We asked could we join them. After lots of hand signals gesturing a soup bowl and mention of beer lao this was greeted by surprised giggling from the women that we should want to sit with them but no sooner did they get the gist of what we were suggesting than we were ushered to a wooden bench and one woman set about preparing us some Pho (pronounced 'fer') We were handed glasses of beer with ice (ooh er, could regret this tomorrow, oh what the hell) and some pretty dodgy looking and tasting 'something' on skewers. Surreptitiously we fed them to the village dog. They do like a drink in Laos, especially the women. They kept topping us up and insisted we 'downed in one'. Thank goodness they were small glasses. The soup was delicious and conscious we needed to cycle back to town we cut out before they got us too drunk. It was a great experience though and the children were so sweet. Lots of smiling, as usual, and two little girls fascinated by this impromptu visit by strangers, barely left our side the whole time, including introducing us to their puppy!
You're never short of choice for eating in Luang Prabang. There are smart expensive restaurants but to be honest you can't better the small restaurant/cafes that line the streets, the mekong or the nam khan rivers that enclose the town. Every evening there is the night market that takes over the whole of the main street and a side street from this has a food market. It's great food and very fresh. There are several stalls cooking fish and meet on the barbecue. Whatever you have seems to be 10,000 kip (that's less than a pound) then you go to another stall and put whatever veggies and rice or noodles you want, the lady then sticks them all in a wok and stirfry's them for you. Added to that a large beer Lao and you've a fantastic meal for less than £3.
Day 2 and still in bumbling mode we cycled in the other direction by the new stadium to visit Alan from LEOT. We'd brought him an odd selection of gifts from home - christmas puds, tea bags, a Time and Private Eye magazine and a cap. He would have liked a pork pie and some stilton but as we'd be travelling nearly 3 weeks before seeing him our luggage would probably be walking on its own by the time we saw him!
The excellent news is that subject to board approval LEOT has agreed to accept Fan as one of their students from the next scholastic year. He'll by then be 16 but will still be the youngest student they currently have. This will be better for him as every couple of months or so their homeland director Teng who is Lao will speak with him to check everything is okay and will check each term on his grades etc. He attends Lao school every weekday anyway but with our assistance he goes to private English school an hour each evening and from September will either go to the LEOT English school if it's open by then and if not he'll also go to weekend school. It's really not expensive. I think we pay £20 a term for his weekday English classes and his English is improving so much. Obviously if the Leot school opens that's preferable as then he'll be taught by English teachers so his accent will be much better. Their schools unfortunately tend to have Lao teachers who were taught by Lao teachers so their grammar and vocabulary might be great but often hard to understand until you get your ear into the accent.
We visited Fan at his temple Xieng Mouane a couple more times before leaving which gave us a chance to get a little insight to his daily life. Prayers, school and chores around the temple takes up a large portion of their day but it has a sort of boarding school atmosphere and it was heartening to see they're a happy bunch. We were looking at some pictures on my iphone and there was one of the house. He asked how many people live there with us - we rather embarrassingly said just us which prompted his next question of who cooks for us. He seemed quite confused when we said we do. He obviously assumed that we must have servants!
One afternoon he suggested we come at 6. We arrived a little early and he was still working with the others putting sticks around some trees in the yard so he pointed us to the temple to pray where there were already 4 novices with their master chanting. Fan is a confident and fairly forceful young man so we did as we were told. It was so funny, a few minutes later he popped his head through the open doorway checking up on us and motioned to us that our hands should be prayer-like and then disappeared again!
At 6.30 he was going off to his English class so we had to say good-bye. It was really quite sad as we're just getting to know him and we won't be back for a year. He asked us if we could come back in June as his little brother is becoming a Novice Monk but he understands that we have to work.
It's clear Fan's moving to Luang Prabang is giving him a much better chance in life and of achieving his aspirations, and indeed enabling him to have some. He's a bright, hard-working and mature boy and we are very pleased we can offer the finance to push his education on a notch.
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