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Published: April 25th 2007
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While the rest of Northern Laos has disappeared into the quicksands of time, Luang Prabang has rooted itself in the Golden Era of French colonialism. Sidewalk cafes serve you baguettes and cafe au lait for breakfast (which lasts well into the midday). Always in pairs, monks in radiant saffron robes stroll by beneath stoic black umbrellas. A shopkeeper sweeps her part of the sidewalk as her help hangs the laundry to dry on a line across the balcony. I'm pretty sure we've caught a disease from the amount of road dirt, dust, and ash that we've inhaled.
A stunning and massively underpromoted free art gallery beneath the Royal Palace Museum houses a world-class exhibit of collaborative art between Lao and foreigners, themed on the dignity of quotidian life. It's called
Quiet in the Land. Graphite portraits of monks depict intense, seeking faces, and embroidered tapestries tell of harvest in the fields and domesticated animals. A photo montage by Ann Hamilton is the story of the construction of a meditation longboat; the Mekong river a symbolic and literal conduit. I believe she must have felt teh same sense of confusion and disorientation mingling with peacefulness, and the very rightness of the place when
looking upon the Mekong's turbulent, churning, riotous surface. A banner, embroidered in the traditional way with gold and silver threads, and modeled upon the funeral banners designed to guide a person's spirit into the next life, shows three houses, huts, dwellings amidst a forest of tall satellite dishes. Their lines echo the palm trees lining the roads (promenades?) here, and their fronds broadcast a message of hope, togetherness, value, a voice for the Lao people, a thether to keep them from drowning in a sea of changes, a warning towards the ephemeralness of their present and a harbinger of modernizations. Indicators of ironic progress.
In Luang Prabang, I am digusted by the harsh sounds of foreigners complaining about the unidentifiable meat in their street buffet. I am irritated that border control let culturally insensitive, culturally lacking people like that through to disturb the quiet of Laos. Here I stroll the streets, with a sense of peace, gentility, easy grace. A welcoming hospitality of a heritage town. How do those foreigners like it - do they sense it alive, breathing like I can? How can they choose to ignore it? I want to wish all of them away and leave
Forgotten Buddhas
Found these in the back corner of an unlit side building in a wat. Their expressions looked pleading, lonely to me. me to a solitary centurion perambulation.
The most welcome intrusion is the one of the monks. I believe one novice has been posted at every corner wat along the way to engage foreigners in discussion, to practice their English. As there are plenty of novices (in fact, I'm having difficulty recalling seeing an elderly monk), there are also plenty of wat. Our dialogues are as follows:
Monk: "Hello!"
Becky: "Sabai dee!"
Monk: "How are you?"
Becky (bewildered, as he is actually interested and because I thought women were not supposed to touch monks): "I'm fine, how are you?"
Monk: "I am good. How long have you been in Laos?"
Becky: "One week."
Monk: "How long have you been in Luang Prabang?"
Becky: "Three days. It's not enough time for such a beautiful city."
Monk: "Where are you from?"
Becky (variably): "America/California/United States. How long have you been studying English? You speak very well."
Monk answers anywhere from one to six months, average of three, and never more than one year. I am astonished. I should also point out that most Lao families send their boys to become novices for anywhere from one to two years. Many of the
boys, therefore, are from villages where they have little, if any, education. We chat about everything from traveling the world to computers and sports - swimming and skiing. One monks suggests that Laos should become a ski resort destination, but alas there is no snow in Laos; another tells me how he's afraid to climb up this tree at a waterfall because it is too high, but his friend does backflips off it. In light of the circumstances, their ability to have this conversation is an extraordinary achievement.
After about the third time I've had this conversation (the first time I didn't get past how are you before running away in shock), I get up the nerve to ask the monk a question.
Becky: "I'm sorry, can I ask you a question?"
Novice: "Yes, please!"
Becky: "I thought women were not supposed to speak with monks."
Novice: "Ah. It is fine for monks to speak with women. But they must not touch a woman." (Pauses and looks away briefly). "It is sometimes very hard, because we are still young." (Smiles).
Now I look at the novices as I see as exactly what they are, as the novice so eloquently put it. They are human too, mortals, not untouchables. And has this novice failed? For he has touched me more deeply than even a simple passing graze.
PS: Photos from our hike, Luang Prabang, Phonsavan, and Vientiane are posted at
Picasa.
PPS: As a result of the water fights in Chiang Mai, my camera light meter is a little off, causing the flash to no longer function. You might notice that the white balance is off on some photos, or that they are less in focus than before. Oops.
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