wedding banquet for 1200? at home? all food cooked on the premises? right this way!

Phet and Ji returned from Pakse last night and Ji was picture-perfect-Lao-holiday goodness. Shaved head, deep dark tan, multitudinous scabby mosquito bites, minor but mysterious chest rash, muddy toenails, and endless good cheer. Thank god they're back. I'm a total sloth when I'm alone. On Friday I had a holiday from school - yay for the Buddha's birth, death, and enlightenment, all celebrated on the same day! - and the sum of my accomplishments was reading Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White. Didn't wash a single dish or load of laundry, didn't even exit the house until 7 pm. Spoke two words all day long. Didn't even wash my hair. Man, if I ever become an old spinster abandoned by her family I'm totally going to have to become a cat lady.

But back to the trip! To sum up, we all had a marvellous time and a very welcome break from Bangkok.

We left last Friday before the sun rose to get to the airport on time. Ji sprang out of bed at 4 am without requiring a second call and immediately packed his bag and got dressed. Amazing. We grabbed a cab and enjoyed the zooooom to the airport without any traffic slowing us down. There is a very fancy new airport being built in Bangkok which is supposed to open in June (which would be, yes, next month) but there appears to be very little likelihood that it will actually be functional when it is opened. The government has been rushing things along in order to be seen to be keeping to their original estimates and plans, but they have gone way over budget and will likely go way over schedule. There was a pre-opening opening a few months ago during which it was discovered that several tarmacs were peeling up in the frying hot sun and that the baggage handling systems weren't handling the baggage correctly. This is not to say that the folks working on the airport are incompetant or that the airport will not be one day trustworthy, but the government is trying to get everything done on a completely unrealistic timeline. Sometime in the next few years Suvarhnibumi (cool name!) airport will open and airlines will move from the old yellow-and-brown Don Muang airport in the north to the new one in the east, but don't hold your breath. We certainly aren't!

The flight to Ubon was pleasant. We got cold hot dogs in solidinous white buns garnished with tartar sauce for our meal. Ji very calmly read the safety brochure for a full half hour. I read the paper. Phet kept snoring off mid-sentence with his mouth open. He'd been up till 2 the night before working with his colleagues after spaghetti dinner at our place. Khairil was in town from KL and Sunil was in town from Bangalore, so they all met up with James and Yoke Mei here to hash out various items of high importance while I slept and Ji raced his remote control cars around their feet.

When we arrived in Ubon we thought we'd try and take the new Ubon-Pakse bus, and so we looked for a cab to take us to the bus station, but we could only find the fancy taxis without metres, and then while we were idling by the curb Ing called and said they'd be able to meet us at the border if we wanted. So, just to make things easy we hopped in a brand new Toyota and enjoyed our chauffeur driven hour-and-a-half drive to the border. It was delightful just seeing a little bit of green landscape. I don't mind Bangkok at all, but it is not a pretty city. There are few parks and green spaces (maybe because it's been built up so recently?) and the buildings are mostly unremarkable. It's neither tidy and new like KL nor ancient, polluted, and fascinating like Hanoi. It's just a big, busy city without many grand vistas. But to get out into the countryside -- ahh! Rice fields, trees, dark brown wooden houses trimmed with navy blue and white paint, cows, and buffalo.

Phet's Mum and brother Long came to meet us at the border with the truck. Meh looked really well. Her eyes have been bothering her a bit lately, but otherwise she seems to be in good health and good spirits. The drive into Pakse was even nicer than the one to the border. You can immediately tell when you hit Laos - no lines painted on the "highway", no airbrushed landscaping. Just lots of rickety houses, red mud, and wallowing buffalo. Before we went to the family house Meh took us out for a proper bowl of pho. Again, nuthin' wrong with Thailand, but you can't get a good bowl of pho there for love or money. There is a pho-type bowl of noodles that you can buy. Looks pretty much like pho. And it's made of pho-size rice noodles, in a beef broth, with thinly sliced beef, and is garnished with bean sprouts and fresh basil. But - like most things in Thailand - it is unbelieveably sweet. The broth is like syrup. Beef syrup. Bleh. But Pakse, on the other hand, is full of pho-making Vietnamese folks. The entire downtown which used to be entirely Chinese is now mostly Vietnamese. Perhaps that's why it feels so homey for us Torontonians. At any rate, we most certainly enjoyed our big, steaming bowls of proper pho as we slurped them down by the banks of the mighty Mekong. Must admit, though, that I don't miss the Vietnamese habit of dropping all restaurant refuse underneath the restaurant tables. You get used to it when you live in Vietnam, but then when you've been away for awhile and come to eat at a Vietnamese-and-near-or-in-Vietnam restaurant and all the old napkins, squeezed limes, bits of gristle, and other rubbish are all underfoot as you eat, you are a little bit unfamiliar with the style of the place.

Our welcome at the family house was warm and cheery. Suki and Yaki and Fuji are all gorgeous and delightful. Suki is still learning at the local Chinese school and can write up a storm. He's a very sweet and fairly quiet kid who is drop dead beautiful. Yaki is just a little older than Ji and is full of tricks and jokes. Fuji is a tough little brick of a baby and goes around whacking things with his meaty little fists. Ji had a great time pulling out the presents we'd brought for the kids - superhero shirts, tank tops, shorts, and pencil cases for the whole gang. He did about eight thousand percent better on this trip than the previous one. The last time we were in Pakse he was hugely attention-seeking, displeased with the squat toilet, and basically a big pain in the neck. This time he settled in right away, having fun with his cousins, eating up a storm, enjoying the motorbike rides with his Pa, learning how much fun the market could be (a shiny plastic sword purchased by Auntie Ing went a long way towards making this visit to Pakse The Best Ever), and finally recognizing the practical and tidy nature of the squat toilet.

Saturday was spent gearing up for the wedding. Ing and Ling spent most of the day out whizzing around delivering invitations - these go out just before the wedding here as opposed to six months before the wedding in the land of Miss Manners. When we asked Meh how many people she expected, she said they had given out 600 invitations, which meant that about 1200 people could be expected to show up, but no one was really sure. There might be rain. There might be other weddings. Who could say. Nevertheless, the plan was to cook for 1000 and hope for the best. In the afternoon we went to help get the stew ready by heading out to kilometre 10 to Long and Kwan's house where two cows were going to be turned into wedding dinner. I'm a big believer that kids should see where their meat comes from, so Ji came to hang out with us too. Growing up at the farm I was never squeamish around bloody bits of anything - used to play hockey with the chicken heads, in fact, and one of my favourite things to do was to go down to the Lillydale plant in Ramsey with my Grampa and pick up barrels of bits for the mink and drive the barrels back up to the farm. I found it interesting getting a tour of the chicken plucking plant and later on I toured a pork packing plant. Neither visit made me want to put down the KFC or the bacon. Then, of course, when we lived in Hanoi, our laneway seemed to be pig-sticking-central. Every day at 4 am we'd hear the relentless, murderous squeals of the pigs. That did bug me. But mainly just because it woke me up - I still ate my bun cha and gio throughout the day. I don't mean to say that I think that vegetarians are a bunch of nutcases. Nope, my Mum and brother and brother in law are absolutely in the right to choose not to eat meat - and as studies show, they are likely helping the environment as a result. What I do think is that meat eaters like me should be well aware of where their meat comes from and how it gets to them. It seems like a cop out to scarf down a steak but to be squeamish about knowing which bit of cow that piece of tasty, succulent flesh came from. So: if given the opportunity to see my dinner under construction, I will take that opportunity for sure. I might not have truly savoured that first bite of grilled steak served at the slaughterhouse (which was just a wall-less thatched roof over a cement floor in the middle of the gorgeous, mountainous Lao landscape) but I felt morally better for having witnessed the spectacle that brought my meat to me.

Ji was fascinated by the cow dismantle-agement. Afterwards, he turned around to me and said, "Mum, I guess I love fish more than I love cows." "Why's that?" I asked. "Remember when we went for Chinese food and they caught the fish to cook it, and I almost cried? But today I watched everything no problem!" It's also nice, in a way, to see that your meat is coming from a pretty low-scale production. Unlike the monster penicillin cows in Canada, Lao Cows are put out to pasture all the time, relaxingly munch on only the freshest of plants and grasses (no 'meal' made out of their cousins, nope), and when their time comes they are in the company of perhaps one other doomed beast at most and are not run through the assembly line of horror that apparently turns western cows into burgers at a ridiculously high speed. Also heartening is that every single bit of the cow except the horns is used carefully. Intestines and tripe are used in salads or with broth, and this time I even watched while the tail got prepared for sale. Did you know the tail is actually hollow? I didn't. Lastly, of course, I'm pro-meat for the same reasons I'm pro-mink. My family makes their money selling animal products and as a recipient of the goods purchased with their meat-dollars I think it's important to support them. Yay, beef!

On Sunday, the day of the wedding, the ladies in the family - excluding lazy old me - woke up at 4 am to get started on the preparations. All of the food was cooked in the backyard of Meh's house. By the time I went to shower, there were 14 ladies sitting out on mats in the yard starting to fry up tofu for the soup that was to be on the menu that evening. However, before everyone's attention could be fully focused on the dinner meal, the lunch for 100 had to be prepared. The tradition is for the groom's family to arrive en masse at the bride's house and for a short baci celebration to take place, followed by lunch. Ing went to get her hair and makeup and (crazy dragon!) nails done and was back by 10:30. Meanwhile, other friends of the family prepared the baci tree in the living room. I don't know what this is actually called in Lao, but it is a beautiful tree-shaped leaf and flower sculpture that is hung with lucky strings, surrounded by good luck symbols for fertility (eggs) and plenty (cakes, cookies, other goodies), and is topped off with fluttering flags made of Lao, Thai, and US money. A monk or an old wise person then chants a number of prayers before the guests then take the lucky strings and tie them around the wrists of the honourees, wishing them good fortune.

Just after 11:00, word came that the groom and his entourage had been spotted. All the Sayos and their friends and family got ready to greet Song and his family at the gate to Meh's house. Song came along surrounded by friends carrying bottles of whiskey. He looked exceedingly handsome in his deep scarlet silk pants, white silk shirt, and woven silk sash. One of his friends carried an umbrella over him to shield him from the blindingly hot sun. When everyone got to Meh's house there was much laughing and jesting and all the main players had to drink from each other's bottles. Some of our side had to make sure that alcoholic and other related expectations were met prior to allowing Song to pass into our house. Ing and her cousins held a gold belt across the threshold, and a few of our male cousins held up a bamboo pole. At long last, Song was allowed to pass and he went in to the living room to begin the baci with Phet's Mum and Dad. We came in to join the ceremony shortly afterward and sat and sweated endlessly while the chants were chanted. Then we tied lucky strings on Ing and Song's wrists, wrapping 1000 baht bills up in our knots. There was a photo call in the newlywed's bedroom after the baci, and then everyone had a big, yummy lunch. Here are the photos from the morning's festivities.

All afternoon the ladies cooked and cooked and cooked. They cooked three massive cauldrons of stew. They cooked fried rice by the bucketload in a wok the size of Nathan Philips Square. They chopped up endless vegetables for a cold salad and meat and herbs for a warm salad. And the tofu and seaweed soup simmered in tanks bigger than the average bathtub. (Well, ok, that last one was a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my drift). At around 5:30, there was a move to plate and saran wrap all the food. Very intelligently, everything was prepared ahead of time and set out onto the banquet tables an hour ahead of time so that there would be little need to actually serve during the wedding feast itself. Each table - now dappled with the rays of the setting sun - was set with two salads, a dish of stew, a spicy squid stir fry, a big plate of fried rice, a big bowl of soup, two bottles of Beer Lao, and a bottle of water. Pretty ingenious, really, as it was cool enough for the food to stay perfectly good for that last hour before the guests arrived, but it was hot enough that the soup stayed warm underneat the plastic wrap. S-m-r-t.

I thought it seemed a bit late, but the guests started arriving right on schedule at 7:30. There was a pretty gate of flowers set up in front of the tables that all the guests had to pass through, and we stood just outside the flower gate to greet the guests. Ing looked stunning in her exquisitely (gold) emboridered wedding dress and Song looked dapper in a dark suit. Phet's Mum and Dad and several other friends and cousins stood with us to meet the guests. Ji had a great time dancing in between sabaidee-ing the wedding guests, much to his grandmother's delight. While folks were eating, there was a great live band that made celebratory announcements and sang festive songs. As the meal wound down and more drinks were drunk they played even better and better Lao dancing songs and wild tunes. I had to crash and go to bed by 9:30, but I stayed awake lying in bed listening to the band play for another half an hour. I woke up again at midnight to the sounds of Mary J. Blige. The band had called it a night, but the young 'uns had hooked up their VCD player to the giant speaker system and they were making a real party of it. Phet reported later that there was much dancing with wild abandon and that everyone had a marvellous time. I didn't join the dancing, but I went and ate a big bowl of soup to help clean up the (surprisingly not so substantial) leftovers. The rest of the family apparently passed out around 2:00, sprawled hither and yon throughout the house. Check out the evening photos.

I woke up at 7:30 and went out to check how disastrous the clean up was going to be. 1200 guests, remember? Well, by the time I got up, the yard was clean, the entire front of the house had been swept and tidied, and everything was pretty much back to normal except that Ling was actually sleeping in.

Dang.

Just goes to show you, if you ever want to cater a party and you're thinking of inviting, oh say EVERYONE YOU'VE EVER MET, give the Sayos a call. They know their stuff. [Laos-17-May-2006]