Lao New Year is derived from the lunar calendar.  The Lao, Thai, Khmers and Myanmarese, who believe in the lunar system, celebrate New Year during this time.  There is also a water festival that happens in Buddhist "Therevada" countries, like the ones mentioned.  (The Therevada school of Buddhism, is arguably closer to its Indian roots and places a heavier emphasis on monasticism.)  This year is 2549, which is a reference point to Buddha’s birth, 543 years before Christ.

"Sam gyeop saal" is roughly like bacon, but thicker and from a different part of the pig.  When you eat sam gyeop saal in a restaurant, you have to grill it yourself at your table.  Once done, the meat is placed on a lettuce leaf, and other things can be placed on top before consuming it.  This can include rice, sesame oil with salt, three bean paste, garlic, mushrooms, kimchi, onions, hot peppers, or anything else according to your taste.  Many foreigners don’t seem to like it because it’s really fatty.  I, on the other hand, will happily consume most food… even better if it’s free.  The following pictures are for… you guessed it, Rory.  I’ll also happily take picture requests from other ex-Kangneung alumni.

Ras poses in front of a sign that says, "fresh sam gyeop sal", meaning that it’s not frozen.

Me, Lane, and Raswan.  Mat is taking the photo.

A message from Ras for Rory.  I printed this sign to be use for this special occasion.

We had a guy at the next table take a soju shot for you!  Behind him is an advertisement for soju.

This group of 16 year olds also wanted to say hi to you too!

What a great meal!  Wish you were here!

Have you ever had Beerlao?  If you’ve ever been in Laos, I’m sure you’ve tried it… it’s only about 56 cents (USD).  Weird enough, I’ve also seen it in Korea Town in Los Angeles.  I’m not a beer drinker, so I can’t say I’ve tried it.  I was surprised to learn that in 2004, it was voted best beer in Asia by Time Magazine.  The full CBC article can be read HERE.

Watching the sun set over the Mekong River while sipping a cold Beerlao (side order of deep-fried crickets optional) has become a must-do for visitors. And travellers returning home post comments on Internet sites such as: "probably the best beer in the world," "decent beer but massively hyped up," and "when is it coming to Sydney?"

So far only one per cent of production is exported, mainly to Cambodia, Vietnam, France, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It also is smuggled into neighbouring Thailand, which puts onerous restrictions on its import.

But Bounkanh said a factory to be built in southern Laos as an export base will double production capacity to some 240 million litres a year.

The enterprise, which traces its origins to French colonial times, added dark brew and a light beer to its regular lager this year and went into a 50-50 joint venture with Denmark’s Carlsberg Breweries, the world’s No. 5 beer-maker.

The Secret War
The war in Laos was so secret that the country’s name was never included in any of the original US records; it was referred to as "the other theater".

Neutral Laos was off limits according to the Geneva agreement. As a workaround, the US sent CIA agents and soldiers in under the guise of civilians; the air raid missions were fought by men in cutoff shorts and cowboy hats.

The Vietnamese didn’t bother to disguise their soldiers.

Staggering Statistics
The USA conducted over 10,000 missions during the nine-year war and dropped over 1,000,000 bombs. This equated to one ton of explosives dropped for every man, woman, and child living in Laos at the time.

Costly Devastation
The secret war in Laos remains the most costly operation ever conducted by the USA. US taxpayers funded the nine-year war at a cost of $2 million per day!

Below is an article I found about this topic.  It has some insightful linguistic information.

What’s in a name? ‘Lao’ or ‘Laos’
By Nick Enfield & Grant Evens
From The Vientiane Times, September 1-3 1998

There appears to be confusion among some foreigners in Laos about how to spell the name of the country known today by its official name, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.  In particular there is confusion about whether to refer to the country as ‘Lao’ or ‘Laos’ when writing or speaking in English.  Historically it has been common for English writers to refer to the country as Laos when not using the country’s official title, and this is the standard form outside of the LPDR today. So why confusion inside the country?   One source of the confusion for some foreigners appears to be that when they come to the country they discover that in the Lao language, the country’s name has no final ‘s’.  Indeed, there are no words at all in Lao which have a final ‘s’. Some people therefore seem to think that it is more correct to say, for example, that Vientiane is the capital of ‘Lao’ rather than ‘Laos’. But where does this logic come from? There are a great many country names that are pronounced quite differently in English, or indeed are completely different words in the home language.   An outstanding example is the country name ‘China’ which actually does not exist in any variety of Chinese. In Mandarin, the official language of China, the country is referred to as ‘Zhong Guo’. In Lao, China is referred to as ‘Jiin’. Another example is India, whose name in Hindi is ‘Bharat’, a completely different word to the English. Further away from the Asian context, inhabitants of the country called ‘Finland’ call their homeland ‘Soumi’. A better known European example is Germany, which is known as ‘Allemagne’ in French, and ‘Deutschland’ in the native German. All these examples show that it is quite common not only for the name of a country to be pronounced quite differently in various languages, but indeed may be a completely different word.   We have heard reports where foreign experts have been instructed by some Lao officials not to use the term ‘Laos’ in their reports, but to call the country ‘Lao’ instead.  “Laos does not exist”, they have been told by officials.   So, for example, we can find the following sentences in a recent UN document: “Reduction of rural poverty is a main motivating factor for rural development in Lao. At its stage of development, rural poverty reduction in Lao will come by increasing rural employment possibilities…” The uses of ‘Lao’ in both cases could have been ‘Laos’, and we would suggest that it is more desirable to use ‘Laos’ in these contexts. Only if the document had used Lao PDR’ in both cases would it have been correct to use ‘Lao’.   It is a puzzle to us why some officials would issue such instructions to foreign experts. Despite that fact that the Lao themselves have their own distinctive ways of pronouncing the names of other countries, we can only think that this instruction is some kind of zealous nationalism which insists that foreigners use the name ‘Lao’ in the same way the Lao do in their own language. Such officials may be unaware that the Lao also force the names of other countries to conform to their own pronunciation conventions.

Consider the ways in which the Lao language renders the names of various foreign countries. While in the cases of Vietnam and Cambodia, Lao pronounces the names of these countries quite like the natives do, there are others that are extremely different in terms of pronunciation. Two good examples from Europe are Austria and Belgium. These are pronounced in Lao as something like ‘Ottalik’ and ‘Bensik’ respectively (from French Autteriche and Belgique).   It so happens that English has a huge range of possible sounds that can appear at the end of a word. In English, the rounding-off of the word ‘Laos’ with an ‘s’ is a very typical thing to do, as any Lao who struggles with an ‘s’ on the end of every second word will attest. In Lao, however, and many other languages of Southeast Asia, it is impossible to finish a word with sounds like ‘s’,'f’,'th’, and so on. In Cantonese, for example, there is a tendency to add an ‘ee’ sound to the end of words that end with ‘s’. ‘Price’, for example, is pronounced ‘pricey’, or ‘tips’ becomes ‘tipsy’, and so on. Cantonese does not have a word-final ‘s’ sound, and so it has to add a vowel so that the ‘s’ can be colloquially pronounced. This process of changing the pronunciation of a borrowed word to conform to the conventions of the borrowing language is called indigenisation.   Laos with an ‘s’ was one solution in English for the country’s name. It could have been ‘Lao’, but it may well have been ‘Lao-land’, by literal translation from the Lao.  This of course happened with Thailand when ‘Prathet Thai’ was translated as ‘Thai-land’. But, for reasons which are obscure to us, ‘Pathet Lao’ is not ‘Lao-land’ and nor is it a country called ‘Lao’.  Indeed, the latter usage is quite marked in English, and when used by foreigners seems almost pretentious.   Of course ‘Lao’ is perfectly correct in English when used as an adjective. For example: a Lao person, the Lao language, a Lao poem, etc. One other possibility that has tended to fall into-use is ‘Laotian’. So one can say: a Laotian person, the Laotian language, Laotian poem. This, however, seems to be losing out to the more economical ‘Lao’.

The old saying (in English) goes: “When in Rome do as the Romans do”, but only if you are speaking Italian should you say ‘Italia’. Similarly in Laos, only if you are speaking Lao do you need to say ‘Lao’ when referring to the country.

Below is an article I found about this topic.  It has some insightful linguistic information.

There appears to be confusion among some foreigners in Laos about how to spell the name of the country known today by its official name, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.  In particular there is confusion about whether to refer to the country as ‘Lao’ or ‘Laos’ when writing or speaking in English.  Historically it has been common for English writers to refer to the country as Laos when not using the country’s official title, and this is the standard form outside of the LPDR today. So why confusion inside the country?   One source of the confusion for some foreigners appears to be that when they come to the country they discover that in the Lao language, the country’s name has no final ‘s’.  Indeed, there are no words at all in Lao which have a final ‘s’. Some people therefore seem to think that it is more correct to say, for example, that Vientiane is the capital of ‘Lao’ rather than ‘Laos’. But where does this logic come from? There are a great many country names that are pronounced quite differently in English, or indeed are completely different words in the home language.   An outstanding example is the country name ‘China’ which actually does not exist in any variety of Chinese. In Mandarin, the official language of China, the country is referred to as ‘Zhong Guo’. In Lao, China is referred to as ‘Jiin’. Another example is India, whose name in Hindi is ‘Bharat’, a completely different word to the English. Further away from the Asian context, inhabitants of the country called ‘Finland’ call their homeland ‘Soumi’. A better known European example is Germany, which is known as ‘Allemagne’ in French, and ‘Deutschland’ in the native German. All these examples show that it is quite common not only for the name of a country to be pronounced quite differently in various languages, but indeed may be a completely different word.   We have heard reports where foreign experts have been instructed by some Lao officials not to use the term ‘Laos’ in their reports, but to call the country ‘Lao’ instead.  "Laos does not exist", they have been told by officials.   So, for example, we can find the following sentences in a recent UN document: "Reduction of rural poverty is a main motivating factor for rural development in Lao. At its stage of development, rural poverty reduction in Lao will come by increasing rural employment possibilities…" The uses of ‘Lao’ in both cases could have been ‘Laos’, and we would suggest that it is more desirable to use ‘Laos’ in these contexts. Only if the document had used Lao PDR’ in both cases would it have been correct to use ‘Lao’.   It is a puzzle to us why some officials would issue such instructions to foreign experts. Despite that fact that the Lao themselves have their own distinctive ways of pronouncing the names of other countries, we can only think that this instruction is some kind of zealous nationalism which insists that foreigners use the name ‘Lao’ in the same way the Lao do in their own language. Such officials may be unaware that the Lao also force the names of other countries to conform to their own pronunciation conventions.

Consider the ways in which the Lao language renders the names of various foreign countries. While in the cases of Vietnam and Cambodia, Lao pronounces the names of these countries quite like the natives do, there are others that are extremely different in terms of pronunciation. Two good examples from Europe are Austria and Belgium. These are pronounced in Lao as something like ‘Ottalik’ and ‘Bensik’ respectively (from French Autteriche and Belgique).   It so happens that English has a huge range of possible sounds that can appear at the end of a word. In English, the rounding-off of the word ‘Laos’ with an ‘s’ is a very typical thing to do, as any Lao who struggles with an ‘s’ on the end of every second word will attest. In Lao, however, and many other languages of Southeast Asia, it is impossible to finish a word with sounds like ‘s’,'f’,'th’, and so on. In Cantonese, for example, there is a tendency to add an ‘ee’ sound to the end of words that end with ‘s’. ‘Price’, for example, is pronounced ‘pricey’, or ‘tips’ becomes ‘tipsy’, and so on. Cantonese does not have a word-final ‘s’ sound, and so it has to add a vowel so that the ‘s’ can be colloquially pronounced. This process of changing the pronunciation of a borrowed word to conform to the conventions of the borrowing language is called indigenisation.   Laos with an ‘s’ was one solution in English for the country’s name. It could have been ‘Lao’, but it may well have been ‘Lao-land’, by literal translation from the Lao.  This of course happened with Thailand when ‘Prathet Thai’ was translated as ‘Thai-land’. But, for reasons which are obscure to us, ‘Pathet Lao’ is not ‘Lao-land’ and nor is it a country called ‘Lao’.  Indeed, the latter usage is quite marked in English, and when used by foreigners seems almost pretentious.   Of course ‘Lao’ is perfectly correct in English when used as an adjective. For example: a Lao person, the Lao language, a Lao poem, etc. One other possibility that has tended to fall into-use is ‘Laotian’. So one can say: a Laotian person, the Laotian language, Laotian poem. This, however, seems to be losing out to the more economical ‘Lao’.

The old saying (in English) goes: "When in Rome do as the Romans do", but only if you are speaking Italian should you say ‘Italia’. Similarly in Laos, only if you are speaking Lao do you need to say ‘Lao’ when referring to the country.