I'm having a marvelously Laosy time!

Never fear to all of you who worry for my liver and personal safety - I have more than learned my lesson on the local drinking customs. The funny thing is that many many of the travelers here have very similar stories, so this must be a favorite Laos local activity - get the foreingers tossed on their bad strong booze. I've moved on to a much healthier activity, cycling! I'm in Luang Prabang now, which is a nice little French colonial town wrapped up by the Mekong river. It's quaint with great architecture and lots of fancy shops and restaurants. Not exactly my cup of tea though, so we'll see how long I last here. There are several functioning wats, here, and the young monks are itching to practice their English with foriengers, even though the locals don't seem to approve much. I actually woke up at 3:30 am yesterday to go listen to the monks in their morning chants, which was totally surreal. NO ONE is up that early besides the monks. So once they finished their chants, I walked around town for an hour or so waiting for sunrise, watching the old men do their excercises (and hack their morning phlegm) and watching people set up for the morning food market. At around 6:15 or so, the novices leave the wat to collect alms, so for an hour or so before that, there are all of these women walking around with baskets of food pachages and sticky rice trying to sell to tourists so that we can "feed the monks" like they're a bunch of monkeys (insert Michael's wise-assed comment here). Against my gut instinct and better judgement, I did buy a little bit just because I didn't have any sort of offering and wanted to be prepared if I felt the need to give. However when the monks come out, it's quickly obvious that we foreigners have no part in this ritual (other than to become completely obnoxious and stick huge telephoto lenses and video cameras right up in people's faces). In Bangkok, people just walk out of houses and shopfronts to place their food offering in the monk's bowl, but here it's much more of a ritual. It's mostly older Lao, the women kneel or sit on low stools, the men stand, and all are wearing a white scarf. There is some sort of prayer to bless the food before the monks come around, and the whole thing is very ceremonial with a devout respect. Some of these little novices are only maybe 8 years old, and you've got an 80 year old man treating this little guy with great reverence.

After breakfast, a friend and I rented bicycles and cycled around some of the villages around Luang Prabang. He's very proud of having been invited to a wedding in every country that he's traveled, so I figured it could be great fun. No weddings, but it was great fun. Toward the end of the day, we ended up at a more modern wat up on a hill (built between about 1960 and 1987). It was really strange because there were paintings of the life of the Buddha circling the top of the main hall, which is normal, but then below that were what seemed to be images of hell. Circling the entire room. And they were very graphic and disturbing. Scenes of people being staked, beheaded, tossed up on rocks to break their backs, eaten alive by wild animals, and the most disturbing was a scene of dozens of people cannibalizing themselves and each other. I knew that Buddhism (at least a modern interpretation of it) included a concept of hell, but it seems that it's not a prevalent motivating concept (as it is in more evangelical protestant religion), and this wat really surprised me. I'm going to ask one of the monks here in Luang Prabang to explain it to me. Let me know if any of you folk have insight. My best estimation is that it must have something to do with the fact that the wat was built in a really turbulent political time for Laos, so it might just be a manifestation of that.

I'm excited for tonight. A few of us are going to eat at the restaurant called 3 Nagas. It was apparently written up by the NYTimes as "perhaps the best restaurant in all of Asia" and yet I can afford it. Entrees are $5 or so, so we figure we could eat our fill and have a nice bottle of wine without breaking the budget too much. It should be a unique culinary experience at the least.