Tardy Monks

I am a punctual individual. I like to be on time for meetings, lunches with friends, or even when I’m simply following my own schedule. Some might even say I am a little OCD about this sort of thing. And this trait is emphasized when I haven’t had the proper amount of sleep and my patience is at its lowest point. Now, I know I can’t hold everyone else to these standards. There are people in the world (I just don’t understand them) who don’t worry about time. People who say, “Eh, no worries, I’ll get there and everything will be fine.” My response, “But there’s a plan! There’s a schedule!” To get through moments with these people I take deep breaths and concentrate on remaining calm and accepting that everyone in the world is different and that this is a good thing (although when these tardy people are more than thirty minutes late I start to think the world would be a better place if it was filled with Lauren clones).

In my mind, however, monks cannot be these tardy people. Monks are something so foreign and so monkish that they must be on time. I suppose a response to this statement would run along the lines of, “Whenever you get somewhere you are on time because that is where you are at that moment.” And sure, in the esoteric sense of time and your placement in the cosmos, this might be right. But in the actual civilized world we need to use another measuring bar. It’s called a clock and everyone should invest in one.

On Sunday morning our Luang Prabang Posse awoke early to watch an amazing Luang Prabang only sight - the monks of the city collecting alms. Each morning the monks come out in droves, walk down the main road of town in a long line and collect alms from everyone who comes (alms can be in any form, including rice!). We have heard it is quite an amazing sight and one well worth the effort of arising early to see. Wanting to get the most out of our experience, we naturally made a plan to rise at 5:30 am to go out and watch this procession. So at 5:30 am on Sunday, June 27, 2010 I accepted my alarms blaring tones gracefully, got up, brushed my teeth, changed into a t-shirt and long shorts, and stumbled out of my room with bleary eyes and distinctly slumped shoulders. But does my appearance really matter? No. I was there and I was ready to watch. That is enough. We headed down to the curbside to await the monks. We sat. We waited. No monks. We thought, “Well, this is Laos and everything runs on Laos time [aka late], so we’ll wait longer.”

The monks never showed! We waited for thirty minutes and nothing. I’m not sure if everyone is just having a laugh at the falang’s expense and this event doesn’t really exist or if the monks just decided to sleep in that morning, but they were quite tardy. At 6:15 am, after I had dozed off several times with my head lolling about, we called it quits. If the monks couldn’t come on time, then we wouldn’t watch! That will show them! We stumbled back up to our rooms, flopped down on our beds, and went back to sleep until 8:40 am. :)

Ok, so looking back on it all, I’m sure the monks didn’t care that we weren’t there and it was maybe a little pathetic that we couldn’t wait for them, but I really do like punctuality and it was quite early! Oh well. I would have liked to be able to describe the long line of orange and yellow robed monks with their golden pots collecting alms from the teaming crowds of people. Instead, I am left with only a description of my extreme joy at my first day of sleeping in on my trip to SE Asia. And that was wonderful and a relaxing way to being our day.

We were finally ready to leave our Villa around 10 am that morning in search of breakfast. We walked around town for a while, looking at menus, trying to find a place that would serve hash browns for me. After looking at every restaurant that served breakfast in Luang Prabang I have come to the conclusion that hash browns are the one food that has not made it to Laos. In fact, come to think of it, I don’t think potatoes have made it here. I can’t think of a single Lao dish we have eaten that has included potatoes. Hmm. Maybe that is the problem. I have come to the one country that doesn’t have potatoes. Weird.

Breakfast consisted of a pineapple smoothie, warmed baguette, and fruit salad. It was a good way to start the day and afterwards we set off to explore more of the town. We wandered around the town, enjoying our last morning in Luang Prabang. We stopped at any shop that caught our eye (purchasing some jewelry for Zenia and Saem and a silver dragon for me!), simply meandering the streets we had come to love in Luang Prabang. Our morning seemed to fly by and soon it was early afternoon. We had decided the previous day that we would eat a light breakfast and then eat an early dinner. You see, the food in Luang Prabang is amazing, but our short time in the town meant that we would not get to experience much of it. Therefore, we needed to maximize our eating abilities in Luang Prabang and toward that end we made a plan to eat a 3 pm meal that would be our dinner for the day.

Saem had already chosen our restaurant, L’Elephant aux Jardins, which turned out to be amazing! We each ordered a different meal (I continued my pasta kick) and tried each, including buffalo for Saem! (Quite delicious, by the way.) It was a long and relaxing meal, a perfect end to our time in Luang Prabang. Directly after the meal we headed back to our Villa to collect our bags and head off to the airport for our return to Vientiane. We arrived at the airport an hour and a half before our flight and sat down to wait. And wait. And wait. The time for our departure came and went. And still we waited. Finally a voice came on the loudspeaker and informed us our plane was delayed (not a surprise at this point) and our new departure time would be an hour later. And so, we continued to wait. Our plane did finally arrive, we boarded, and set off for Vientiane. The flight home was beautiful. Although it was night and therefore dark out, the sky was illuminated by lightning flashes allowing brief illumination of the mountains below and the deep black of the clouds surrounding our plane. Our flight home was short and we quickly grabbed a tuk-tuk back to our residence and settled back into life in Vientiane. I felt a decided pang of sadness on our return to Vientiane as our first vacation was over. But soon we are off again, to Cambodia this time, and the Adventures of a Bookworm Abroad shall continue!