Dinner at Laos!

We were famished!Checked in to our guesthouse; Dragon Lodge! Which is owned by a very nice Singaporean guy called Peter! Great place to stay!
Anyway, we decided to look for food in the city. We walked to "Chinatown" and walked in into a steamboat place.

Laos is a slow place with very nice people. The street here is a busy one in Laos standard, there are much lesser cars in this Capital city, less street lights, but I do not feel like I am in danger of being robbed.







Now comes the fun part. I never seen a meal with so much raw veggies before, there is a plate for big leave veggies, a plate of ginger, garlic, etc and one plate of cucumber, lime, bean sprouts, and many other assorted stuff.
In fact after taking these photos they gave us more veggies!

We were an embarassment because we did not really know how to eat the stuff placed in front of us! haha
The nice waitress actually came over and did a demostration!

The instructions are as follows, in case u might wanna go to Laos and try it out;
1) we had to make the Po Pian Skin wet so that it is soft, we had ROCK HARD po pian skins.
2) Pluck a big leave from the big leaves plate and placed in on the po pian skin.
3) pluck another big leave( different type) and place on top of the 1st big leaves and do it till all the different Big leaves variety has been plucked and placed on top of each other.
4) then place small veggies like cucumbers, bean sprouts
5) then place the even smaller cut veggies like garlic(which i love), ginger, etc
6) THEN place the cooked beef slices which u should already have placed inside the steamboat
7) apply the sauces provided
8) Wrap the po pian and bite it!

Okie sounds pretty easy huh? The problem is gets really messy!coz when we take small bites, the other stuff gets dragged out and it gets really ugly.
We decided to stuff the whole po pian into our mouths for awhile and decided that that is also not the way.
I finally found out that we have to bite it cleanly if we want to have small bites. It means bit biting along the grain of the vegetable so that the veggies are cleanly bited off. Tough eh?