Market veggies
Things in the market in Luang Prabang that were alive:
- Some of the fish, though not the giant catfish
- Small brown furry rodents, plush and almost spherical
- Snails with long turret shells, escaping from their pot
- Little songbirds in bamboo cages no bigger than a fist
- A snake, with a little plastic bag over its head
- Fat warty toads, hopping vaguely
- Lots of little round black beetles in a bucket
Catfish
We spent a lot of the rest of the day exploring various Wats. Luang Prabang has a lot of them; it’s the spiritual heart of the Lao people and was the capital city for a long time. Generally speaking the temples are less blingy and perfect than the Thai buddhist temples. On the other hand, they aren’t nearly as grungy and encrusted with soot and dripping wax as the temples of Tibet. They’re somewhere in between. Which feels a lot like the town itself: not as fully civilised as Thailand, but catering well enough to tourists that it certainly doesn’t feel overwhelming or off the beaten track. The Lao people seem nice too.
Typical LP wat
In the evening we went to a little storytelling theatre where a local chap entertained us for an hour with folktales of the Lao. I liked the one about a local queen who kept sending Monkey off to find an unspecified type of mountain mushroom for her from way off in Sri Lanka, until after his third basket of mushrooms was rejected as the wrong type he came back with the whole mountaintop, dumped it at the edge of town and said “there, find your own mushrooms!” (the type of mushroom the queen wanted were called “monkey ears” and she was concerned about offending Monkey by asking directly).
Roast pork as promised
Storytelling
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