Chickens Crossing, Playing Chicken and Pondering Why

Today chickens are crossing the road - playing chicken with my bicycle, and I am left to ponder why. Despite the roosters many crows claiming it was all about them, my observations suggest otherwise that just as often Ms. Chicken is crossing away from one rooster and there just happens to be another on the other side thinking it was attraction that brought her rather than avoidance.

In addition to our thoughts on Chickens Yvette and I penned a few lines over the last few days. Yvette thinks I should ask the question, not "Why did the chicken cross the road?" but How.... This after two chickens came flying across (gracefully as only chickens can be) our path on our way home from a waterfall that we sought out and found today...

Night

by Neil
Our bicycles parked, we stand on the blacktop under the Laotian sky – the Asian sky – the Earth Sky
The Big Dipper is here, an old friend far from home
The contrast of the sky magnified - brighter AND darker
Moon, stars and lightning coexist
The clouds wisp about the moon like a closer swirl of the Milky Way
The lightning adds drama at the fringes on the low clouds over the surrounding hills
A tractor putters by with a handheld flashlight for a headlight
The light swivels to our faces, surprised by Americans in the blackness, in the starlight, in the lightning, in the cicada song and the croaks of night

Web of Travelers
By Yvette
Polish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, French, Korean, American
Or combinations of these, each made up of where they’ve been
Joined by this thing called travel, a role, a pigeon box to be put in,
(What are you doing here? Ah, you’re tourists.)
Evoking Marco Polo, Gulliver, Canterbury, Mecca.
People identified as “that French couple,” or “those Finnish guys,”
If something happened to them, might I be one to speak to their families?
“We saw them last in the back of a tuk tuk on the way to . . .”
Wanderlust, restlessness, grunginess, discovery, brief connections, disconnection.

Scram Bled Eggs and Other Pleasures of the Road and the Dark Side of Familiarity

by Neil

Satisfaction
The rainbows kissing the rice fields, butterflies dancing on the air currents, broods of chicks and ducks exploring the scratches of in the dirt and rivulets in the dikes, smiling babies, silver clad headdresses, wise weathered faces, the tidy compound by the river – surrounded by grass and tended by a grandmother with a young one on her hip, created wind by the bicycles speed, diligent students with an eagerness for more, Coldplay and U2 and Rufus played on the tinny speakers of our lugged laptop, eggplant jhao, mangos and sticky rice, bananas, fans, showers, smiles, glimpses of culture, saffron robes, expansive moody skies

Dissatisfaction

Trash thrown from the bus –the shop – the house - everywhere, hawking and spitting, cow and dog shit, dental work gone amiss and without, the rubber trees, the squalid toilets, ants, the hack job of pruning trees, the administrators dirt bowling while their buildings crumble, the males standing around smoking while the women work, the aimless teenagers cruising about, and the amateur-hour plumbing jobs, the diesel spewing tractors and trucks, the one same unimaginative menu in every restaurant, the indignity of beggars and hangers-on at the market, the apathy of many, the beer industry, suffering and addiction, cruelty of boys – boxing ears, jabbing each other in the butt, pushing and shoving to get their way