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Published: August 16th 2016
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I was up with the dawn, ie around 5.00am to watch the tak bat, the morning round of alms giving where locals line the road to give sticky rice to the monks as they file past. This morning there were around 250 monks lined up. It is quite a moving site to see some of the very old people who get up every morning at dawn to give to the monks and have done so for most of their lives, perhaps with a break of a few years when the Pathet Lao first came to power and religion was banned.
I then did my final lap of the town before going back to the Saffron restaurant to sample their French toast with coconut and mango. You gotta love Lao food, especially the French influence. Organised to get some laundry done, the guy wasn't overly convinced it would happen, "only if no raining" he said. Well I must have done something right because the rain held off right up until I picked up my laundry at 4.00pm. In between times I paid a visit to the UXO centre which is quite different to the COPE centre in Vientiane as this is
where the clearance and child education teams are run from. Very educational - enough said.
Then from a more cultural perspective I toured the museum Hawprabang which until 1975 had been the royal residence. The interior of the building is beautiful with polished hardwood floors, glass mosaics and murals adorning the walls, and lots of gold, both gilt and the real thing. The bedrooms and library have been left as they were in the time of royalty and the gifts from foreign embassies are all displayed in a couple of rooms. The highlight for me was the royal garage with a beat up old 1950's Citroën, 1950'and 1960's Lincolns and a rare Ford Edsel.
Around 5.00pm I visited Big brother mouse which is a Publishing company, the only one outside of Vientiane that has a publishing licence, they write, illustrate and publish children's books in Lao. They also organise village book parties to try and introduce the joy of reading to village children. There is very little published work in Lao, which is similar to Thai but different enough to require the creation of new fonts for publishing packages that were not previously available. The other thing they
do is from 5 -7pm every day they have an open house where a lot of young Laotians turn up and hope that a bunch of foreigners turn up as well so they can practice their English. They were not disappointed, there was even a couple of Germans chatting away. It was a blast, a bit stilted to start, what's your name, where do you come from type stuff, but as they warmed up and gravitated towards the foreigner who most interested them things warmed up. I had 3 or 4 guys grilling me on everything from software development, through hip hop and sheep farming in NZ, all of which I'm a complete authority on. I'm pretty sure I got more out of it than they did.
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