Host Family

So, I moved in with my host family last week. They are wonderful. When I first met my mae (host mom) she gave me two hugs, which is not common in the Lao culture but I knew right then that we'd get along just fine! She has 6 kids... five boys and one girl, all of them right around my age. Next door is her sister with her 5 kids, four girls, one boy, and then there are a couple of grandmas and some other random people who I haven't figured out a connection yet. In Lao there is no word for "cousin" the way we know it, so anyone who has some sort of relation is a "cousin". Everyone and their various spouses and children live in the same little cluster of houses behind the mini-market the family owns. I learned soon that basically no one is in the house all day, rather up at the market. That is where we eat meals and meet to go places. Two of my host brothers did the IVEP program which is the same as my program, only it brings foreigners to the US/Canada, so they know the drill when it comes to being a host/having a host family. All of the kids in my family speak English which is nice, but it is really motivating to learn Lao sitting around with the cousins, grandmas and Mae!

I had a "cultural experience" over the weekend when I went to the "spa" with a grandma, Mae and sister-in-law (none of whom speak english). I seriously had no idea what I was in for. We got there and put on cotton sinhs (lao skirts) but wore them like sarongs covering our whole bodies. We then washed our hair out of a barrel with a bucket and put conditioner (?) in it. Then we sat down at these tables outside and smothered weird food items all over our arms legs and faces. There was honey, milk, prunes, and some other indistinguishable paste. We then went into the sauna, but it had some serious herbal concoction cooking along with the typical steam. So we kept travelling in and out of the sauna, each time adding more goo to our skin. At one point, they started talking about how the sauna makes you loose weight (I picked up on this because my host brother's nickname is "Toui" which means fatty) and then they gave some sort of tea to everyone who was skinny and water to everyone who was not. Let's just say by Lao standards, I'll be drinking water for the rest of my life :) After we had enough herbal steam, we went back to the bucket/ shower rooms and washed everything off. Even though it was perhaps the weirdest "spa" I've ever been to, this is the type of thing that I was so looking forward to in planning a trip like this. Being in a position having no idea what I was doing, or why but trusting and loving the local culture and people. My family and I bonded through our honey pasted sweat!