Earth Hour came to Vientiane for the first time on Saturday, March 27. Our little city was the 92nd one to join the movement, which aims to raise awareness about climate change by promoting one hour without electricity. It wasn’t as dramatic as the footage of Sydney or Shanghai, where global landmarks and big sections of the city suddenly went dark. Still, the event attracted an enthusiastic crowd to the Patuxai Monument, where a stage featured speeches and entertainment under electricity-sucking spotlights. After the countdown, the lights turned off in the vicinity around the monument, and even the stage lights dimmed a bit.

Apparently Laos had wanted to make participation compulsory, but Vientiane’s patchwork power grid precluded the flipping of a switch to cut off all the electricity. Another quirky note: The rest of the world celebrated Earth Hour at 8:30 p.m., but Vientiane decided to do it at 7:00.

Our internet’s been quite unreliable recently (maybe Laos figured out how to impose compulsory limits on THAT…), so I’m a bit late posting this. I finally got it on YouTube this week. Here’s the Vientiane countdown from four.