The pictures are true...this town...not a city in any world standards...is magical...the french colonial influence, the dozens of golden Wats (temple), and hundreds of orange clothed monks that walk the streets and Wats, the Mekong river that flows softly by the town, and the calm and soft spoken people make this place special, it isn't hard to understand why sooo many foreigners have fallen in love with Luang Prabang.
Before it would take 4 long days on a wooden long tail boat up the Mekong to get here. Now a 9 hour local bus filled with locals and packs and packs of rice, produce and who knows what else fill up the bus from Vientiane. The last hour they put a promotional video on (no doubt made by the government) with a local Lao "SUPER STAR" playing the guitar with a background of a forest and the Mekong...and just in case you want to sing along the english words were printed underneath....KARYOKE ANYONE????
There's a crazy old Lao man who walks the streets of the town all day long, dressed in an army outfit. Sometimes he carries a long chain saw in his hand and stops every few feet and tries to saw an imaginary tree, other times a hammer, other times some baskets, and sometimes he just walks without anything in his hands and just approaches foreigners and starts babbling in French or Lao. I think he still thinks the war is going on and nobody has the heart to tell him it ended about 35 years ago.
For Christmas dinner my new friends and I headed down the small alley on the left from the night market. It's about 10 feet wide and filled with vendors selling all types of Lao food: bbq fish, noodles, veggies, chicken, coconut jello/cashews, coconut with soybeans, everything is made with either: 1 rice, 2 coconut, 3 banana. Give the Lao these 3 ingredients and they'll survive for the rest of their lives.
At the end of this long narrow alley there are half a dozen picnic tables lined together as 1 big table on both sides. This is where we had our Christmas dinner, with backpackers from around the world. Here, there are no wars, no political problems, no judgements. Here, we were gathered from all around the world, Wales, Belgium, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and ofcourse your truly...and American-Armenian-Venezuelan....yes, here I'm all 3 at once.
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