The festivities surrounding the end of Buddhist lent and Dragonboat racing had been underway all last week, but peaked this past weekend, when the entire road along the river was shut down and mobbed with people shopping, eating, drinking, and playing carnival games. The street and riverbank was covered with tents and vendors of every sort, despite the fact that it remains a construction site. The piles of loose bricks and unfinished sidewalks were just minor obstacles for the thousands of people who flocked to the Mekong for the weekend. 
When fighting the crowd became too exhausting, eating and drinking were the main activities. I spent awhile sitting at the Namkhong beer tent (one of Beerlao’s only competitors here), where there was a live band and dancers. I also sampled a few sticky rice desserts, and enjoyed a “drink in a bag,” which is exactly what it sounds like. If you order a soda to-go from a street vendor, they’ll pour it out into a small ice-filled plastic bag with a straw for your mobile enjoyment. Somehow the novelty of this makes it much more delicious than drinking from a glass. On the street, shops were selling anything and everything, with the fancier tents, like the cellphone companies, blasting music to compete for attention. Carnival games were set up on the grounds of a temple downtown, which was a strange juxtaposition, with monks accepting donations as a reminder of the holiday’s origins, but with balloon-popping and ring toss games all around. The prizes for the games seemed quite funny–a few of the typical stuffed animals, but mostly juice boxes, energy drinks, and bottles of soda.
lanterns floating down the Mekong
On Saturday night, after a delicious dinner at Chinese Dumplings (one of the essential Vientiane restaurants), I visited the river with some of my PiA friends. Though the games and revelry were still going on this was the slightly more traditional evening of the festival. We bought small lantern-boats made of banana leaves and flowers, with candles on top, and carried them to the riverbank, where everyone was releasing lanterns to float downstream. A little ways upriver from here, floating lanterns were being released, which were mesmerizing as they slowly moved across the sky. Amidst the crowd, amateur fireworks and sparklers were being set off right and left, often by small children, who waved fireworks twice the size of their bodies.
Sunday was the actual boat race day, and we got up early to stake out a spot at Spirit House, an ex-pat hangout with tables along the river and delicious Western food. Over breakfast and mimosas, we watched the boats go by every few minutes. Each boat team was associated with a certain village, and sported neon t-shirts with the names of their sponsors. The race seemed fairly disorganized, there was no sure way of knowing which boats were racing when, but it was still exciting to watch the brightly-colored teams speed along the river.