Luang Probang

3/18/2011
-woke up late, catching up on sleep. had a banana pancake and tea at the guest house.
-walked around town, trying to get my bearings, the usual, whenever i get to a new place spend the first day walking around figuring out the lay of the land.
-Walked up to the huge gold stupa on the hill in the center of town:

-heard over amplified chanting in the distance coming off the river.
-followed the sound over the old soviet bridge that goes over the Nam Khong, and into a sort of residential area, wound up at a Wat at the elbow of the river on the far side from the old town. they had a huge PA set up with air-raid style speakers, and a single monk was chanting into a microphone, surrounded by people paying their respects and the metal trees hung with offerings. i made a sizable donation and asked for permission to record. they said it was ok, so i set up, unfortunately there was a dog in the temple that hated white people, standing next to me and barking, sort of ruined my first recording. went outside the walls a bit, and recorded off the PA speakers. I watched the same dog bark at every Falong that came through. spent maybe a half hour recording, and amassed a small army of curious children, hard to keep them quiet, you can hear them in some of the recordings.
-spent a while there, then wandered back into town.
-went to the night market, they shut down a main street everynight and there are tons of vendors selling handicrafts, bought a nice shoulderbag for $2.
-Ate a big dinner, called it a night early.
3/19/2011
-went for another walk around town but took the camera instead of the recorder, took some pictures:

-wandered around, saw three kids run up to a tree with a big bamboo pole, and excitedly pull a huge milky white spider out of the tree, which they grabbed with their hands.
-there was a young german watching this spectacle as well, went for a beer with him, he'd been studying abroad in Thailand, and was visiting Lao before heading back to Germany.
-wandered around some more, wound up stumbling upon an Erhu player at the night market, sat and watched for a while, but unfortunately didn't have the recorder.
-went to this place called Utopia for dinner, truly a Utopic spot, watched the moon rise from a huge bamboo deck over the Nam Khong. 

-went to another bar, Hive, where unbeknownest to me they were having an "Ethnik" Fashion show, which was super weird, a lot of Lao girls in traditional garb walking the runway. That was followed by a group of Lao B-Boys doing a breakdancing show which was pretty fun, reunited with the american girls there, and met an awesome dude from cali, Oren.
-Hive sort of cleared out, so we returned to utopia, had a nice time, got a hookah. The girls had taken to much Valium, and the drinks on top didn't help, one girl wound up disappearing, and around closing time we found her passed out on the floor of the bathroom.
-The bars here close at 11:30, police enforced curfew, so the girl that had passed out in the bathroom went back the guest house, but the rest of us went down and chilled on the river.
more to come...