The Palace at Luang Prabang

Here I am in our room at the Vanvisa Guest House in Luang Prabang. The house is a French style brick and concrete building built in 1916. The room is not air conditioned but has a ceiling fan that runs like a helicopter blade and the room is acceptably cool when it is running. And at ten dollars a night that is okay.

Mme. Vanvisa is a sort of local authority on weaving and textiles. She has many types of fabric for sale in the lobby, and last night she told us about how she works in the community with the women who weave the cloth. There is a loom in the room behind the kitchen.
This is the street in front of the Guest House. It seems to be a very nice neighborhood. The muddy water of the Mekong can be seen at the very end. About half way down the road is a vacant lot where boys play a game that I think is the French game boules. Kind of like horse shoes with metal shot put type balls.
This is Mother walking down the main street.
There are over 500 monks in the city living in varios Wats (or temples).
We ate at the Coconut Restaurant--unpleasant for me because the people behind me were smoking. But we did notice that the restaurant across the street has free Wi Fi.

Speaking of my computer, my laptop has been plagued with malware or a virus or a trojan horse. There are files called fun.exe, dc.exe, SVIQ.exe, winsit.exe, and a couple of others that I cannot delete. I seem to have infected my three flash drives AND the memory on my camera. Exe files are created in each folder with the name of that folder. I'm not sure if it is doing anything harmful. I have tried to do a recovery on my computer and have basically deleted everything--I can't use Word anymore and have access to a couple of programs through a backup folder that was created. It is an ongoing headache.
We visited the National Museum, which actually used to be the royal palace. The palace was built around 1909 to 1914 and was remodeled by the king who ascended to the throne in 1959. Then in 1975 there was some kind of communist coup. The king stayed on as "advisor" until 1977, though in March 1976 the palace was turned into a museum. The king was a rallying point for people who were not satisfied with the ruling regime. In 1977 he and his wife and eldest son were sent to a "seminar" to study Marxism--code for a re-education labor camp. Then they just disappeared. In 1989 some high level general admitted to French authorities that the king and his wife had died but nothing was said of the crown prince. Rumors when they are spoken about have it that the three of them died of starvation.

This is the palace. It was beautiful inside, but we could not take photos. The receiving room is covered with murals of traditional Luang Prabang life, and the room beyond that has walls covered with beautiful mosaics made of Japanese glass depicting myths and legends of Laos. Behind that are the king's room and the queen's room--it's strange to look at the spartan rooms decorated with 1960's style furniture and realize they were shipped off in the 70's to a work camp and died there.
This is looking out from the palace steps to the mountain that is in the center of town. A wat is at the top and is supposed to afford a lovely view of the sunset.
This is the guards' barracks, now a museum.
The museum currently housed a collection called "Floating Buddha" that documented mediation by various monks.
This is the theatre that is on the grounds of the palace. We are planning on going to a traditional ballet there tomorrow night--our last night in Laos and it's my mother's birthday.

Also on the grounds is this pavilion which was built in the 80s to house the Pra Bang Buddha from which the city gets its name. The Buddha image itself is temporarily in the Palace while they are renovating the building.
This is the altar on which the Buddha usually stands. We were not able to take photos of the image because photos were not allowed in the palace where it is now kept. Inside the pavilion I observed craftsme applying gold leaf--the columns were painted black (see the one in the center) and the gold leaf applied one square at a time.
We tried to catch another beautiful sunset down by the river but it was overcast so we just sat there. They seem to burn a lot of stuff aorund here and smoke is in the air everywhere. People are cooking on the streets and I think the farmers burn off crops in the rural areas.