Culture & Life

Raw meals

Sitting down to the bowl of chopped raw meat, a chicken’s head, a salad made of free and shrub leaves, and sticky rice interspersed with rounds of fiery home-made rice whisky is not the normal traveler's idea of a mouth-watering exotic meal.

But the occasional visitor to Laos is unlikely to experience such really distinctive Lao food. That is, the Lao taste for things raw rather than cooked. This preference tells you many things about Lao culture and society: for instance, the proximity of most Lao to the "wild" forest where food is still hunted or gathered. A deer shot in the mountains is carried back to the village where it is chopped up into many bowls for laap and the family’s neighbors and friends come and feast and drink. The whole deer is consumed immediately because there are no refrigerators in the villages to keep the meat fresh. Even in the ‘civilised’ cooked haute cuisine of Laos the presence of ingredients from the "wild" forest makes it different from other food.

Pi Mai

The lunar new year begins in mid-April and practically the entire country comes to a halt and celebrates. Houses are cleaned, people put on new clothes and Buddha images are washed with lustral water. In the wats, offerings of fruit and flowers are made at various altars and votive mounds of sand or stone are fashioned in the courtyards. Later the citizens take to the streets and douse one another with water, which is an appropriate activity as April is usually the hottest month of the year. This festival is particularly picturesque in Luang Prabang, where it includes elephant processions.

Bun Bang Fai

The rocket festival takes place in May. It's a great pre-Buddhist celebration with plenty of processions, music and dancing, accompanied by the firing of bamboo rockets to prompt the heavens to send rain. A ceremony is performed at the temple in the morning. In the afternoon, people gather in fields on the outskirts of villages and towns to launch the rockets with much abandoned revelry. Villages, communities and departments compete for the "best decorated" and the "highest traveling" rocket. Beginning around the middle of May, the festivals are staggered from place to place enable more participation and attendance. This is the time when an offering to the spirits can be made in a corner of one's garden, early each morning

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