Hmong New Year

It's been a busy weekend so far. Packed with lots of great cultural experiences and fun times with friends.  Friday night was our language tutor Touy's engagement party. She is marrying a Lao man who lives in the U.S. but they are having an engagement celebration here with her friends. Below is a picture of some of us ladies with the beautiful bride-to-be.

Then, we went to the bus station early this morning to meet some of my students to go together to Village Kilometer 52 (yes, that's the official name:) for the Hmong New Year celebration.  We were supposed to meet at 7 and they showed up a little before 8 and then were en route by around 8:30. Learning to pad my expectations with a few hours of leeway just to keep my sanity :)  The two girls I mentioned before who are my new Lao teachers came and another one of my students named Palinya. It was about an hour ride to the village from Vientiane and Sonexay taught me several new phrases in Lao. She also shared with me that her 25-year-old brother passed away last year of a brain tumor. He had been married only 6 months and Sonexay was really close to him.

Here is a picture of Sonexay with one of the little girls dressed up in traditional Hmong clothing.

We arrived at Kilometer 52 and went to my student Jao Lo's house. They had prepared an amazing feast for all of us teachers (6 of us went together, along with 3 of my students and then some other friends met us there) and then gave us a chance to try on the traditional Hmong dress.

Heather and I trying on some of the Hmong clothes.

Getting ready to get all decked out. 

Sonexay and I dressed up in traditional Hmong clothes.

Jao Lo's little niece getting dressed up.

So, at the Hmong festival, they play this ball game where single men and women stand in a row opposite each other and throw a ball back and forth...back and forth.... Somehow it's supposed to help you meet a significant other. Not sure exactly how it works, but it's a really famous part of the festival and culture. Didn't work so well for us, but that's probably because most of the people in our group were all girls. Oh well, can't date anyway til next August per our organization's policy.

We ran into one of my other students, Sialo, who is Hmong and was the MC for the tigo (Lao phone company) booth at the festival.

Sonexay and her boyfriend. Observe the midrift style.

 Steph, Thippachanh, Palinya, Sonexay and me at the festival.

The craziest part of going to the Hmong New Year was that all these people kept coming up to us and asking to take a picture with us. Since there are many foreigners (falang) in Vientiane, I'm not really used to feeling like a spectacle, but here it was very different. There weren't very many foreigners at the festival, but we were the only ones decked out in traditional Hmong garb so everyone was doing double-takes and all-out staring at us.  And a lot of Hmong people live in America and can speak English, so probably about 15-20 different random people came up to us, talked to us, videoed our ball game, and wanted to take photos together. It was quite the experience. But a wonderful time of hanging out with our students and learning more about one of the minority people groups in Lao.

All the single ladies, all the single ladies... Jao Lo, our Hmong friend and host, is in the middle.