Nick Comes to the School - Disco Night!

Nick and I take a Lao bus to the school. As we board we notice that the walkway between the seats is filled with rice bags waist high. We have to climb over them to reach some seats and when we do we see that the floor space in front of the seats is also filled with rice bags.

This seems comical and we are in high spirits with the absurdity of the situation. I tell Nick that this isn't so bad compared to when Ramsey and So took the same bus but they had goats and pigs tied down onto the roof of the bus. The were bleating and oinking through the ride and then of course it began to rain and the goat and pig "juice" began leaking through the roof and onto the passengers. Wow, perhaps that would have been less comical. I consider Nick and I lucky just to be inconvenienced by space, and not by livestock run off.

We arrive at the school and one of the students greets us at the gate, Sai says hello and shakes Nick's hand - progress! The other students also greet Nick, and I see that they seem a lot more confident then when I first met them. Nick is great with the students and encourages them to interact with him in English. They are very interested in another falang at the school. The girls seem to be especially interested in Nick, and Ramsey comes over to tell us that the girls all find Nick hot. Ramsey has said that the Lao usually find him ugly so he suggests that Nick is considered more attractive because he is lighter skinned, with a smaller than usual falang nose, and because he is clean shaven (the Lao women don't like facial hair).

Nick sees the students playing rattan ball and decides to join in. The students seem impressed by his attempts and he manages a few good moves. Ramsey watches for a while, and even though he refused to play when I asked him to play with me earlier (claiming it hurt his feet) some sort of male competitive pride sets in and Ramsey decides to play on the team opposite Nick.

In the kitchen I challenge Nick to eat a whole hot chilli pepper in front of the students. He does it without much difficulty and they are impressed. Later Ramsey said that he had to do the same thing cause Nick set the bar, but Ramsey was feeling a bit of gut rot as a result. Male pride strikes again.

Nick experiences his first night time bath in the river; he is taken aback at the strength of the current and the unevenness of the stream bed. He has a lot of difficulty getting his footing and I can't help but laugh at how odd he seems just falling everywhere or being stuck not knowing where to move next in the stream around the slippery rocks. I warned him it was tricky!

They have planned special food and a dance in my honour since I'm leaving in a couple of days. They have retrieved an amp and music system from another village and have set up the school into a disco. You have no idea how weird this seems. On top of that, it is the full moon tonight.

They are all wearing their best clothes and all of the girls have foundation and powder on their faces to make them look whiter. I have seen a few of the girls do this before, since they prize white skin over dark, but all of them wearing it at once seems really strange - they all look like weird ghosts. Even So has put on some makeup for the evening.

They play Thai folk music, Lao music, Southeast Asian dancehall as well as American hip hop. Ramsey takes my flashlight and proceeds to wave it about frantically to mimic a disco ball scattering light on all the dancers. His ability to keep this up during the night is a bit absurd in combination with his frantic style of "freedom" dancing as I call it - I can't stop laughing every time I see him spasming around.

The girls keep on surrounding me and mimicking all of my dance moves en mass. It is a bit unnerving so I begin to dance with the boys who are doing more hip hop moves and robot moves. I'm not sure how they learned this stuff but it was more fun to try to dance this way.

What the heck…I get Nick’s belt off of him and get the students to limbo under it. They find this very amusing, especially as they fall.

Very surreal evening.

Fan Yuan - Sweet dreams.