Birthday Party in Laos!

July 29, 2013:

Today was my birthday!  It started off with a delicious breakfast made by P-Koko and Abi giving me a birthday gift - a beautiful painting that perfectly describes our trip.  (I'll include a photo)  

It was an awesome day to celebrate our birthday on the other side of the world together.  We taught and played with the local kids, worked on the community service project (a bathroom for the village we are staying at), we played cards, showered in the stream while playing with the kids and Abi even found a leach stuck to her arm twenty minutes later!  Dean caught the runt piggy I had been chasing around for the past few days and I got to hold him.

After our delicious dinner and singing of happy birthday we were given the traditional birthday gift of killing a chicken.  We had a hard time with this and we agreed to convince everybody to let him go.  By naming him Gunther.  However, this did not work and other people started to say they would just kill him.  So, we decide we had to do it.  Abi would hold him while I slit his throat.  After five or ten solid minutes of me laughing and crying at the same time our friend Seton came to help steady my hands and help.  We were warned not to cut to hard or we would cut his head off when we only wanted to slit his throat.  So the first three slices were unsuccessful.  By now everybody was yelling "kill him already" and "you're making him suffer" and "Ah! I got blood on me!!"  As you can imagine the two girls who wanted to set him free ran away at this point and the chicken was finally dead.

Then we went inside where the room was beautifully decorated with balloons.  Khom Thai put balloons in his shirt and was pretending to be a ladyboy.  We had our birthday pancake and shared the last third with the local kids.  After this most everybody went to sleep.  I stayed up with my friends Dean, Anya, MengYang, Anou, and Khom Thai.  Khom Thai cooked the chicken with a little bit of cilantro and I enjoyed a small tasty piece of Gunther.  Dean ate the chicken feet and the chicken head (both common in this part of the world) ; brain, tongue, eyes, skull and all.  However he couldn't quite crunch down on his beak.

R.I.P. Gunther 7.29.13 Mok Dou, Laos

Definitely my most memorable birthday so far.