That's a picture of me emerging from a wall of scarves--45% Pashmina and 65% silk !!!for 3 bucks, they're a steal!! And the title is the sound of me emerging from the watery depths of the rainy season, at last, with another report from the land of lotus and larceny, the most maddening and endearing place I have ever lived where I discover every day just how much there is to learn about these fabulous, frustrating folks----and about myself.
WEATHER...Lovely. Lovely rain now falls almost every day, sometimes at night, sometimes a gentle drizzle, sometimes an all-out bang-bang storm but always cooling and sweet and wonderful---right up to when it dries up and the searing sun comes out to steam us all into submission and the septic tanks fill up and seep their sickly smell into the heavy air.
The good thing, of course, is how everything grows like crazy. You can almost see it, I swear. My garden of pots out front is a lush tangle of ginger, coleus, bamboo, alternanthera, maranta, orchids, ctnanthe, gomphrena, lilies, bougainvillea, hibiscus, ferns, bromeliads and lots of things I don't know the names of...Also, of course slugs and slaters and snails and scale and ants and the odd cat. My hibiscus hedges are vast walls of green, dotted with brilliant red, that need pruning pretty much every week and the Bougainvillea that almost ate Luang Prabang needs daily snipping.
I have water pots and ponds with water plants and lilies growing in them and a few fish. I really want pretty orange and black fish, but Joy keeps bringing home bloody catfish that grow alarmingly fast. He doesn't see the point of fish one can't eat so he pretends he doesn't understand what I want. One of my big hotels, however, has lots of interesting fish in their ponds and seems willing to let me have some so it will be interesting to see how they get along with the monster catfish.
WORK...Yah, it's been busy. This being low season for tourists, it's high season for me. I've been flat out with two big contracts at big hotels, teaching staff and overseeing teachers from our school who've been teaching the beginners.
I would love to talk endlessly about the daily lessons I am learning about teaching, but I know the teachers out there would just roll their eyes and the rest of you would tune out, but let me just say that there is a lot more to this gig than verbs and nouns and lessons and all that.
The psychology, the strategies, the cultural awareness, the extraordinary devices I need to get things into my students' minds are probably worth a Phd or two. Attitudes to learning are extremely complex here where some parts of society actually fear and mistrust learning. Many people are so overwhelmed by how different English is that they just give up and others have never actually learned their own grammar very well, if at all. Lots of people have learned both Lao and English on the fly, just by listening and picking it up, so just raising the ugly head of grammar fills them with fear. The idea of a correct way to spell things is considered quite quaint here where there are several versions of the Lao alphabet. And given that there are no forms like ours for different tenses, I have to try to introduce the idea that words can take different forms to perform different functions. This is hard.
But the biggest stumbling block is how badly they have been taught in the Lao system. The poor darlings get hit with all twelve English tenses in the first few months of most English courses, and none of them have the vaguest clue how to use any of them. Including most of the teachers.
Oh, I could go on....
Anyway, the school is good, but we are only just breaking even and are desperately searching for funding to train another batch of ten teachers. Any ideas will be gratefully received.
The demand for English speaking staff increases here exponentially and we are nowhere near able to supply the people they need. But I plod on, now preparing a new hospitality curriculum to use next year.
And I am working at the Agricultural College helping their teachers to create an English for Agriculture syllabus. Great fun, actually. It's a long drive along a harrowing road up there and back three days of the week, but I am loving it and learning a lot.
DRIVING...Probably shouldn't say too much about this as the fainthearted among my readership might find it worrying, (that's you, Pete) but my kids have driven all over the place with me while they were here and didn't actually rip my carkeeys out of my hands and hurl them into the Mekong to stop me ever driving again, so obviously I am coping.
It's very Mexican here. Roads too narrow, too many vehicles, many badly maintained and here, the road is considered part of the living space of the village. People dry chillies and park bicycles in the road even the major north-south highway. Which is pretty much the only road anyway. So massive logging trucks, Chinese semi-trailers, smoky old motorbikes, bicycles, guys pushing food vending carts, tuk-tuks carrying six families and the monthly shopping, muddy tractors, shiny vans packed with terrified tourists and pedestrians--small children, dogs, pigs and ancient crones--- all share the scant space and do so without any evidence of alarm,any idea of basic road rules or an appreciation of how much room one needs to get round them or to stop when one comes around a bend to find a guy sitting on a neatly folded blanket with his tools spread out while he tinkers with a recalcitrant engine right on the pavement.
I approach this challenge with white-knuckled concentration and a never-ending stream of invective, advice, sarcasm and occasionally, howls of sheer frustration when someone potters to a halt right in front of me with no signals or brakelights, usually a motorbike carrying several people including a tiny infant casually slung ina a carrying cloth knotted over the shoulder. Sometimes I use hand gestures to tell oncoming drivers to get back onto their own side of the road, but mostly I just shake my head theatrically and mutter.
In Luang Prabang in the evenings, in the dim, haphazard lighting, the favourite pasttime, especially of the young and silly, is to ride around town, very slowly, on squads of motorbikes or bicycles, usually several to a vehicle, in groups and pairs for socialising. There is a lot of giggling and meandering and texting and shrieking but absolutely no signalling or awareness of the REAL traffic trying to get somewhere. This evening cycle promenade goes on, all around town from dusk till nine-ish---boys pursuing girls, girls taunting boys---and somehow, no one gets knocked over, even by irate middle-aged farang ladies bent on dinner and a drink after a long hard day at the whiteboard.
Then there's the total disregard for one way streets, despite the occasional crackdowns by police, so that one has headlights beetling towards one when they shouldn't be, or unlit vehicles ditto.
And wearing motorcycle helmets, a law in force for months now is only occasionally observed, despite daily and now nightly police presence, lurking fairly obviously in the same places every day and whistling people over for document examination, a stern lecture and the exacting of a fine---no receipt, of course---and still folks drive around with no helmet, or simply carry one in the bike's basket and look so surprised when they are stopped. This is not just girls with elaborate hairdos or devil-may-care youth---this is grannies and bureaucrats and yea, verily, policemen, who, of course don't get stopped. Even when they wear helmets it's only the driver and not the passengers, babies et al, and often the helmet is not done up or it's just a construction worker's hardhat or some such flimsy item and not proper protection at all. Lao people, someone told me, are some of the stubbornest people in the world. Amen to that.
OK, that's yer lot for now as I have a dose of the rainy season fever. It's just a low grade temp plus heavy chest so I am curled up with a book and a new pet---a tiny, scrawny, mewling ginger tom who has apparently been abandoned on my doorstep. As long as he outgrows his revolting toilet habits he may stay to catch our mice. May call him Bowser....or Boris, as in Boom Boom.
I will now crawl back to my downy couch on the verandah, watch the sun burnish the Mekong and listen to the stirring, throaty chants of the boat racing teams training for the upcoming festival, wiry brown arms stabbing rhythmically at the river with fifty paddles in perfect unison.
Wonder if a G&T is an antidote for this malady....Perhaps some research is in order.
