Morning market

This morning, I stepped onto the street outside my hotel to find the morning food market bustling. The streets acted like a grocery store, with fruit, veggies, eggs, grains, fish, meat, and countless other food items available for purchase. Included as options were the freshest chicken possible (that is, alive) and having one’s meat chopped using the entire body weight of a small Laotian woman.

National Museum

I’ll admit, I’m feeling the need to take a little break from visiting temples before I get entirely tired of them. Because of this, I thought I’d make my first stop of the day the Luang Prabang National Museum.

It turns out that the first thing you are greeted by when walking onto museum grounds is the Royal Temple, Haw Pha Bang!

The museum is located in what used to be the Royal Palace and is largely a tour of the building as it was set up during the last stages of the monarchy. Also on display are some ancient tablets showing the dedications of historic temples, and gifts given to Laos by leaders of other countries.

Unfortunately, the museum does not allow for photography inside the building, and the style is tricky to explain. There were both European and Southwest Asian influences at play: the throne room was ornately decorated with glass mosaic on a red field, the king’s and queen’s bedrooms were very sparse with the exception of some royal portraits and vases gifted from France, and thrones were on display alongside howdahs (the carriers for kings atop the backs of elephants).

Also on the grounds of the museum were the Royal Theater, an exhibition of royal cars and other vehicles, a pond, and – somehow – two out-of-service Shell gas station pumps! I think the theme here is that, though everything in Luang Prabang has an amazing history and was built beautifully, it has gone through a lot and some of its wear and tear is beginning to show through.

Exploring on foot

After my museum visit, I walked around the entire perimeter of the town. I also crossed the famous bamboo bridge (which is rebuilt every year because the river floods and washes it away) to get to the village on the other side of the river, where I bought a couple of souvenirs.

I had to pay 5,000 kip to cross the bridge twice, but I thought I could handle that. (I feel ridiculously wealthy here, handing out bills that have a minimum of three zeros on them!)

I took a break at a restaurant in the touristy part of town. (Legitimately, on the map my hotel gave me, it’s the area labeled “Tourist Street.”) Hey, you’ve got to take breaks here and there, right? I also had enough time to return to my hotel for an hour to have a nap, which I took full advantage of.

Garavek

In the evening, I went to Garavek, which defines itself as a traditional storytelling project. In a tiny theater of 30 seats (of which 15 were occupied tonight), a young local man tells traditional Lao stories in accented English, accompanied by a man playing the khene: a bamboo mouth organ found in Laos and Northern Thailand. The man playing the khene was much older and clearly didn’t speak any English, but the two had developed a method of cues for when he should start and stop playing.

The performance was really enjoyable! Many of the tales were about how the local landscape was formed: two giants died in a lover’s quarrel and became the distant mountains; two naga fought until the land was divided up by the rivers; a mountain was placed at the palace gates for a queen’s convenience. I was pleasantly surprised by how fun and well-produced this hour-long show was.

Finally, on my walk back toward my hotel, I wandered through the night market which had been set up in the time that I was gone. There were some beautiful locally-made goods for sale there, so I did a little bit of shopping.

At the far end of the market, a class’s worth of teenagers were waiting for any English speakers to appear so that they could interview them to practice their English as a class project. A pair of seventeen year-olds approached me and were so sweet in nervously asking me my name, where I was from, how old I was… all the basic learn-to-speak-a-language questions. We hit some stumbling blocks here and there, but we made our way towards conversation, with their note-taker writing down all my responses to their questions. It was a fun way to end the night!