I Love The Smell Of Pigs Blood In The Morning......

It's 6am, Adam and I are wandering the streets looking for monks in orange robes, if we find them we can observe the sacred morning alms ceremony, where devoted Laos place offerings of food and drink in the monks alms bowls. By doing this they gain merit and the monks get their daily meal.




There are about 32 temples in Louang Prabang and each morning the monks set out on a defined route. We come across a few women lining the street and we find a spot to sit and observe quietly. It soon becomes clear that there are not enough people participating and offering food to the monks and some must go hungry.

We talked to a local woman later and she explains that times are changing here, so many of the women that use to participate, now work so hard, they just don't have the time to get up so early to cook food and then bring the food to the monks. We both feel like we are intruding so we decide to go to the morning food market, I am told that this is the local food market where all the women from the mountains come down to sell their produce. After visiting the evening food market the night before, I am curious to see what the locals are really eating and I am not disappointed.




We turn a corner and the street is lined with women sitting on their bamboo mats each displaying their produce. Some women are selling just one item, others are selling an unusual but small variety, enough for each women to carry down from the mountains.




The first few women are selling fruit and vegetables, violet aubergines – long ones and baby ones, bunches of morning glory, rocket (a smaller variety than ours), pumpkins,dragonfruit, longan, melons, green papaya, banana flowers, sweet tamarind, coconuts and bananas, cucumbers, watercress, lettuce, galangal, ginger, ferns, river weed, green beans, bundles of shallots, a special wood that imparts a special flavour for Or lam stew, palm shoots, okra, kaffir lime leaves, bamboo filled with a sweet dessert of purple sticky rice, coconut milk, coconut meat and banana – a speciality at this time of year.












Baskets of whole grilled fish on bamboo sticks. Dried mackerel fillets, grilled wild birds – splayed in half showing their hearts and all, a foursome of frogs roasted on lemon grass stalks. Buckets of cockroaches, necklaces of baby crabs, grubs and worms, baskets of live frogs. I hear a chicken squawking and a young woman walks past holding a live chicken by its legs that she has just bought from a street vendor, ready to take home for dinner. Small hills of dried squid, barbecued and incinerated bush rat, an enormous catfish, a woman is sitting with frogs in her lap, tying their legs together with ribbons of bamboo.







Varieties of rice in large open baskets, a mountain of soy beans in their pods. In the distance I can see a women with a mound of coffee beans on the ground. She has a mug in one hand and she is scooping them from the bottom of the pile onto the top, many times but on closer inspection the coffee beans are in fact snails.










Rings of edible flowers and then a basket containing one guinea pig (I think). A bucket of live turtles some more okra and sitting right next to it is a snake. There are whole de-feathered duck, chickens and river shrimp. Lastly we arrive at the meat section, women are chopping away. I walk through quickly to avoid the splattering of blood and almost slip over as I gain my balance something catches my eye. I am peering into a bucket of congealed pigs blood, the heady aroma wafts up my nostrils and its time to retire.