i think each country will have their own way of practising Buddhism according to their local situation & culture…Sri Lanka will be different from Cambodia will be different from Lao will be different from Myanmar will be different from Thai…

in Thailand, monks are sometimes given so much food, it can’t fit into their bowl & bag, they need dek wat (temple boy) to follow them on bintabaat to help carry the food. some monks even take a tuktuk back to the temple if they have too much food to carry…

in the old city part of Luang Prabang, there are so many monks & novices, i think you will need many many dek wat to help them carry the food if laymen don’t bring some of the food directly to the temple =P maybe tourists are on the street taking photos of the monks & not looking at the empty temples, so they don’t see the village people walking into the temple & bringing food to kitchen?

bintabaat in other parts of Luang Prabang away from the old city (& in other parts of Lao) is more like what we are used to seeing in Thailand =)

i also had the same thoughts about buying food for tak baat. in the end i didn’t buy from the ladies because it might encourage them to disturb tourists like some tuktuk drivers?

in Thailand education is free up to mor 3 but in Lao it’s free only for primary school. & not every village has a school. many rural Lao families are too poor to pay for their kids’ education, so they send their sons to be sam naen in the big towns that have schools for monks. that’s why there are so many saam naen, Luang Prabang has 3 schools for monks (one primary + 2 high schools). many of the novices in Luang Prabang are from villages in provinces like Phongsaly, Houa Panh, Udomxai, etc.

some of the Luang Prabang monks & saam naen attend night classes at private schools, colleges or Souphanouvong University, so they go out of their temple at night.

internet…well now many Thai temples have their own website like www.nongpahpong.org =P the high school for monks in Luang Prabang teaches them about computers. some use the internet for serious reasons (find out about universities in Vientiane & Thailand, etc), some use it to play computer games…!

Thank you for the nice email. I just showed Amy your pictures, she really enjoyed them. Now we want to go to Laos too!

We really liked the Venice pics too. Only three more days and we will be there!

Lek

Sometime it’s the thoughts that counts compare to the superficial, materialist fufilment.