At the H'mong girls' suggestions, we went to a free performance of traditional H'mong dance and music. The performance took place in a stone walled basement bar complete with disco bar. The juxtoposition of the of the disco ball bar and traditional performance struck me as rather funny.

Some of the performance was really good and interesting and some of it made me feel like I was at a Jr. High talent show. There was one guy who was obviously the village performer and he was on stage almost the whole time.

There was a part of me that wondered if we were actually seeing traditional performance . I had a vision of this guy playing his instrument (it was sort of a bagpipe without the bag and had an accordian quality to it with out the accordian- it was pretty neat) in front of the mirror at home and deciding that it would be cool if he started doing acrobatics at the same time. After deciding that he looked cool, perhaps he showed his neighbor who agreed that it was cool and wouldn't it be a good idea to put this in the show for the tourists?