blowin' in the wind

tha kaek, laos

regional saying: the vietnamese plant the rice, the cambodians watch it grow, and the lao listen to it blowin' in the wind. having gotten my toes wet in each of the these countries, i will attest to the statement's accuracy with whatever limited credibility i may have. with regard to the latter country, there is room for a potato/potahto disagreement. to some, this evokes the attribute of laziness. to others, like myself, this suggests that the people in question are "chilled out." however, to the first group, anyone who employs "chilled out" in their vocabulary is nothing if not lazy and then we're right back where we started.

the point is that there are certain places where we say some derivative of "island time" and laos is one of them. if the siesta were an internationally-recognized sport, there would be a lot of these polysyllabic names floating around dinner tables during the upcoming london games [and the siesta would definitely be a part of the summer olympiad rather than the winter.] drivers set up hammocks within their tuk tuks. one bus driver prolonged a rest stop fuelup for ten minutes so he could watch the rest of a kickboxing match. an inevitable part of any meal is standing up to fetch your own water or beer. sometimes, this is because the staff is so engrossed in whatever music video or soap opera is pixellating on their television screen. usually, it's because the bartender/server is eight years old (and most certainly does not know how to make a proper old-fashioned.)

what is so surprising about this phenomenon is that it does not make sense, at least regionally. china's directly north and it's hard to characterize them as passive when they're presently blowing the dust off the triangular trade playbook. to the east is vietnam, home to people who spent weeks in tunnels fighting the world's superpower and still tended their fields. cambodia is to the south and they certainly share the blithe disposition, but they're also a couple grains of time's sands after a genocide and can be granted leniency for not wanting to take life too seriously. geographically and culturally, laos seems to be spooning thailand to the west and they're also known to be sunnier than a detergent commercial. but not so fast: thailand is experiencing massive economic growth and occasional political unrest, so they're a tiger (raaaarr!) in disguise.

when we look inside the borders, it's almost more baffling. for one, it's inland. the heartland of any continent is home to the milk-drinkers and sun-up-to-sun-down type crowd that frequently appear in car commercials. the people on the coasts are the ones wearing sunglasses and using words like, "bummer." furthermore, this place is pretty far from ethnic homogeneity. there is a dominant group (you guessed it: they're called lao), but the country is comprised of over forty ethnic groups with a population of only six million. they were colonized by the french almost as an afterthought, so it's not as if there is some unifying experience to tie all the groups together. when you factor in that it's one of the planet's poorest countries, it seems an almost perfect recipe for divisiveness and chaos. instead, it's.....

imagine going to a wedding where bride and groom are each other's respective third marriage and each of their parents is on their second spouse with several kids from each union. everyone is invited, everyone attends. the sound system breaks, the caterer only has rice cakes, and the officiate is slurring his words early into his very long, disjointed, and borderline offensive sermon. the tents collapse and grandma soils herself and still, at the end of the evening, everybody links up with arms around each others' shoulders and sings "(i've had) the time of my life" with full projection and mean every single bar and word of that song. put some palm trees and a slow river in the background, and that's laos.

i have a feeling i'm going to like it here.