Catching up

Another random list! (Also, I was racing the clock....so my apologies for the incomplete sentences and spelling errors. I promise I'll run a spell check one day.)

1. Food: I'm way way behind on food. We've had some amazing food in Laos, and it's surprisingly different from the food we enjoyed in Thailand. I'll start with tonight and work backwards, I guess. We met a lovely man and fellow foodie at dinner last night who said the best meal he'd had was at the Luang Prabang night market. We didn't even know they had food there, but sure enough, there was a little alley at the end crammed with stalls and tables with random people crowded around them. The food was fantastic. We had a whole fish grilled over charcoals, spring rolls, and dessert (mine was a quarter of a pumpkin that had been steamed with coconut pudding/flan-esque something or other inside.....sarah got coconut stuffed bananas). Deeelicious. Last night we ate "Thanksgiving" dinner at an American owned restaurant around the corner form our guest house (more on this below, too). It ended up being a bbq where turkey was the special meat option of the evening. We all gathered around a table, then the waiters came and removed the center tiles from the tabletop and lowered in a pot full of glowing charcoals. We then got a basket of glass noodles, herbs, vegetables, etc....a bucket full of chicken broth, and a platter full of raw chicken and buffalo meat. I'll have to rustle up a picture of this contraption, but you basically set a piece of pork fat on top of a domed grill that was on top of the charcoals. There was a ring around the dome where you could pour broth and add the vegetables and noodles to make a soup. After griling up our meat, we slathered it with a peanut tamarind bbq sauce....soooo good. Not Thanksgiving dinner (although Jeff, the lovely man mentioned above, ordered some potatoes that he mashed up with some of the broth....that's as close as we got), but pretty excellent. Before that there was some phenomenal fried fish (with ginger, lime leaves, and chiles), more amazing fruit shakes, and oh! (I just remembered) the most incredible bakery in southeast Asia. Mango crumble. Mango....crumble. We've gone every day. One day we went twice. This morning we discovered they had pumpkin pie, and apparently someone there knows how to make the real deal. It was phenomenal. Luckily they have another location in Vientiane.

2. PAD: This whole protest, airport closing thing is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody seems to know what the PAD's problem is. The only answer I can get is "they don't like the prime minister for some reason". I'll wikipedia it soon. We're not planning on being back in Thailand until December 4th, but we do have a ticket out of Bangkok that day. They need to stop being ridiculous. Them and the government. If they don't, we're starting to entertain ideas of changing our tickets home, hanging out in Vietnam, and flying from Hanoi to the US.

3. Thanksgiving dinner: I sorely missed family, scalloped oyesters, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin desserts. We heard from Jacob via email that there was a Thanksgiving gathering at Lao Lao garden, so we went down there last night to chekc out prices. On our way to the restaurant, another American (he was the first one I'd met in Luang Prabang) mentioned he was also on his way to Lao Lao and we ended up joining him. We ended up at a big table full of Americans longing for the full meal but ready to settle for turkey cooked on the Lao-style bbq. It was a blast. And Jacob was there! (We randomly ended up at the same table.)

4. Now I have to go because the battery is dying on Sarah's laptop :-/

Love you all!