Catherine et Richard

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Sabaidii,

These two months have past in no time.
It was weird the first mornings when Richard left for work and I stayed in the hotel room. I felt like a housewife but I didn’t even have to cook since we didn’t have a kitchen yet.
But since then I got used to it. I’m a full-time student (although my Lao ID card says I’m a housewife) studying Lao in the mornings and Rural Development in the afternoon.
The day we left Luxembourg it was snowing, in Bangkok the next morning at 6 o’clock it was already over 30 ° Celsius (not mentioning the humidity). For a couple of weeks we permanently felt like in a steam bath, but after getting used to it, we even visited the herbal steam bath in Vientiane. That and a massage are the absolute treat during a weekend in the capital.
Not much is left of the dusty Vientiane I remembered from my first trip in 1999. It has developed into a nice and relatively clean city. We were able to admire Bob’s (Bob Hardy, of course) contribution, the ADB building ;-)
Another thing we had (or still have) to get used to, are the million insects invading our house every evening, but the geckos feast on them with great pleasure.
Our house lies right on the river, the Nam San, which flows into the Mekong two hundred meters further downstream. Naturally we have the most beautiful view of the neighbourhood ;-)
My turn:
Our neighbours are all very friendly and helpful in their own particular way. When we moved in the lady next door offered us what looked like a rugged bushel of greenery but which turned out to be flowers for us to embellish our garden.
Our landlady occupied the house for two consecutive afternoons, inviting her friends over to what looked like a jolly round of cards. It turned out to be a light ceremony of exorcism to chase the bad spirits and attract the good ones.
We moved in with a mattress and a fridge but have since then given the local carpenter a whole new perspective on furniture-making – copying “habitat”- samples and explaining the design to him with hands and feet. The result is quite satisfactory with a touch of Lao imperfection, which makes it unique.
(Can somebody chase that enormous grasshopper from my laptop please).
Anyway, we have acclimatised so well that we actually dared to participate in Laos’ first ever Marathon. We opted for the 1/4 distance, which was more than enough to test our endurance in this climate (we went to bed at 20h15 that day ;-)
The day in Paksane starts with a parade of hundreds of smiling school children swarming past our house in their dark blue and white uniforms (girls in long skirts) on their bicycles, quite a many holding an umbrella against the sun or rain.
The people in Paksane are generally cheerful and friendly. Our market visits are frequent and always observed closely as everyone is interested in knowing what these “farangs” are interested in buying and possibly cook in their home – we omitted the frogs today.
Me again:
On one of our first field trips we visited the sericulture project (silk worm project). As usual in Laos nothing is spoiled, so after collecting the silk, the cooked worms are eaten. A local delicacy, they say!
And while our neighbours fry big red ants, I have turned into a decent housewife and, though I haven’t learned to cook any Lao dish, I have, upon wrongfully assuming I had bought corn, discovered banana flowers, which we skilfully turned into a salad.
Not that we would have invented anything, but banana flower salad is a favourite in Vietnam. But since it’s extremely time-consuming to prepare, we still mostly live on Khao pad (fried rice) and Phö (noodle soup).
The husband:
We could keep on going on with e.g. my hair cut at the barber shop at our local market (sharing a stand with the motorcycle repair shop), fireworks which are held during the day, thunderstorms that tug heavily on our corrugated iron roof or the very impressive cremation of a 103 year-old monk from our local Wat (temple), which actually almost took place in our back yard…but its late (22h30) and we Laotians rise early!

Catherine & Richard

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