Luang Prabang (cont.)

So this morning I woke up at 530am, so that I could go see the monks collect food from the people. They do it every morning at 6am. They basically walk down the street with their bowls and people hand out sticky rice and bananas and stuff like that for them. The men can stand when they do it, but the women have to sit on the sidewalk. I bought some sticky rice and gave it, in little balls to the monks. I ran out early cause my sticky rice balls were too big so I had to go buy more. It was pretty cool. The monks are not allowed to cook food for themselves. I guess it has to do with living a simple life devoid of materialism. If you cooked your own food, you’d crave the good stuff, or want to make special, yummy meals or something like that. Your mind would be on food and the next meal instead of on meditation or whatever. But they don’t only eat the rice and bananas that they get at 6am. I guess some of the worshipers from the temples also bring them real food like curry and stuff to the temple to eat with their 6am rice. The monks only eat twice a day, breakfast and lunch. And I think they can’t eat after 11am.
After the monk thing I wandered through the morning market, which starts at like 3am. The morning market is all food, and crazy types of food! After walking through there, I really want to become a vegetarian! All the fruits and vegetables and rice looked really good, and all the meat looked so so horrible and disgusting and covered in flies and just really gross. I was like, no wonder I’m sick! Yeah, it was really not a good thing for my stomach. I had to walk through there kind of quicly and get it over with. But I got some good pictures. There were crickets in a bag, wasp larva and wasp honeycomb (I don’t know if you call the wasp’s stuff honeycomb…???) There were frogs and dead little rodent looking things. There were lots of dead chickens or ducks and big hunks of either beef or water buffalo getting chopped up, and I think piles of liver or heart or something. And of course flies everywhere. How is it ok to have flies all over your food. Yuck! I think I’ll still to buying my food in a grocery store, thanks. There were lots of veggies that I had no idea what they were. But I’d way rather take my chances with those, I think. Ugh… I don’t even want to think about it anymore.
I feel like I should be doing more while I’m here since this is really our last day in Luang Prabang, but I still don’t feel good and I don’t have any energy. I wanted to climb Mount Phousi (funny pronunciation, just guess, lol) at sunset, but I just don’t have the energy. My roommate just got back from there and she is dripping with sweat and said it was s killer, so now I don’t feel bad that I didn’t go. I just want to get over this sickness. So this afternoon, I just came back and took a nap after sitting in this cute little café all morning trying to upload my pictures. (Flickr was being sooo freakin’ slow and I have so many pictures, it’s going to take forever!) I think I’ll go back there tonight. It is a really nice place where they serve coffees and teas and ice cream and cakes and sandwiches and alcohol. Everything you need, basically. And wifi for as long as you want for $.50. I guess some of the younger monks like to practice their English with the tourists, and we were wondering if they would talk to a woman, or if they would only approach a man, but they did talk to my friend Anne today. 3 of the young ones came up to her together and were sort of egging each other on to ask, what was probably a list of questions that they’ve learned to ask, like what is your name? Where are you from? How long have you been in Laos? I guess they can talk to a girl, just as long as they don’t touch them.
I keep sort of feeling like I should eat something, but I don’t know what. Yesterday I ate a pumpkin cake/loaf thing, and a banana bread. And I woke up in the middle of the night again with cramps. Not nearly as bad as the day before, but still just really uncomfortable. Today I’ve eaten 2 baguettes and a 7up. I’m drinking lots of water, oh and I just ate a few Ritz crackers. Before I got sick I was craving a cheeseburger, but now there’s no way. But I feel like I’m getting sick of Asian food, which is bad, because I’ve got like 3 weeks in Asia to go.
Hope I'm not overloading you guys. I'm having to post a bunch of stuff all at once, while I have wifi. I did find some tomato soup to eat, so hopefully that will work out ok.