We’ve had a chilled out few weeks, mainly motorbiking around Luang Namtha. We’ve also been renovating the kitchen with new larger benches, and also upstairs in the shop, putting bamboo on the walls up there as well and getting it ready for next high season. There’s been lots of laughs again with the builders and lots of minor mishaps that have been worked out. We had to wonder why the guy who made the new benches brought his tape measure along and measured everything, when the benches that turned up were completely different measurements to what we needed. In the end though we managed with a bit of ingenuity to make it fit along with the other one so everything worked out fine!
Our friend Shahu who owns the Indian restaurant in town and his wife San had their baby and we attended the baby party. Traditionally when a baby is one month old the parents have a baby party which is a Baci ceremony (string tying ceremony) where everyone wishes good luck to the parents and child and asks all parts of the child’s soul to come into his/her body for the best possible start and protection in life.
.
The rice fields are now beginning to be planted so it’s really nice to see some green returning to the area. We’ve spent a lot of time in rice paddy huts watching a lot of sunsets over the newly planted rice, it’s really cool to see the new fields filled with water and the sunset reflecting them. We’re now really looking forward to the return of the thousands of dragonflies that hover over the rice fields once the rice has grown some more. Living here really is so interesting and so much fun for us – the diverse wildlife and views dependent on the time of year are constantly inspiring. We even continue to discover new fruits – we thought that now we’ve been here over a year that we would have seen all the jungle fruit, but this month there have been two new ones that we didn’t see last year – and one of them is even a little bit like feijoa which is pretty cool! Now that the shop is running itself, we’ve also started planning our next project for Luang Namtha – this one’s going to be even more exciting… we can’t wait!
