Our house sits on a main road through Thongkang Village in Vientiane. Directly across from our gate is a collection of vendors selling fruit, vegetables, dried fish, grilled meat, clothes, coffee, fruit shakes, sticky rice, air for your bike tires, eggs, toiletries and other sundries.
It’s a real hot spot.
We often open our gate to see parked tuk-tuks with drivers napping in the back, cars left running while their owners grab some lunch, schoolchildren in uniform purchasing icy drinks on a hot day, stray dogs scrounging for scraps and other activity.
Once a truck-o-monks pulled up with a huge gold Buddha draped in Christmas lights and blasting music. Villagers scrambled out to throw money at it.
Today, I heard drums and singing so I wandered out to find this crew. They might be representatives of the village temple. Not sure. (Yeah, the composition is pretty lame. I snapped it too quickly.)
Again, the locals were dropping money in the silver pot. So I stood in line and did the same. The lady with the glasses tied an orange string around my wrist and rattled off what I think was a blessing. As I dropped my 5,000-kip note (about 60 cents) into the pot, I saw the pile of other bills and realized I was giving about 10 times the usual donation. Rookie mistake. Maybe my blessing was actually the Lao version of “Sucka!”
Oh, notice the jackets and hats? That’s because today’s high is a bone-chilling 85F/29C degrees. When you’re used to temps in the 100s, you gotta bundle up on days like this.
