As my new Laotian teacher was going to the ceremony of Ok Pansa, she kindly invited me to go with her, "Why don't we go together." Since Mr. Wantong was traveling to Japan for training, I asked this twenty-five year-old lady to be my conversation partner. Tah-chan, as I call her, is a masseuse who works at a sauna center I go to quite often. She told me that she was originally from Pakse in the southern part of Laos, and that she came up to Vientiane to look for a job after graduating from high school. Then after studying for two years she obtained a license for massaging and began working. She also went to an English conversation school, so she has no problem in English as far as daily conversation. Yet she is still a student right now at a training school for secretaries. She said that because she has no intention of continuing her massaging work, she decided to study such fields as English, computers, and bookkeeping. The fact that there are more motivated young females than males may be an aspect that Laos is still keeping up with the trend of the world. I asked her if she can cover the school fees with her massaging work, she replied that it's quite hard. Hoping it to be of some use, I approached her and asked if she would be my teacher, and she gratefully accepted that offer.

The ceremony was held at a temple. They say that they are going to "Tak Bat," and that is equivalent to what we call religious mendicancy in Japanese. They prepare a bowl for mendicants with fruits, cookies, flowers, and candles and a basket with steamed glutinous rice in it. They also prepare money, and it has to be a crisp new bill. I heard that by offering a fresh bill, you'd be reincarnated as a beautiful woman. This money should also be put neatly in the bowl. Then each woman is supposed to wear a skirt called sin as well as an elegant shirt, and to cover her shoulders with a scarf.

The ceremony was supposed to start at around 7:00am, and Tah-chan and her friend Ni-chan came to pick me up. Both of them were dressed in sins with gorgeous embroidery made of silk and dazzling silk shirts, and that made them incredibly beautiful. Since I didn't have a sin, I was wearing a long wrap-around skirt instead. At a temple called Wat Si Ampon, which was about five minutes' walk, there were a large number of people holding big balls in their arms and waiting for the ceremony to start. Only about twenty percent of them were males, and the majority of all were young women about Tah-chan's age and they all looked gorgeous wearing beautiful sins. Then the ceremony was opened with a sutra recited by an aged monk. Some parts sounded quite similar to what I hear in Japan in scale, but other parts were recited in an intonation that was completely unfamiliar to me. Having some kind of short narratives between each section, the sutra was over in about twenty minutes, and then it was time for the religious mendicancy. As I was putting a gift in each bowl without thinking much about it, I ended up with many items still left over even though I was already reaching the last person, and I didn't know what to do. So I asked Tah-chan for help, and she told me "Just put everything in the last one." Then that last bowl became full of offerings from me. After that, while the monk was reciting a sutra, we poured water out of a tiny bottle which we brought from home, little by little at our feet, and then finally the ceremony was over. I assume that it had such meaning as to purify us. Though they were doing it as a means of improving their virtues, I was totally amazed at the great volume of offerings the Laotians had brought. I heard that since the ceremony of Tak Bat takes place at many temples, people freely choose one depend on the time and their mood. I suppose that I'll have a chance to go to a temple again on November 11th, a full-moon day, so I'll try to wear a sin on that day. It seems that because my legs would be showing with a wrap-around skirt, it would be improper.

Since we were expecting a display of some fireballs in that night, we went as far as seventy kilometers down to the south from there for that. That is a phenomenon called "Dragon's fire" that appears at a certain area along the Mekong River on a full-moon day in October. Because such information was not available in any tourist guide book, I was half in doubt at first, but there were actually a great number of Laotian families out to see the fireballs at the riverside area where we went on the advice of a Laotian official of the Agency for Cultural Affairs. It seemed that the opposite shore, Thailand, was also crowded with many people. The small orange balls were floating in the air noiselessly and then disappearing quickly. They looked somehow like misfired fireworks, but they were not as powerful as fireworks when going up in the sky. I believe that we saw about ten balls in an hour. I was eager to keep looking at them and find out what they really were, but since we were getting hungry, we decided to go home. Laotian people were eating dinner and drinking beer while looking at them peacefully. I heard that there was a legend regarding this phenomenon in Laos. The legend has it that the Ok Pansa is the date of final celebrations of the Buddhist Lent, and so that the monks with an accumulated experience of good conduct turn into dragons and go up into the sky. As I asked some of my American and Japanese friends for their opinions, I received various kinds of responses such as "That must be the monks setting off fireworks just for pleasure" and "Even though by straining his eyes, my husband who works as an engineer couldn't figure out what they were, and he was completely vexed. But I thought it was a fantastic phenomenon." Of course, Laotians seem to take it simply as a mysterious phenomenon, and none of them believe that there is any human work involved. As for me, though I cannot find any reasonable explanation to conclude it as a natural phenomenon, I wonder how come there is no sign of artificial work.

There is another activity to cerebrate the Ok Pansa in Laos. That is a boat race. Forty-five to fifty people form double rows on a boat hollowed from a log about twenty meters long, and have a one-kilometer race with other boats along the Mekong River. Each team represents a different village. A lot of stalls were set up by the river near the race course, and the town, which is quite deserted usually, was crowded with people. The boats seemed to be quite shallow that just as they passed the goal line, the crews quickly took small ladles, and scooped out water from the boats in a great fluster. Though some teams with sponsors were taken back by a motorboat to the starting point up the river, most teams rowed the boats once again to return to that point. Both in the women's and men's races, the teams sponsored by the only beer company in Laos came out the winners. There was an international team participating in the women's race, but they unfortunately lost in the first round. I heard that since many of the boats taking part in the races this year have been improved to be able to speed up easily, there are loud calls for limiting the races only to the traditional boats.

Translated by Maiko Noda