lao day 3: vang vien

i hate roosters. y'know why? because they're obnoxious. i don't have a problem with people/animals that feel they need to wake up at 4:30 in the morning but raucous activity at that time is a little rude. lao roosters are everywhere and they cock-a-doodle-doo funny. and it sounds like they're having conversations with each other about the right way to cock-a-doodle-doo. i can say this from extensive research, having been woken up daily by said roosters for the rest of the trip.

we gave up at around 7:30 and just woke up and went for breakfast. we sat in a day bed and had some very cakey pancakes. it was like a crepe, except not. it was literally a birthday cake smushed down covered in bananas. we spent the rest of the morning trying to digest the "more cake, less pan" and find a way to get down to the river and get on some tubes (see pretty picture). we eventually found one but were told it wasn't worth going down until about 11 when it was warmer so we walked around and found a monastery a little bit outside of town.

after we walked around the monastery for awhile, several little monks started talking to us. by little i mean they were small but also young. only one monk was an actual monk, lew (far left). the rest were novices. (gotta be at least 20 yrs old). one of the novices, tao (far right), had phenomenal english so we just kept asking him questions and him us and generally had a pretty good time. they asked us to come to evening prayer so we were kinda excited about having woken up so early and having had the time to wander off.

so we spent the day tubing which was fun but cold. we did manage to stop off and have some beer and find a cave and walk in and look around. unfortunately, we were in bikinis and flip flops, and there was a lot of mud. that swim suit is no longer in use, needless to say. and not just because london is freaking cold.

by 3pm, we were cold and not done tubing so we decided we needed to get back into the water so we could be back for evening prayer. we also figured we'd need time to change because we probably shouldn't roll up to evening prayer in bikinis, especially when it looks very much like i'm not even wearing that in certain photos (ahem, cool tree). so we got back, changed and headed back over to the monastery.

when we got in, they were stalling and being a little strange. finally one of them asked me if i could help him with his english homework. this was pretty standard practice in china so i wasn't too surprised, i guess. after a little while, evening prayer began and we got to sit right up with them and watch everything close up. afterwards, we asked them very dorky music questions and were quite satisfied with the whole evening.
then we were sitting around with two of them and they asked us what we were going to do that night. we said we were thinking of meeting a friend for dinner and going out. they said (no joke), "oh because we could all go down to the river and go to a pub... and listen to english music." and then we went, "huh?" and i followed with, "... are you guys allowed to leave?" because i clearly thought that monks were chained to the monastery or something...we declined in the end but we were a little confused. we left having given them our email addresses and hopefully not too bad an impression.

we kinda spent the rest of the night walking around being confused and wondering if monks were... well... not what we thought.