khon kaen coffee friends

My friends Dtao and Pim who adopted me in Khon Kaen. Every morning I would meet them for a cup of coffee and practice speaking Thai with them. I would order something for breakfast from the lady at the next door shop. She can make the best kai yasai, egg omelet with vegetables, I have ever eaten.

But the best part was the treats that Dtao and Pim would bring from the market everyday for me to try. One day it was khao tom, pounded sweet rice and coconut wrapped in banana leaves. The day before was koy jap, a Vietnamese pork noodle soup. Next day was donut ball things.

What fun people. Thanks for sharing your culture with a farang with such enthusiasm.

A typical day in Laos

How do I describe a typical day. I could write a whole blog entry on just the scents and smells of Laos. Or a whole blog entry on the friends I have made. Or the food. Or the cultural misunderstandings. Or teaching at the library. My "typical" day is all of these things...

Roosters crowing in the morning. The feel of walking barefoot on worn teak floors. Walk outside the guest house to the shower wearing nothing but a towel - I've gotten comfortable around the guest house... The smell of Cussons soap.

I walk past the elementary school with barbed wire atop the fence to my favorite noodle shop a couple blocks away. In my best Lao language, I order fur moo, a noodle soup with strips of pork. I squeeze a couple lime slices, splash soy sauce and tear fresh mint leaves and other leafy greens into the mix. Ah-hahn sep, it's delicious! It feels so healthy to eat fresh vegetables and lean shredded pork first thing in the morning.

Motorbikes, tuk tuks and bicycles fill the streets. Girls ride side saddle on the back of motorbikes wearing traditional long skirts.

Stopping to chat with friends on the way to the library. Lenou the coffee guy who is finishing law school and conversations about entrepreneurial ideas. Next are the Hmong baguette girls that make me sandwiches and teach me Hmong language. They're so funny! Helping Thilaitat with his math homework and drinking a glass of milk on the Mekong in the morning. Teaching English to the staff at Joma Bakery.

I'm going to miss the way simple parties just seem to sprout... The rawness of life here. People living closer to the land and closer to their food sources. Oranges with seeds.

Elephant Festival Photography Trip

The library took five photographers on a field trip to the Elephant Festival in Paklay for an intense photography workshop. We worked on the relationship of aperture and depth of field, blurring the background to focus attention on the subject, high shutter speeds to capture motion... We got up early to photograph the elephants bathing. We played with night shots and macro photography.

Some photos of mahout and their elephants.

The library is run by The Language Project and has a gallery in the main library where students showcase their best works. Tourists can purchase prints for $25 which is shared equally between the library and photographer. To put this in perspective, to earn $12 on the sale of a print is a big deal for a student earning $30 a month...

An online gallery of photography contest the library held last year entitled Laos Through Our Own Eyes.

We played elephant trivia at every meal. Here's your chance. Laos is known as the Land of a Million Elephants, how many elephants remain in Laos today?

Measurement of Gravity

After realizing that college level physics students didn't know who Einstein was, I decided to try something a little different with my next science experiment. I invited all the students who had signed up on the interested in math and science sign up sheets to an exclusive measurement of gravity.

We dropped five little water balloons, five crumpled balls of paper and five gigantic water balloons off the third floor of the library while timing how long the balloons took to fall. Splat!

We then took the data inside and graphed the results in Excel. (This was the first time many had used a computer to do calculations.) I helped derive a relationship for gravity from the time it takes to fall. We talked about who was the most accurate timer, who was the most consistent.

After two and a half hours they were still asking questions like:
"Why does everything fall down towards the Earth?"
"Why doesn't the moon fall down too?"

We're winning.

Book Party! in Ban Sivilay

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No doubt you are reading the title and thinking, "oooh books, now that sounds like a really exciting party."

Well, if you live in a Hmong village where there are no books, and some foreigners bring enough books for each child in your village to have one, you would throw a party too.

I was invited to tag along with a German couple that had sponsored a book party through the Big Brother Mouse organization in Luang Prabang. I knew I was in for something special when the villagers started chasing the van with huge grins as we drove into the school yard.

First we had a drawing lesson. Every child with one piece of paper and a pencil drawing cartoon faces. Then we sang songs in Laos. I think they were about the alphabet, but not really sure. Played games in the school yard and ate a snack. It was great fun. And then... Each student got to chose one book for themselves, probably the first book they have ever owned. They were completely absorbed with their new book.


. . . . . .

If you are interested in supporting this group I highly recommend you go to Luang Prabang and sponsor a book party for a village. Its an amazing experience. The Big Brother Mouse group also publishes books and is always looking for people to sponsor the publication of a new book.

Thank you Big Brother Mouse for letting me tag along!

Book Report: Mindfulness in Plain English

A book that is exactly what it says it is. Ever had so much on your mind you feel like you can't concentrate on a single one of them? You might be interested in this one.

I found it to be an exceptional book for someone like me with zero knowledge of what meditation is and what it isn't.

Water Balloon in a Bottle?

The idea was to create a stand-alone science experiment that could generate sparks of interest with all ages. Carol asked me one day if I thought it was possible to get an egg into milk bottle. The seed was planted... What sprouted was a contest to challenge kids to get a water balloon into a kethcup bottle.

I stole an empty ketchup bottle from my baguette friends and bought some balloons. We created a sequence of laminated cards with questions in English and Laos to lead students to the answer without giving it away.

Surprising how many kids would try the "it doesn't fit, I must need to push harder" method. But water balloons add a sense of danger... At least tens times a day the sounds of water splashing and giggling could be heard. Ultimately it was a great science success for the library.

Try it at home. Can you get an egg sized water balloon into a ketchup bottle? Not as easy as it sounds... What's the science behind it? The staff at the library was able to brainstorm four answers. How many solutions can you find?

Just read: The Skull Mantra

Several people have asked what I've been reading, so I will try posting an uber-brief summary of things I am reading and see how it goes.

An engaging murder mystery about the struggles of Tibetan people and life in a laogai, Chinese labor camp. The story begins with the discovery of a decapitated American body by a Tibetan work gang high in the mountains of Tibet. The plot follows the investigation of one of the slaves who is promoted to the investigator and has a myriad of twists and turns like every good murder mystery should... Sprinkles of history and politics of the region make it feel real.

I plan to make a trip to Nepal and Tibet in the coming months. That's why it was interesting to me...


If you are interested in understanding the plight of the Tibetan people and how purchasing things made in China supports a dangerous regime, I recommend browsing the website: www.boycottmadeinchina.org. Or download the pdf version of Buying the Dragon's Teeth.