid and chicken breasts imported from Thailand.
Later in the day, when the meat has all been bought, different vendors
cook it and sell it. Entire pig faces lay barbequed alongside pig skin, pig back, pig fat, pig intestines. Strips of buffalo skin, smelling horrible, and as chewy as tires, are grilled. I’ve previously mentioned all the wonderful food you can eat in Laos, but I shouldn’t neglect all the terrible food also available. Pha dek, a stinky, dark-colored, thick sauce filled with rotten fish chunks, is a popular ingredient, to be found by the bucket on every block, and added to almost every dish.
Gap pie, an overly strong shrimp paste, the color of dark clouds, is a condiment also found on most every table and tasting and smelling like bitter, rotted shrimp. Often available are tiny fish, fried and eaten whole, because, to my surprise, their bones and scales are soft enough to digest. However, eating their innards tastes like you might imagine eating the guts of a fish would. Very smooth texture but very bitter taste. And fish soup, that’s another one you’ll eat all the time with Lao people. But it’s chunks of fish, bones in. So every single spoonful of fish you eat, you’re pulling dozens of tiny white bones from your mouth. To
a foreigner, this is an awful lot of work.
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Meat
The way you describe how meat is sold in Laos makes me want to become a vegetarian. I think I’m going to stay away from the meat markets in Laos. Fast food dollar menu in the US can’t compare to food prices in Laos.