Ruairí and Alfred: Last post for 2013

(Alfred: 'Last Post'? Sounds a bit melancholy for what has been an amazing year and, especially, an amazing last two months. Let's see - in 2013 they toured Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao, got engaged, got married, travelled to France, Switzerland and Scotland, honeymooned in Ha Noi, moved to Lao and are now living in a palatial mansion with two cats. Pretty damn good, if you ask me! Not that anyone ever does...)

No, Alfred is (as usual) right (Alfred: *Swoons*), it has actually been an amazing year. Martine remarked today as we returned from the Thai border where we had had a wonderful five-hours of queuing, and more queuing, and yet more queuing to renew our visas, that it was exactly two months to the day since we had left Dublin. It seems amazing that we have packed so much into such a short space of time! So here is a quick round-up of some of the things that have been happening that may not yet have got mentioned before (Alfred: Or just extra stuff that Ruairí forgot at the time).

Food and cooking

Amanda starting the egg

One of the great joys of moving here has been trying new foods and, in particular, experimenting with the various forms of street food on offer. Amanda and Dave’s visit proved a great inspiration in this regard as there are a number of stalls very near our house so, on a few occasions, we just loaded up on whatever was on offer and tried it out. The stars were barbequed chicken, fish, sticky rice and the various dipping sauces. The highlight was a wild boar sausage which was just stunning! Not so good was a very strange pork fat roll in banana leaves which (Alfred: Only after Ruairí had tried it and said it was OK-ish) everyone decided was uncooked and composed of some sort of tripe. (Alfred: Funny how you can think something tastes OK until someone tells you what it is!!).

Amanda finishing the egg

In the market we have found various toads, frogs, eels, crickets, grubs and assorted other delicacies. Time will tell whether we have the courage to attempt any of these or not. Amanda DID have the courage to try one particular Lao delicacy – a boiled egg with a chicken (or duck) embryo inside it. And she did it twice. Amazing. The rest of us had to make do with a variety of things on sticks, including coiled intestines, snails and possibly cockles. (Alfred: Of course, what he isn't telling you is that same night they all went for pizza. Puts the snails and intestines into a bit of context, eh?)

The new house has a proper kitchen, so we are now back to our favourite diet of pho (noodle soup) and, with my new Lao steamer, sticky rice! The last day Amanda and Dave were here, we steamed a kilo of black rice and then made a dessert with coconut milk and coconut cream which we left in the fridge overnight and had for breakfast! Gorgeous! (Alfred: Not that I got any. Then again, I don’t eat, so ….) We have also found supplies of other necessities, such as fried garlic, fried shallots, sesame oil and suchlike.

Lao sticky rice steamer

Half-kilo bags of fried garlic and fried shallots!!

Strangely enough, many of the outstanding culinary experiences we have ... experienced (Alfred: Oh dear!) have not been what you would term traditional Lao food at all. Early on, Martine encountered a Philly Cheesesteak for the first time in her life at Ray's Bar & Grill and instantly fell in love. Then there was the bubble tea - what looks like a milk shake with jelly-like black globules floating in it (Alfred: Nicer than that description sounds) and the best, absolutely the best fried chicken in the world - an entire chicken breast, hammered flat, marinated, coated, deepfried and then sprinkled with spices. We seriously could not get enough of this and, at one euro a go, pretty good value!!

Bubble tea stand

Chicken stand

First taste

Mmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!

Nails

Only those who know me well will get this but … I am going to book myself a manicure next week! In what may be the clearest sign that life here agrees with me is the fact that, for the first time in my life, I have stopped biting my nails! It is actually rather strange because when you aren’t used to having nails, they present problems. For example, I usually have to scratch myself really really hard to have any effect. This now produces wounds that need suturing (Alfred: especially during the night!!). And how are you supposed to cut them. Scissors in right hand to cut left – fine, but the other way round doesn’t work! And you have to CLEAN them ALL the time! (Alfred: I’m glad Ruairí included a photo. Those normal people out there who HAVE nails will be looking at these stubby, short and slightly uneven horn envelopes covering the dorsal aspects of the terminal phalanges of his fingers and wonder what the hell he is making this fuss about. Imagine if (God forbid) Ruairí were to lose a leg and then, several years later, had a new one grafted on, imagine how he would whinge! Takes twice as long to put trousers on, double the cost of footwear, wasted investment in crutches and the difficulty of recycling prosthetic limbs, other than as Christmas lights (yes, Christmas lights - explain later))

Save the lift

Si Saket Temple

Temple on left with cloister running around it

Someone mentioned that I hadn't really included much in the blog so far of what most people come to Vientiane to see, which is the amazing range of temples and other holy sites. It seems strange to say it but, after only two months, it's as if we have already stopped noticing them! But we did go to a temple that had been closed in January when we first visited, the oldest one in Vientiane - Si Saket Temple. Well, when I say the oldest, it is the oldest still standing after all the invasions, sackings and general pillaging the city has been subject to ever since some idiot emperor decided that a low-lying, completely indefensible spot right across a river from your most bitter enemy was the obvious place to move your capital to (Alfred: Whoa! Steady on).

Buddha images in cloister

Si Saket is unusual in many respects: the main temple has painted murals, now sadly much deteriorated and in need of restoration (Alfred: Which is why you can't take photos). The main temple is surrounded by a cloister which contains hundreds and hundreds of buddha-figures, some large but most tiny. There are also some other impressive statues, flowers and some massive graves. (Alfred: For a 'slightly' more erudite - and possibly historically accurate - description you can either go to Wikipedia or else just stick 'Sisaket' into either Google Images or YouTube.)

Alfred: This is what people in Vietnam meant when they used to
rub Ruairí's stomach in the street for good luck and say 'Fat Buddha'.

That Luang

I mentioned That Luang in an earlier entry. We went back there again on Amanda and Dave's last day and I saw a few things I had missed the first time. We went into the Wat itself, a beautiful and striking building from outside but which turned out to be a soulless, echoey museum of a wat, utterly devoid of any spiritual presence. In a stroke of genius, someone had decided to mount an art exhibition in the entrance hall - the completely unlit entrance hall. Upon closer examination, most of the 'pictures' turned out to be jpegs that had been enlarged to look like paintings - if only someone had bothered to make sure that the original resolution was sufficient! But it did have the best picture I have ever seen of Buddha flying to heaven on a giant fish with a flower in its mouth, so that was something at least.

It was also a chance to see again the giant reclining Buddha (Alfred: First time for Dave and Amanda) and try and figure out what the small Buddha on the pillow is holding in each of his hands. So far, going clockwise from the bottom left, we have a sword pointed at the genitals to avert sexual thoughts, a lotus flower for nourishment, a seashell to hold to the ear from time to time (Alfred: No, no - an empty giant land snail shell to symbolise the Buddha's advanced homeless rehousing policy based on the example of the hermit crab), a mosquito coil (especially needed if you lie with the soles of your feet exposed like that), a Toblerone (self-explanatory), a bottle of something, a pointy stick to hold up the bottle of something, presumably because it is really, really heavy and finally, a sink unblocker. I admit that Dave and I were not quite able to figure out the actual theological significance of all of the items but we are working on it.

We also found an ancient bodhi tree, planted in 2500BC according to the plaque (Alfred: Hmmm, suspect a mismatch between the European and Asian calendars here). Whatever its actual age, it was easily the largest one we had ever seen! All bodhi trees are fig trees of the species Ficus religiosa but to be a proper bodhi tree it must have been grown from a cutting from another bodhi tree. (Alfred: And, looking over Ruairí's shoulder as he passes off Wikipedia's knowledge as his own, I see that the oldest known bodhi tree was planted in 288 BCE (or 288BC as we used to call it) so the date given on the plaque needs adjusting!)

COPE

Another place we visited with our visitors (Alfred: Oh, please! Call yourself a proofreader and editor? Visited with your visitors?) was COPE, which stands for Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise, a centre that produces prosthetic limbs and provides training and rehabilitation for the hundreds of Lao people who still, every year, get injured by bombs left over from the war. It is estimated that as many as 30% of the bombs dropped on Lao by the Americans didn't explode and are still there in the soil waiting to detonate. The majority are small cluster bombs, which the Lao people in a slightly creepy childish way call 'bombies'.

A somewhat scary fact is that Lao is, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in all of human history. Approximately 270 million cluster bombs were dropped of which an estimated 80 million remain undetonated. There are also plenty of other munitions, right up to 2000lb bombs but if you encounter one of them, prosthetics will not be an issue. And since the war ended in 1974, over 20,000 people have been killed or injured by these devices.

In January, when we visited Phonsavan, I wrote about the work being done there in finding and defusing these devices and the training of Lao people - mainly women - in this work. Here was the other end of the story, the results of the unexploded ordnance which continues to take a toll. And if anyone out there feels like supporting their work here is a link to their fundraising page (the entire website is well worth a look). For example, $150 will pay for a prosthetic arm and a mere $75 for a leg!

Fishing boat made from a jettisoned
B-52 auxiliary fuel tank

Sculpture made from 500kg of unexploded bombs

Prosthetic limbs used as Christmas
lights (as mentioned in the 'Nails' section).

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
It has been an amazing whirlwind of adventure in November and December! Honeymoon, new country, visitors, new house, new jobs (more on that anon), more visitors due in January and February and, best of all, both of us knowing in our hearts that we have made absolutely the right decision in coming here! So a few last images to ring in the New Year and to wish you all all the best for 2014 (Alfred: All all? I give up).