Exploring Luang Prabang

Sometimes, you gotta just go with the flow. This trip, wanting to cram as much experiences in to our limited time as possible, we have barely stopped and taken the time to smell the flowers, so to speak. Well, unless you count that time in Chiang Rai, with the festival...but I digress. This morning, we realized that this trip is rapidly approaching its end, and we haven't stopped moving. Through an error in booking, we are being forced to change rooms in our luxe little guesthouse on the river, so we took advantage of the check-out time to take our time. We don't bother re-packing our stuff, just throw it all in duffles for the short trip to the next room. We laze around at breakfast, Mario giving the noodle soup a try(it's no Pho, but it's good), while I stick to the tried-and-true scrambled eggs with toasted baguette. We peruse the tour book, looking at what we *could* visit, but don't HAVE to, necessarily. We chat with Blue Jayson, who has joined us in the outside dining area, and trade ideas for things to do on our last day. He has more time here to see, do and visit - something we wish WE did, as Mario and I are slowly falling in love with Luang Prabang. This town has quickly become our favorite place of the trip, and will likely be the first place we return to next time.
Sometime around 11, we make our way downstairs with all of our accumulated stuff from the last 3 weeks, preparing to deposit it for the day while our new room is readied. Turns out, a large group of French tourists checked out early this morning, and the rooms are already available, so we get turned around and sent straight to our new home for the night! Such luck - we won't have to make our way back to hotel later on to check in and move our things, allowing us to spend ALL of our remaining time wandering around the city. Which is exactly what we do.

One of the main reasons we laze around at the hotel all morning, besides the check-out/check-in non-event, is to make it to Tamarind restaurant for their 11 o'clock opening so we can sign up for yet ANOTHER cooking class! Yup, if you've been following along, this will be our FOURTH one of the trip(if you count the one on the boat in Halong Bay) and will cover cuisines from ALL the countries we have set foot in. Technically, we did not take a class in Thailand, but when we last visited in 2007, Mario and I enjoyed an all-day lesson at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School, so we've got Thai cuisine covered. We have since been cooking the most authentic Pad Thai and Green Chicken Curry at home - and can get all of the local ingredients at OUR local asian grocer. Regardless, we are looking forward to delving into the wonders of Lao cuisine, which so far has consisted of sandwiches with sweet chili sauce, or food on a grill, so some more traditional fare would a be a welcome change!

Speaking of sandwiches, we make our way through town to the central post office to mail another postcard, and head across the street to the food market to indulge in - you guessed it - chicken sandwiches with sweet chili sauce! They are very good, though, well-balanced with creamy avocado and fresh cilantro, piled onto tender baguettes, which are excellent in Laos. And very filling - these sandwiches will easily get us through the afternoon, until our evening cooking class. If you are in Luang Prabang, and are looking for a tasty lunch(or dinner), head to the food market stalls on the right side when you are facing the main stage. The Hmong "healtea" shop is right next to the HATO Taiwanese bubble tea place - it is our go-to place, and makes GREAT baguette sandwiches, very similar in style to the Banh Mi in Vietnam.

Stomachs full of tasty baguette, we walk around the city in search of interesting sites. First, we head to the centrally-located Imperial Palace museum, once the home of the royal family of Laos. Since they were deposed in the late 1970s, the palace has been donated to the country, and converted into a museum, preserving some of the charm and splendor it once held while house the head of state and generations before him. One room is filled with large, flat settees, great for lounging and staring up at the frescoed walls, depicting scenes of Laotian daily life. The french artist commissioned to do the work, Alix de Fauntereaum has a similar style to Paul Gaughin, known for his work of Tahitian women, full of colours, heavy on the green so present in tropical settings. Apparently, his scenes in this room follow the path of the sun, each painting depicting a certain time of day, and the natural light streaming in the large windows will illuminate the piece at the SAME time! It seems like quite the undertaking!

Next door is the coronation room, redone for the intended coronation of the last King. The walls are red, and covered in glass mosaics depicting Lao folk stories, similar to ones we heard at the Traditional storytelling last night. The scenes are all jumbled together, though, so try as we might, neither Mario nor I could pick out any that we had heard. Other coronation relics are peppered around the room in presentation cases, as are many different styles of Buddhas in many different materials, salvaged from temples and caves around the country.

We wander through the rest of the palace, admiring the simplicity of the bedrooms, the contrast between the super-high ceilings and rather short furniture, which seems so out of place. We admire the displays of gifts from visiting countries, on show in the secretary's reception room, and are caught by the fact that a simple blown glass plate, red and gold in colour, happens to be a gift from Canada. It's nice to find this tie here, both to us and the country we come from, so far away from us and yet sitting right in front of us.

Outside, the large garage houses the "fleet" of royal cars - all 5 of them. The royal family, it turns out, liked big American boat cars, Lincoln Continentals, and were often gifted them by the US. There is an old black Citroen in the corner, one of the first royal vehicles, and a wooden speedboat. Outside, two golden barges for current religious ceremonies are getting a cleaning for the upcoming Lunar New Year celebrations, and an old, dilapidated grey Peugeot sinks into the ground, though it is likely NOT one of the royal cars!

After collecting our shoes, and our bags, and our cameras(here, EVERYTHING has to go into a locker, and it was quite the runaround to figure it all out, let me tell you!), we continue our walk through the town. Next stop? Wat Xieng Thong, the largest and most well-known monastery in a city that is seemingly full of them. The main hall is full of more beautiful mosaics, the walls telling the stories of Laos, and some of them here we CAN pick out from our evening of story-telling at Garavek.
There are several other beautiful buildings scattered around the grounds, but our attention is grabbed by one in particular. While similar on the outside, inside we find a carrying barge for a Buddha statue located on sight, some plywood signs scattered about, wooden Buddha images in varying states of decay, small glass cabinets laying empty of their contents, a bundle of brooms, a shop-vac...if I didn't know any better, I'd say that this place is the storage shed of Xieng Thong! It's so curious to see all of these other buildings being well-presented, clean and cared for, and then step foot in something that looks like the door was shut and the contents forgotten for the past 30 years! At least, that's what the cobwebs tell me!

As the sun begins to set over the city, Mario and I make our way back to Tamarind restaurant, for our evening cooking class. A taxi pick-up gathers us all together(11 of us for tonight's class), and out of the city we drive, down bumpy gravel roads to Tamarind's lakeside garden and pavilion for an beautiful outdoor experience. Under the superior tutelage of our instructor, Sit, and his assistant, superhero Mr. Sa, we learn the about the simple-to-make, yet complexly-flavoured, dishes that make up Lao cuisine.
Before us, platters of ingredients are overflowing with fragrant lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves, spicy chilies, fresh bouquets of cilantro and sweet basil and green onions, are gathered from the gardens behind our cooking stations. Sit pulls out large cards listing the ingredients, hinting at the dishes to come. Just behind him lies another area filled with charcoal-fueled clay stoves, awaiting eggplants and tomatoes that need charring, banana leaves that need softening.
We fly through a whole meal's worth of preparations: First up, Jeow, a classic Lao chili dip based on either eggplant or tomato, but heavy of the spice, and apparently served with EVERY meal in Laos. Having eaten nothing but sandwiches thus far, Mario and I have not had the pleasure of tasting this sauce yet, so we pound away at the ingredients in our giant mortar, anxious to make a new discovery. The dip is then eaten with sticky rice, fashioned first into little balls by hand, thumb pressed in to make an indent, and then dipped into the sauce like a little scoop. REAL meals in Laos are always served with a bamboo basket of sticky rice, and the entire meal eaten by hand using this same scooping technique - we are only just now discovering this! It certainly encourages a much more relaxed, more familial atmosphere for meals!
Next, Mok Pa, a herb-marinated fish steamed in banana leaves, the flavours reminiscent of the fish Amok curry that we had in Siem Reap. Again using our trusty mortar and pestle, we grind up herbs and chili and shallot into a paste, and use this paste to marinate pieces of white fish - snapper, in our case. Twenty minutes later, this fish, along with the marinade, is pilled high into banana leaves. It is folded into little packages, tied with care, and placed into a steamer to infuse the fish with even more flavour.
We stuff lemongrass with flavourful minced chicken, which sounds impressively complicated, and I assure you that it IS impressively complicated, too. Probably not something I will replicate at home, even though the stuffed stems, bulging with the meat, dipped in egg and then fried until crispy, are quite something to behold. I've been told that they can also may be grilled on the BBQ, so if you come by sometime in the summer, you might be drawn in by the delicious smell of Mario and I grilling up stuffed lemongrass...
Finally, the classic mango-sticky rice, ubiquitous in this area of the world, each country we have visited adding their own spin to the dessert. Tamarind's version is made with black(or purple) sticky rice, steamed and then cooked again with sweetened coconut milk, which we steep and squeeze ourselves from freshly-grated coconut. To this pudding-like dessert, we add a spoonful of house-made tamarind jam, fresh fruits and toasted sesame seeds. We take our garnished bowls to the communal dining table, where all of our hard work is laid out to feast on, both with our eyes and our bellies.
The staff at the Tamarind Gardens have also prepared typical Lao dishes to add to the spread: Bamboo Soup, a minced Buffalo and Herb Salad, and stir-fried Young Pumpkin with kaffir lime and ginger. With our baskets of sticky rice to scoop everything up, we eat to our hearts' content, and then some, and still the table seems untouched, there is so much food. We wash everything down with a bottle of Beer Lao, our drink of choice in Luang Prabang. We are full and happy and satisfied, and content at the knowledge we have acquired tonight, and the tasty food that came with it. I always believe that the best way to understand a country's culture is through its food, and the best way to understand a country's food is through a cooking class. I go home happy(though let me tell you, that really bumpy road back to town was no fun on a full stomach!).