Circus

On Saturday evening we (six guys and myself) went to the Viet-Lao Circus, which was in Vientiane for a week. It was held at the Russian Circus building (which also hosts Muy Lao fighting and other sporting events), and it was incredibly awesome. 

Outside the Russian Circus there were carnival rides and stands.  One of our guys, Zach, bought a turn at the beebee guns (we finally figured out how carnival games worked), but he couldn't shoot the soda bottle with enough force. So Griffin asked if he could shoot Zach in the back with the gun. And, because this is Laos, the man running the stand had no problem with it. 

Tickets to the carnival were 40,000kip, 60,000kip and 80,000kip, so we got the top tier seats (still only about $10). Unfortunately, even top tier seats (second row) are not enough to prevent the lady sitting in the row in front of you from using her iPad to record the... entire... show. 

We didn't have incredibly high expectations for the performance, but we were so surprised by how great the acrobats and trapeze artists were! There were jump-ropers, artists on tightropes, a magician and clowns...

The trapeze artists were my favorite (even though they did their performance to a Kenny G rendition to "My Heart Will Go On"... which played twice)

All of us agreed that the worst part about the circus was the animal acts.  I don't really know how animals are treated in the American circus, but they always seem to be happy to perform and to be incredibly well-trained. This is not the case in the Viet-Lao Circus.  The circus performance included acts done by dogs, monkeys, snakes, and a horse. 

The dogs were dragged out by their front paws, which was bad enough, but the way they cowered whenever they had to perform tricks, or when the trainers came towards them... it was heart-breaking.

The snake act was kind of weird... there was a basket with two enormous snakes in it (some in the group speculated that the snakes were drugged). The entire "act" was really just the snake man wrapping the snakes around his body and running around the ring yelling like a crazy man.

The snake act became decidedly more interesting when the snake man was focusing on the second snake, failing to notice as the other snake tried to slither out of the ring to the back of the building (which was right next to where we were sitting). Nick hates snakes, and was poised with one foot on the stairs to run away from the snake if it decided to come toward the stands.

The monkey act was by far the most brutal, and the hardest to watch. The monkey trainer came out and tied his monkeys to the crates that were at the edge of the rink while he set up (about 10 feet from where we were sitting). The monkeys were agitated and one of them kept throwing himself on the gate to knock it over. Some parents were not paying attention to their kids and one of the children went towards the monkey, almost as if to pet it, until a woman sitting in the first row pulled him back.

The trainer had a loud whistle that he would blow into the monkeys' ears whenever they messed up a trick. When one of the monkeys got confused and did a trick prematurely, the trainer smacked him on the head! And when the trainer had the monkey bike around the ring on these little monkey-sized bikes, it's almost like they were trying to bike away from him, and were terrified of him chasing them.

Probably the highlight of the animal acts was the moment the angry monkey was placed on a pole that the mean trainer balanced on his nose. When the monkey got up to the top, he almost immediately started peeing ... not much got on the trainer, but enough so that I felt the monkey got a wee bit of revenge.

I just hope he wasn't punished too severely after the performance :( 

The horse was fine... almost pointless. He just ran around the ring with a performer on his back.

Despite the animal abuse, and the woman with an iPad, it was a really fun time :)