A Strange and Facinating Market

This was a picture of me on a giant bridge in a small village in Laos.
I just took a walk to the post office here in Vientiene, the capital city. As it turned out this is a national holiday so it was closed. All along the fence that surrounded the postal compound there was a Hmong market of ladies sitting on the sidewalk surrounded by their wares.
It was the wares that were so facinating and strangely dark.
Everything was in open bags or laid out on blankets and there were hundreds of items. Claws, teeth, fur,nails, eyeballs, slabs of what looked like dried blood , coils of dried barks, herbs and roots and things that must be of been of signifigance like naturally knotted roots. There were potions and bottles of strange looking liquids and probably parts of many endangered species. There were also human figures about 6 inches high made out of what almost looked like crude paper mache with bark as the fibre. They were quite strange and appealing and I wanted to buy one but when I asked what they were for ( nobody spoke English) they showed me pictures of them hung in trees in weird positions and I couldn't decide if they were for healing or some kind of voodoo type thing so I passed.
Further along squatted at small tables on the sidewalk there were a number of card readers. I wanted to get mine read but none of them spoke English well enough to feel they could do it. It's not the first time I've seen this but I've never found a person who would or could read for me.