While visiting a Lue village up in the mountains this week, a group of girls and boys where playing with wooden tops. “I used to play when I was a kid.” Teom explained, “You don’t see this game played among the younger generation very much. Only in the poorer areas do they still play.” The rules were simple. One person would spin their top and everyone else would take turns projecting their tops at the original top to knock it away. Whoever’s top was still spinning after everyone had thrown was the winner.
Last week I went and helped Praphan (my best friend) sow Jasmine rice along with several other members of his family. Praphan hired out a tractor to till the soil but he still sows the grain the way it has been done for centuries-by hand. Everyone grabbed a 3-gallon bucket full of unhusked, fertilized rice. Then all 8 of us spread out in a line along the side of a freshly tilled hay naa (field) that faced downwind. Then we would grab a handful of rice, snap our wrists just so and then flick out our pointer finger. The rice would then fan out from our hands. This was done correctly if you could do this procedure three times (each toss should equally spread the same amount of rice) without having to get another handful of rice.