Day 46-48 Luang Prabang

Day 46 - biked around the town

breakfast at joma - good!

i'm reading a book called ant egg soup by natacha du pont de bie. she's a british woman who calls herself a food tourist, which i could call myself! sometimes i decide where to go and where to stay just based on the food! she heard there was only one book written in english about laotian food so she set out to write the second. she traveled all over laos meeting native people all along the way and having them show her how to make laotian food. i love the book so far! it's great to read a book about a country while you're traveling around it! gives you more info and more perspective.

anyway, after breakfast we got bikes and rode around town stopping at any temples we saw. there are 34 in luang prabang! i think we only saw 3 but that's ok. we've seen tons of temples in s.e. asia in general we will be seeing more lol

it was really nice to be able to slowly bike around. this town is really quiet and beautiful! i love the architecture!

we went up phousy hill and saw the temple and buddha statues there including "buddha's footprint", obviously fake seeing as how my whole body could fit into it lol the view from the top of the hill was great though! you could see the whole town and both rivers that run through it- the mekong and the nam son (i think...we've never been able to confirm the name of the other river).

we rode around the town some more admiring the pretty little cafes, monks in bright orange robes and kids playing in the streets.

in the afternoon we got a late light lunch of iced bale fruit tea and a tuna potato salad that was really good at l'etranger - a book lending/selling tea room/cafe. what i loved about it most were all the national geographics you could look at for free upstairs while lounging on big cushions on the floor. i looked at one from 1973 and enjoyed the olds ads as much as the articles. i read one article about centanarians and how they live as long as they do. it sounds like the key to longevity is hard physical labor everyday of your life, a low calorie diet and a good bit of alcohol lol i need to work on the first one lol

we biked some more until dusk and then turned out bikes in.

we decided to go to dinner at hive bar because they have a hilltribe clothing fashion show every night. we ordered a house salad and a tomato pesto pizza, the fashion show began and it started to rain...the problem was all the tables and the stage were outside! no one wanted to risk sitting in a downpour so after it had been sprinkling for 5 mins. everyone ran to get tables indoors and they stopped the fashion show. we got to see 4-5 different kinds of hilltribe clothing though. there are over a hundred different ethnicities who live in the hills and each has their own distinct style of clothing. it's really cool!

we ate dinner inside but it never did rain very hard. the food was good and afterwards we want back to the hotel for an early night because we were getting up early in the morning.

Day 47 - change of weather and change of plans!

we had planned to take a biking and kayaking tour to a hilltribe village and a waterfall where you can swim but the weather had drastically changed overnight! we woke up to the coldest weather we've experienced in s.e. asia and we were NOT prepared! i didn't even have pants or enclosed shoes. we immediately went to the tour office and asked if we could reschedule our tour for sunday because we saw online that it was supposed to warm and sunny that day. thankfully they switched our tour with no problem and no charge.

it was so chilly all we wanted to do was stay inside all day lol we went to joma and had a long breakfast, hot tea and read quite a while. then we went out and checked out some places to schedule a cooking class either for that evening or the next day. it took us forever to find a place and it was too expensive so we went and found another place for which we had seen flyers. it's called tamnak (3 elephants) and it's a combined restaurant, cooking school and book exchange. it seems to be owned by an ozzy woman (and maybe her husband?...she said "we" a couple times but i never saw anyone else...) she lives in the building in which the book exchange is run and she has a funny-looking medium-sized shaggy gray mut with an underbite who will apparently bite anyone who tries to pet her lol the lady had signs up everywhere warning people not to pet her. the dog didn't seem phased by jens and i and as we were leaving she even came up to me and sniffed my leg. i like to think that she could sense jens and i were good dog people :o) the ozzy lady was gregarious and funny and i really liked her.

it took us so long to find a cooking school that it was time for lunch and we had seen that joma had a really yummy looking rueben sandwich so we just gave in to our love of the place and returned for lunch lol we got the delicious rueben sandwich and a wonderfully comforting bowl of creamy tomato soup which really hit the spot on such a cold day. you're probably thinking it was like 30F or something but it might have only been 60F. it was just such a drastic change that our bodies weren't used to it at all and like i said i didn't have proper clothing. if we walked briskly down the street it wasn't too bad but i certainly didn't wanna meander around in it!

so after lunch we decided to go see the national museum which used to be the royal palace when there was a king. when the communists took over they put the king, queen and prince in a cave prison. the prince complained about the food so they said ok cook it yourself. he soon got dysentery and brain fever and died. they moved the king and queen to another cave prison and they died shortly after...of what i don't know. when laos became extremely poor the govt decided to open the palace up as a museum to bring in some money from tourists. so it's a bit weird. the author of the book i'm reading likened it to killing the pope and then opening up the vatican as a museum...i guess you could also compare it to killing the president and then opening the white house as a museum.

nonetheless the palace was pretty cool! the throne room had intricate japanese glass pictoral mosaics on all the walls which really amazed me. picture a little man on a horse made entirely of tiny pieces of colored glass - there were hundreds of these pictures on the walls. amazing! there was also the king's bedroom, queen's bedroom, dining room, a couple other rooms, buddhas (i've really seen enough of buddha and i'm sure he would be appalled at how many statues there are of him all over the world seeing as how he had no intention of people worshipping him at all!), and a room filled with gifts from other countries (given to the king during his reign). most of the gifts were amazing. china had given this intricately carved sphere made of ivory that had other spheres carved inside it! it was amazing and i have no idea how one would do that! it blew my mind! on the other hand the u.s. had only given a little crappy model of the craft they landed on the moon lol now granted they also gave a few moon pebbles but still it didn't really compare to the amazing craftmanship of the chinese ivory sphere.

we discovered the royal ballet theater is right next to the museum so we bought tickets to a traditional dance for that night. it start at 6pm so we needed to eat an early dinner. we decided to go back to l'etranger because i had seen that they had chai. unfortunately when we got there they said they were out of chai so i got hot bale fruit tea, jens got coffee and we went upstairs to read and look at more national geographic. i looked at two old ones from the 70s that had articles about texas! it was really interesting to see how they wrote back then and to see what they said about texas. they wrote about it pretty stereotypically and if that was people's main info about texas i can see why every time i meet someone from somewhere else they think texas is just a desert with cows, cowboys and hicks lol the thing that shocked me the most was that they used both the terms "wetback" and "coolies" as if that was totally ok lol we've come a long way since then!

after hanging out a while we ordered pappadam with 3 dips (smokey eggplant dip, salsa and pesto) and that tuna potato salad again that was so good.

then we went to the dance show. they performed a story from the ramayana and the dance was similar to ones i had seen in bali. pretty cool but a bit slow going. i was glad i saw it but i was also glad it was only an hour lol

it was still early and jens had really been craving apple pie so we went back to joma for the 3rd time that day because we knew they had it. unfortunately they had run out lol (not our lucky day!) so we got cheesecake with mango and a brownie.

Day 48 - cooking class!

we had a light breakfast of raisin bread, fruit and tea and then we headed over to tamnak cooking school. there were about 9 of us students all together.

first we took a tuk-tuk to the market and one of our teachers showed us around. it was great! i've always loved asian markets but i had never had someone guide me through one and tell me what things were! i loved it! we saw fish in buckets, pig feet, pig snouts, blood jello, buffalo meat, buffalo skin, tons of herbs, veggies and fruit, bamboo, cornstarch snacks covered in palm sugar, and lots of non-food items like clothes, toiletries, etc. but we of course focuses on the food! jens and i weren't too phased by anything after living in korea so it was fun to see some of the other students freaking out about the gross things lol

after that we went back to the school for morning tea and some of that cornstarch/palm sugar snack. then we got to learnin'!

there were two teachers and they took turns teaching us how to make various dishes. first they would demonstrate the dishes and then we would go to our stations and make the dishes ourselves following the cookbook (which we got to keep). it was so much fun!!!!! jens and i wished we had been doing cooking classes in every country! not only because it was fun but simply because we like to cook and we were tired of eating out all the time. jens said he was surprised at how great he felt as soon as he started cooking lol there's just something about making your own food that's really satisfying.

first we made a luang prabang salad which was really easy. just lettuce, cucumber, tomato, boiled egg, peanuts and laos mayonaisse which we made from scratch- it was just oil, vinegar, hard boiled egg yolk, salt, pepper and sugar. very yummy! then we made a fried noodle dish with chicken, veggies and herbs. it was delicious! after we made our food we went outside on the porch and all ate together at a big table.

then we went back in to learn how to make 6 other dishes. this time we could choose which ones we wanted to make ourselves. the first half of the afternoon we were shown how to make laap (the national dish), a stir fried vermicelli noodle dish with veggies and pork and a pork and egg stew. then we could choose two to make. we chose the first two. the laap was made with chicken and was also super easy! all you had to do was cook the chicken and mix it with a bunch of garlic, onion and herbs! sooo fresh tasting and so good! next we made the noodle dish and that was a bit more work but really yummy and had a totally different taste. it was made with "ear mushrooms" which gave it a woody peanutty flavor.

then we were shown how to make 3 other things - a stir-fried eggplant and pork dish, an eggplant and chicken red curry and a red chili paste. we could choose one of the first two dishes to make but they didn't let us make the chili paste because we didn't need that much of it. in the demonstration they made enough for everyone. laotian people use it as a condiment like korean people do. so jens and i decided to make the eggplant curry (and we left out the chicken because we already had meat in every other dish that day lol ). it was a little more difficult to get right. it tasted fine we just didn't have much liquid left in it at the end and i'm not sure why. turns out everyone else chose to cook that same dish and none of them had enough liquid at the end either lol dunno if we were supposed to turn the heat down halfway through or what but like i said, it still tasted good. if i made it again though i'd use less red curry paste as it was too spicy for me.

after making our 3 dishes of the afternoon we all sat down to way too much food for such an early dinner lol we ate dinner at 4:30! they have an evening class that starts at 5pm. but the food was really really good! i liked all the dishes equally for different reasons and i'll definitely try to make them when i go back to the states!

we had a lot of food left over so a couple of us boxed ours up to give to people..we weren't sure who but we didn't wanna just throw it all out. jens and i ended up giving ours to the workers at our guesthouse and they said it was good! lol dunno if they were lying but i'll go with it!

we watched the sunset over the river and then we went for dessert at a nearby cafe. got chai, coffee and a cookie, read and then came back here to get on the internet.

tomorrow is our last day and we're doing our biking kayaking tour! hope it's warm!

then we'll be on our last leg of our trip- angkor wat, cambodia!!!!! wooooooo!