Sabai Dee from Laos.

"Sabai dee" means hello in Lao, and you can hear that all the time when you meet people on the street and where ever else. We are now in Luang Prabang in the north of Laos, and has been here for 3 days. It is a nice place and I've been surprised how calm and relaxed it is, when thinking of how many people is coming here. Maybe it is because the city is big ebnough to digest them all, even it is a small town of only about 25.000 inhabitants. More I think is has to do with the locals, as they do not excess the fact that many people come to visit. It is all very calm and the city is spread over a very large area, so it kinds of absorb all the visitors.
It is a stunning beuatiful town on a tiny tongue of land between two rivers, and the fact that it is a former royal capitol, can explain the many extreme fine and nice houses in french colonial style, which dominates the oldest part of town. Most of these are nowadays turned into Guest houses, hotels and restaurants, but nayway in a very modest form.
The trip here from the new capitol- Vientiane, where we arrived on the 19th - was long and hard, about 12 hours on a bus, on busy dusty roads at first, and then over some mountains on very narrow roads, where the bus had to fight with steep passes and a load of huge trucks on the way down. It is a hard trip and you only want to do it once -if you can avoid it.
But now we are here we do not regret it, only thinking that the next time we will fly into Luang Prabang and leave Vientiane out of the schedule, because it isn't really worth it.
It has just been Christmas and we celebrated it this way:
Freinds of ours who also came here before us, had arranged a trip with the local "Libraryboat" to a little village two hours by boat up the Mekong river. The library is a charity organisation, and you can sponsor books and learning material to the small schools in the villages. We sponsored some books and pencils, and went with the library boat to the village to hand these over. On the beach we were met by the whole school and their teacher. First they sang a greeting to us, then we got to talk to them and we did some language games before we could hand over these small gifts. But for them it meant a lot to get some pens and a scetch book each, and some reading books for their class. This was the oddest Christmas eve day in my life, but worth it for the response and the over 30 smiling faces.

Merry Christmas

This is going to be the last Hong Kong post in twenty ten. Next post will be from the peoples republic of Laos. We are at gate 47 at Hong Kong International Airport and waiting for our flight out. First stop Hanoi and then an hour later we board for Vientiane in Laos.
We will spend all Christhmas in Laos and at Christmas eve and Christhmas day we will be in the former Royal Capitol of Luang Prabang.
In my suitcase I have two pair of shorts and 8 t-shirts. That will do, at least I hope so.

Bye for now.

From Treasure Island to the Plastic Beach.

First Sunday in Advent, so merry Christmas to all of you around the world and I hope you will have a nice and cosy day, inside or outside or whatever the weather allows you to, in your part of the world.
The Christmas month started for me on a beach, and compared to what I’ve heard about the weather in Europe, we have had the most fantastic weather period with average temperatures of 26 degrees and a clear blue Sky.
But back to that thing I mentioned with the beach. On the 1st of December I joined our year 6 team and went with them on a nature experience camp on Lantau Island.
The Camp is called “Treasure Island, and is managed by a group of young people from places like New Zealand, the US, Australia and the UK. They run this camp for students from Hong Kong and offers activities like water sports, hiking and trekking and rope courses. It is a tradition that our year 6 goes there every year in December, but this was the first time that I got to join them.
And what a nice experience it was, not only for the students, but for all of us who went there.
The venue at Pui O beach on the south side of Lantau Island is just amazing, and when the weather turns out like it did, it is nearly as being on holiday. Well apart from the 167 students, who are all around you, I mean. We all slept in tents 2 minutes from on of the incredible Lantau Style beaches, and most of the day and evenings were spent on or around this beach.
Back to the civilisation on Friday afternoon, I started to boot my self up to the visit to another beach on Friday evening. This time is was a visit to the Plastic Beach, and the guide to this was the band Gorillaz.
And what a visit this was. It was kind of a mixture of concert and going to the cinema. To every of the songs, there was a movie playing on a huge screen on the stage, over the band. So if you couldn’t see so much of the band on stage, there was enough to look at on the screens. But there was a band there I just have to say, and they did play real instruments, I believe.