Birthday Traditions in Luang Prabang

Welcome to the latest incarnation of my travel dispatch, formerly known as the Update. I had big plans for launching a multimedia version this year, but after too many hours in the world's slowest internet cafés, I'm scrapping it for now.

The Aborigines, world-class wanderers, map unknown territories by collecting bits of data along the trail. Directions, distances, positions of the sun and moon, landmarks and signs are strung together into a story or song to tell the rest of the tribe about the journey. These “songlines” become the map and as long as you can remember the words, you’ll never be lost. Since I’ve spent much of the last five (!) years on walkabout, my dispatches, pictures, and stories have become my songlines. I’ll admit that I don’t always know where I am, but I know where I’ve been—and I almost never feel lost. In a traditional walkabout, there is no destination—you just keep walking until you meet up with yourself, and then you sit down and have a long conversation together.

Below is a firsthand account of birthday traditions in Laos. Tune in next month for more photos and stories, hopefully with links that actually work. Until then, happy trails and happy holidays, wherever you are.

Peace on Earth,

~ laurie

Birthday Traditions in Luang Prabang

I always spend my birthday on the road and I've found that mixing in a few local customs makes for a more memorable event. This year, I got to celebrate with old friends in a familiar place: Luang Prabang, Laos.

Monks Before Dawn

My birthday dawned auspiciously—in the literal sense—with a 6 a.m. ritual: feeding the monks. Buddhist monks are forbidden to cook or buy food, so the locals earn extra merit by cooking rice for them. Some people do this every day and it's critical to do it on a special occasion. When the suggestion was made, I was a bit reluctant (many of you already know what a charming person I am in the morning), but my dear friend Paan cajoled me into it "so we can meet each other again in the next life." I could hardly resist that, and since the guesthouse where my brother and I are staying is next to a large wat, I only had to drag myself out of bed and walk to the street.

Paan provided mats to kneel on, traditional silk scarves to wrap around our left shoulders, covered baskets of sticky rice, and careful instructions. As the monks walk by single-file, silent and solemn with their alms bowls extended, you roll a small amount of rice into a ball with your right hand and place one ball in each bowl. Our neighborhood temple houses more than 200 monks, so we had to be quick with the rice balls and it took more than an hour to feed them all. I lost count and eventually ran out of rice, but still earned enough merit to get my birthday wish, according to Paan. It was a lovely way to begin a new year.

Road Rule #1: Never Make Assumptions

When I invited Paan and Ek to join us for a birthday dinner somewhere, I had in mind one of the excellent and modestly priced French-Lao bistros on the main street, where tables spread with beautiful hand-woven tapestries are set out under the soft glow of lantern light. I was thinking perhaps we’d order a whole-roasted catfish for the table, accompanied by braised morning glory, stir-fried mushrooms with garlic, watercress salad, and sticky rice. Maybe we’d even splurge on a nice bottle of Burgundy…I’d been looking forward to it all day.

My guests rolled up on their motorbikes more than an hour late. While we waited, I kept checking my watch to make sure I’d set it correctly, until I remembered that no one has invented the timepiece that can track “Lao time”. Nathan and I were pretty hungry by the time they arrived, and before I knew what was happening they had herded us onto the motorbikes.

“Now we go to the river,” Paan announced over her shoulder as we motored down the road, “for Lao barbecue.”

Change of Plans

They’d both been so sweet and generous to us, I didn’t want to appear ungrateful—also, I couldn’t argue and balance sideways on the back of the bike at the same time. Barbecue would be fine with me…except that Lao barbecue is exactly like Chinese hotpot, and the last thing I wanted to do on my birthday was cook my own food over a boiling cauldron in the sultry, tropical evening. Minutes later, we arrived at a no-name barbecue spot overlooking the Mekong, the tables packed with locals enjoying their Saturday night out on the town. Seated around a stone picnic table with a hole in the center, we ordered cold Beerlao and waited for our personal inferno to arrive.

Paan and Ek got married last spring. They’re both tiny people who appear much younger than their common age of 27. The great disadvantage to having younger friends is that they will always look better than you do, and they usually remember things more clearly. My young Lao friends, ironically, can remember every faux pas I’ve ever blundered into in their presence, every mispronounced word and social mishap, yet they never seem to remember that I don’t eat meat. Before I could remind them, large platters of raw, slippery flesh began to arrive at our table. I was distracted at the time because the waiter had just upended a bucket of flaming coals into the tabletop burner, sending up a cloud of smoke that set us all hacking our lungs out and frantically brushing live sparks from our clothes and hair. When the smoke cleared, Paan was already poking a mound of liver-colored slabs around the grill with her chopsticks.

“What’s that one?” I asked hopefully, gesturing toward a whitish piece in the middle that could be seafood.

“Fat,” she replied with a smile, “Fat of the beef.”

Yummy. The beef fat and other animal bits sizzled furiously on the grill, while Paan poured liquid from a kettle into the hotpot below. I peered through the steam and saw a nice soup of green leaves, baby onions, noodles, and eggs bubbling away down there. Maybe I would eat after all.

“Is that filtered water?” I inquired, ever-vigilant against unnecessary bacteria.

“Yes, of course,” she said, “Water with pork bone.”

“All your favorites!” my brother chuckled under his breath, dipping a chunk of meat into a chili-tamarind sauce and munching away merrily. I ordered another Beerlao and leaned away from the fire, sweltering. Birthday or not, I’d been eating way too much lately and figured this was as good a time as any to start cutting back.

A Fleshy Birthday Feast

As the evening wore on, Paan noticed that I was only picking at my food, but Ek, a man so diminutive that his Western clients often mistake him for a child, quickly reassured her that it was better I not eat too much; he’s been concerned about my weight. Normally I’d be insulted by that sort of remark, but next he commented that his wife, who tops out around 89 pounds, is also getting too fat, so I didn’t feel so bad. I located a few pieces of charred squid among the carnage and nibbled those along with some pork-tainted vegetables and glass noodles, while my guests gorged themselves on barbecued beef and chewy slabs of fat. The crème caramel Ek and Nathan had made for dessert, along with another Beerlao, improved my mood dramatically. After our meal, we hopped back on the motorbikes and they whisked us across town to go dancing.

You Can Dance if You Want To – Until 11:30

The Evening Club, so named because the law requires it to shut down at 11:30 p.m., is my old stomping ground. When I lived in Paan ’s village, we went there together at least once a week, usually without our boyfriends. That was four years ago, and Luang Prabang’s youth population looks even younger and hipper to me now. As we breezed past the eleven-year-old doorman with a flicker of Paan’s fingers, I joked, “Wow, I feel really old,” and Ek replied,

“Don’t worry, I see old people here all the time…Paan’s mother came last month.”

Inside, the disco ball twirled to the usual arrhythmic mishmash of obscure pop songs, old covers, and traditional Lao folk tunes, all churned out by a motley lineup of live bands, karaoke singers, and CDs. As a special treat, the club stayed open an hour past curfew. When I asked Paan how that was possible, she shrugged.

“The police making some extra money tonight,” she told me. Some things never change.

The party lasted until about 12:15 and then with some effort, I convinced Paan to let us take a tuk-tuk back to our guesthouse, sparing Nathan another well-known Lao tradition—driving home drunk with the lights off. (They believe it saves on gas.)

Family Picnic with Golem

On Sunday afternoon, Paan borrowed a mini-van (with driver) from her employer for a family outing to the waterfall, about 28 km. from town. First we stopped by the village to pick up an assortment of cousins, neighbors, and children, and we stopped once more en route to buy papaya salad, sticky rice, and a whole-roasted fish from a vendor. Arriving at the park, we hauled everything about halfway up to the falls and spread our picnic under the trees next to a jade-green swimming hole. Everyone who was willing to shiver (not me) changed into swimsuits and splashed around in the clear, cold pools before gathering for lunch.

People here love to eat and meals are a communal affair, with all of the dishes placed in the middle of a mat or a low table and shared. You don’t get your own plate; you just sit or squat around the perimeter and use whatever utensil is handy—a spoon, chopsticks, a ball of sticky rice, or just your right hand—to scoop up bites. Before we could get everyone assembled, three-year-old Tyana began to squawk for her favorite treat. As soon as the fish was set out, she pounced on it like a starved muskrat and dug out the eyes with a tiny forefinger, popping them into her mouth with lip-smacking relish. “My Pwecious!” she cackled with glee, sucking strings of fish-eye goo from her fingers and expertly flipping the carcass over to extract the other eye. Her love of this particular delicacy borders on obsession; she becomes flushed and fixated in the presence of a whole fish.

Her family is accustomed to this performance and luckily, I’ve dined with them often enough to contain nearly all of my revulsion and even be amused. Besides, denying her the fish eyes would turn this normally sweet, dimple-cheeked child into a shrieking, tooth-gnashing Golem. Once the eyes were gone, she morphed back into a normal three-year-old girl, grabbing a handful of rice and running off to play “fairy princess” in the trees—returning only to slurp the brain out of the fish carcass and crunch on the pile of leftover bones and cartilage.

It was all much more interesting than the standard cake-and-candles routine—a birthday to remember, my pwecious.