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.