Saysouly Guesthouse

Compared to elsewhere in Laos + Thailand, Vientiane isn't replete with good clean accommodation options within the cat's budget. Stayed here more for the convenience - central but relatively quiet location + space for meeting with Lao friends + familiarity with staff + used to be one of the few (if not only) cheap places that could be booked online. Reviews on Travelfish here.

July 2007:



October 2008:



Main/older building pictured above. Hidden on the right is the newer building. Secure + sheltered parking for bikes in the space just inside the left entrance that gets shuttered up at night. Night shift guy sleeps in the lobby just inside the middle/main entrance.

August 2007:



July 2007 - non-ensuite twin (old building 2F):



Because the room we had in mind wasn't available for the first night - the previous guests had decided to stay on for another day. The parquet flooring might interest those who love jigsaw puzzles - no lack of loose pieces & gaps to play around with ;) The AC must have worked when the cat was still a kitten :P

August 2007 - ensuite twin (new building 2F):



What someone on Thorntree had recommended as the best of all rooms in this place.

October 2008 - non-ensuite double (old building 3F):



November 2009 - non-ensuite double (old building 2F):



Again, because the room the cat had in mind wasn't available for the first night. The AC unit is purely for security reasons - to plug that large rectangular hole in the wall. One of the 2 shared bathrooms on this floor was pretty bad - the cat has stayed in more basic guesthouses in rural Laos with cleaner bathrooms.

291206 出家-想家

05. khit theung baan

Those left behind:



A new identity:



Concrete feels so different from rice straw:



Most of the teachers left home to ordain around the age of 13-15, in order to further their education beyond primary school. Some like Monk TYF & 3-day old monk stepped into school for the first time only at age 9-11. While Monk TYF's parents were supportive, packing him off to a larger village in a neighbouring province so that he could continue on to lower secondary school, 3-day old monk was under constant family pressure to drop out from the time he was 10 y/o, just like the cat's dad. Every pair of hands was needed in the fields, & one doesn't need to go to school in order to learn how to plant rice, maize or sesame. Cash for uniforms & books was (& still is) hard to come by. Even if their parents sold off part of their harvest or livestock, most of the earnings would be eaten up by the cost of travel to & from the nearest market, & the family would have less reserves of rice to see them through should the next harvest be poor. Back then, around the mid-90s, less than 20% of Lao children completed primary education, with another ~20% receiving no education at all.

Others like Novice Spoil Market & Monk Big Head (that's what his name means in Hokkien & Teochew :P) started their 5 years of primary education at age 7, then dropped out of the education system for 2-3 years. There was no secondary school within walking distance of their villages. Monk V had a bicycle, but once it had been worn beyond repair by Lao roads, making the 16KM roundtrip on foot was just too tiring.

In addition, quite a few of them finished Por. 5 (5th & final year of primary school) around the time the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis struck. Inflation hit 87% in 1998 & 134% in 1999. Some families found themselves no longer able to feed all mouths, & sons were sent to live in temples to lighten their parents' burden.

One father moved his family from the mountains (3 hours climb down to the nearest secondary school) to a lowland town in 1997 in order for his kids to have better access to education. Their attempt at starting a new life in town doomed by bad timing, the family retreated back to subsistence agriculture in the highlands. Nevertheless, they found an alternate path to their goal - sending two sons to become novices in a town temple. Quite a few families from traditionally animist ethnic groups have chosen this option, & there are now Khmu, Hmong & (more rarely) Akha novices. For those who had known only life within their isolated villages, had never stepped into a Buddhist temple before, & couldn't speak Lao, the experience was akin to being sent to Mars and being made to dress Martian (little orange instead of green men), speak, chant & write Martian & do other Martian stuff. For some, the journey to their new life was their first time seeing 'black' (paved) roads.

Some had no advance warning e.g. One day somebody from my village took me to go with him & when we arrived XXX town he took me to be novice, or a parent handing them just enough cash for the boat journey to XXX town & telling them to leave & find a temple there. Others saw it coming - it was a matter of time before they finished primary school & were sent to join an older brother or cousin, or it was the usual thing that happened to many boys when their parents died or divorced & relatives couldn't take them in.

In short, practically all of the teachers ended up in temples by circumstance rather than by choice, & the town temples together with the monastic schools end up serving as a boarding school system for rural boys (not unlike Thailand). The merit that they make for their parents by ordaining is just a bonus. As each successive cohort of monk & novice students graduate from the monastic high schools & waste no time returning to lay life & dreams of jeans & motorbikes, they are quickly replaced by a new crop of boys from the villages.

KHIT THEUNGGG!! ex-novice Reebok cap roared in response to the question khit theung baan bor (miss home or not?), hence the title of this post. 出家 chu1 jia1 (lit. exit home) & 想家 xiang3 jia1 (lit. think home) are the Chinese terms for becoming a monk & for missing home respectively.

With the rising prosperity of the more fortunate in the towns & the concomitant increase in the amounts they give as alms, more of the teachers are able to save enough to travel home to visit their families. In the past, quite a few wouldn't see them again for as long as 5-8 years after leaving, now many are able to make the trip home every 1-2 years.

Some like 3-day old monk have no phor mae (parents) left to khit theung (miss), but still look forward to such visits to see their siblings & other relatives, catch up with childhood friends, & enjoy a brief respite from urban life. But there are some who don't care much for home, like one particularly bitter novice who never wants to see his mother or stepfather again - somehow it seems rather common for kids from previous marriages to be 'cast off' when divorced parents remarry (another similarity between Lao & Thai society?). When parents walk out, some sons take a direct route to the temples, others take an indirect route (left to grandparents, & then end up in temples when the grandparents eventually pass away), & the cat would later meet one boy taken in by an expat falang.

Unlike the owners of the first three photos, quite a few who move from the sonnabot (countryside) to live/study/work in urban areas have no photos of their families, & likewise their families have no photos of the kids whom they will hardly get to see for years. When giving its teachers photos of themselves, the cat passes them two copies so that they can send one to their parents back home. Wonder if any of the monk-stalking photographers juggling assorted lenses, tripods, memory cards & other accessories while staking out the monk-shooting hotspots of Luang Prabang might be interested in doing the same? Or are their photos meant only for professional portfolios, Lightstalkers/TrekEarth/Zenfolio/Pbase/Picasa/Flickr, & commercial purposes?

291206 orange clots

03. clot, clots & clotting

The teachers started pointing at all sorts of stuff & quizzing the cat on the English terms for each object. When it came to the naga carvings...

Monk TYF: This?
cat: Naga (as pronounced in Lao/Thai)
Monk TYF: Naga? You sure? N-A-G-A?
cat: Yes
Monk TYF: Have tourist tell me that correct way for N-A-G-A is pronounced 'na-jar'
cat: ...

For the record, the 'G' in 'naga' is pronounced like the 'G's in 'golden goose'.

After they ran out of things around us to point at, they started taking out all sorts of stuff & quizzing the cat on the English terms for each item. & then they picked up someone's jiworn (outer robe) lying near us...leading to a struggle over 'cloth', 'clothes' & 'clothing', which quite a few Lao & Thai tend to pronounce as 'clot', 'clots' & 'clotting' respectively...

Bedsheet-sized saffron 'clots':



Made by sewing together panels of 'clot' in five columns of staggered rectangles - identical to the layout of rice fields in Magadha, India. During Buddha's time, both Buddhist & non-Buddhist mendicants in India made their robes from bits of discarded cloth (pāmsūda aka. pāmsūla e.g. cloth that had been worn by the dead/burial shrouds, munched by oxen, burnt by fire, gnawed by mice, etc) scavenged from places like cremation grounds & trash heaps.

There was no standard pattern for piecing the scraps together. This confused King Bimbasara, who wanted to dismount to pay his respects to any Buddhist monk he met along his way - how was he to distinguish them from mendicants of other traditions from afar? A request for uniformity was put to Buddha, who then asked Ananda to come up with a standard design that has lasted till today...the same pattern is used for the outer robes worn by Chinese monks in the Mahayana tradition, but with bright red cloth & the pattern outlined in gold:


Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, Singapore

The teachers were pretty shocked to hear that devout Chinese Mahayana Buddhist laypeople do wear robes (e.g. at left in above photo) for chanting sessions & ceremonies within temples - black ones called 海青 (hai3 qing1) & dark brown outer robes called 缦衣 (man4 yi1)...Another detail in that photo that would shock them was how laypeople (including women) could stand with their heads higher than those of monks.

Myriad uses of old 'clots':


Photos from 2007 & 2008 in Vientiane & Sakon Nakhon

Clockwise from upper left - to protect Holy 'kidnap victim' from construction dust; to partition off a sleeping area for two very young novices, & hide their Doraemon from the old chief monk of the province who shares the same living quarters; cord belt to keep unruly bamboo stems in place; bedding for temple cat.

291206 motorbike & four eyes

01. motorbike

Back at 'Lao language school', the cat found some teachers busy examining a layman friend's motorbike parked outside Monk A's kuti. They took turns to sit on it & fiddle with various parts, dreaming of the day they would get to ride one of their own after they had returned to laylife. From time to time during the cat's last afternoon in Luang Prabang, we would all turn to look & laugh at novice B surreptitiously examining his face in the motorbike mirror & picking at his zits...once he realised that we were spying on him he would stop...but not for long :P

Fast forward almost 2 years...this time it's ex-novice B's motorbike & helmet receiving all the attention from his former wat-mates...


(Photos from 2008)

...& he still remembers why we laughed at him back then :P

Seriously, the cat hopes that wearing helmets when riding bikes will be seen as the cool thing to do by more Lao youths. According to this 2005 report, the number of motorbikes in Laos increased by 240% between 1990-2002, & the number of road fatalities by 295% between 1991-2002. Only 5% of motorcyclists have licences - too much red tape & bribes involved according to a consultant. & most have had no formal driving/riding instruction (in Luang Prabang some newbies practise on friends or relatives' bikes in an open field near Wat That Luang). A more recent report with 2006 data states that in Laos, 84% of all road traffic crashes are motorcycle related, 90% of casualties with head injuries were motorcyclists. No wonder '150 dtiang' ('150 bed' aka. Lao-Soviet Friendship Hospital, the country's only trauma centre) in Vientiane is always busy - the first report mentions that the road fatality rate per 10,000 vehicles for Laos is six times that of North America & Europe.


02. sii dtaa

As usual, the cat's spectacles drew plenty of attention too...The teachers believed that these metal frames had acted as a magnet for the illiterate seeking help with directions & reading signs, & were also the reason why the cat had (mistakenly) been treated with a lot of respect by people who think that spectacles are the preserve of highly educated teachers/monks & the elderly (think wizened grandmas hunched over their needlework). Sounds just like how plenty of Thais were once conned into thinking that the little cat was a child genius...whenever the cat wants to shock Lao or Thai people, it tells them that it has been wearing glasses since the age of 8. For more kick, it will add that this was (& still is) the norm in its country, long before computers became available.

Glasses, spectacles, eyeglasses - which was the correct term, the teachers asked. All? After some clarification on the difference in pronounciation between 'glasses' & 'grasses', they told the cat that the Lao word for spectacles is the same as the Thai equivalent (waen dtaa), & then cheekily added that 'sii dtaa' could also be used...HEY don't think that the cat doesn't know that 'sii dtaa' means 'four eyes'!! Lao people & their devilish sense of humour ;)

The cat told them that after almost two whole weeks in the far north of Laos, it had seen a grand total of only 3 bespectacled Lao. Later in the afternoon, puzzled cat wondered why Novice B looked somewhat different from an hour or so before...& it was nothing to do with fewer zits...& then it realised that it was now staring at bespectacled Lao #4 - after hearing the cat's comment, he had slipped back to his kuti to put on his glasses, & then quietly joined us again, smiling broadly & waiting for the cat to notice the change. Almost two years later, another novice-turned-monk would join our sii dtaa 'geek club', & Monk C would still be fascinated by glasses, asking both his vice-abbot & the cat to lend him their pairs to try on.

The cat is grateful for having enjoyed cheap/free access to enough reading material to lengthen its eyeballs to myopic proportions during its childhood, even if it meant perfecting the cat art of digging through garbage bins (to salvage discarded magazines). If you would like to endanger the perfect eyesight of Lao students in a more hygienic way, find out how you can do so through:

• The Language Project
  Who established & run My Library, the main culprit behind Novice B's myopia.
  
• National Library of Laos National Reading Promotion Project
  Supported by the Lao Voices Book Box fund & EDF-Lao, among others. For more on the work by the National Library of Laos, please see:
  About the Director
  Book Box libary training in Sam Neua - part 1 & part 2
  Book Box library in Vieng Xai

291206 Wat Mai - monkeys & demons

After covering the whole ceiling with stencils of scenes from the life story of Gautama Buddha, & filling the entire front wall with gilded stucco depicting the Vessantara jataka, the artists who decorated the front verandah still managed to squeeze in the epic tale of Pha Lak Pha Ram (aka. Ramakien or Ramayana) - onto the horizontal beams above...





...with every available bit of surface area so ornately embellished, the cat couldn't help but take a quick look down at its feet to check if it were stepping on even more artwork...

The demon king Ravana (Totsakan) fights Vali (upper left), the monkey king of Kishkindha, while wielding a whole array of weapons & holding onto Mandodari (Nang Mando) with his 20 arms:



Vali defeated Ravana & took Mandodari away. Ravana's teacher later snatched her back, but she was pregnant with Vali's child, who would be born as the monkey warrior prince, Anggada (Ongkot). A vengeful Ravana turned himself into a giant crab (left) to kill Anggada while he was bathing, but Vali (right) captured him:



Crabs are decapods, but the artist has given Ravana 14 legs in addition to two pincers, perhaps a reflection of his extra arms when in demon form?

Mandodari later bore Ravana a son, the demon prince Indrajit (meaning Indra's victor). He acquired this name after defeating the god Indra, shown here riding his elephant mount Erawan:



Indrajit (left) attacking Indra - above photo is of the section to the immediate left of this one:



Mandodari also bore Ravana a daughter, Sita (Nang Sida). Ravana got rid of the baby Sita in the belief that she would cause the destruction of the demons, but would later fall in love with the adult Sita & kidnap her from Rama (Pha Ram), the prince who had won her hand in marriage.

Hanuman (left), the leader of the monkeys, offers his services to Rama (second from left), after returning Lakshmana (Pha Lak, third from left) the bow that it had snatched away:



Hanuman & Anggada would help Rama search for Sita & battle Ravana to rescue her.

This beam has been damaged by rain seeping through the roof, like what has happened to ceiling stencils - the large bird (left) is either Sadayu or its brother, Sampati:



Sadayu tried in vain to rescue Sita from Ravana, & later informed Rama of her capture, while Sampati helped direct Hanuman & the monkey army to the kingdom of Langka, where Sita was being held. On their way to Langka, the monkey army had to cross a river. Hanuman thus ordered the monkeys to carry rocks over to construct a causeway:



The cat gave up trying to take clear photos of all the beams - it is simply too short, & had only 3X optical zoom & no tripod. During its 2008 visit, it managed to take a few more before it was called over to join in the morning chanting & offering of breakfast to the monks of Wat Mai to mark Boun Ok Phansa.

For other episodes of the story including the ending where Ravana is killed, see here & here.

291206 Wat Mai - Maha Wetsandon chadok

มหาเวสสันดรชาดก aka. Vessantara jataka, the story of the penultimate life of Buddha (before his rebirth as Prince Siddartha), covers the front wall of the viharn:




This story of the charitable Prince Vessantara who gave away every single thing he had, including his wife & two children, is recounted in a marathon recitation by monks & reenacted by laymen during the Boun Pha Wet festival in Laos & Isaan.

There are several pavilions, of which some probably represent the six alms halls where Prince Vessantara's mother distributed silver daily before his birth:




When the prince was older, he visited his mother's alms halls six times a month on the back of a sacred royal white elephant to distribute gold:



However, Prince Vessantara was banished from his father's kingdom after he gave away that precious elephant to another kingdom. He spent his last day in his father's kingdom giving away all of his possessions (totalling 700?), including slaves, horses & even more elephants. (For Boun Pha Wet parades, papier mache elephants & horses are made to represent these gifts; one temple in Sakon Nakhon even had a papier mache zebra.) The prince then left with his wife & kids in a chariot...



...only to encounter Brahmins who asked for the horses & chariot, which the prince naturally granted them. & so Prince Vessantara & his wife continued their journey into exile on foot, each carrying one child:



They lived as hermits in the forest beside a lotus pond. One day, the wife of a poor Brahmin, Jujaka, told him to get her two servants. Jujaka, who could not afford to buy any slaves, decided to ask Prince Vessantara for his children. The prince agreed, but his children ran away to hide under the leaves of the lotus plants in the pond. One child begging not to be given away, & the other hidden in the pond (bottom left corner):



Jujaka bound their hands with jungle vines & took them away:



Their mother was later given away to another Brahmin, who turned out to be the god Indra in disguise:



At the end of the story, the family was eventually reunited & allowed to return to the kingdom of Prince Vessantara's father. For details of the happily-ever-after fairytale ending, refer to the links above ;)

Wat Xieng Thong makes a cameo appearance in the stucco work:



More detail:



Some of the many animals - does anyone know their significance?




3D rhino that looks as if it's turning its head to glare at you:

291206 Wat Xieng Mouane - workshop 2

Click here for larger version

For anyone who might be interested, books on such patterns can be found in the bookstores of places like Silpakorn University (directly opposite Grand Palace & Temple of Emerald Buddha in Bangkok).


Click here for larger version

Classroom where drawing skills are taught:



On the left is a room where some of the paintings are on display (fourth photo from top in link) for sale.

In 2008 there was a new waterproof poster:




Click here for larger version


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Temple graffiti: