Luang Prabang,
Before Six in the Morning.

The first morning I tried to watch tak bat, I did everything a guidebook tells you not to do. I bought a basket of sticky rice from a woman stationed suspiciously close to my guesthouse, sat on a plastic stool wedged into a row of identical stools, and held my phone up the entire time the monks filed past — several hundred of them, barefoot, moving faster than seems possible for a silent procession, robes the exact orange of the Kuang Si turmeric dye stalls I'd walk past later that day. I left with a basket half-full of rice I hadn't managed to give away and a video I've never watched since.

The second morning I did less. No basket, no stool, no assigned spot on the curb. I stood back from Sisavangvong Road, near one of the smaller side-street temples where the monks emerge and turn toward town, and just watched a town feed several hundred of its own monks before sunrise, the way it's apparently done every single day since Luang Prabang settled on Theravada Buddhism sometime in the 1300s. No basket-sellers on that side street. No stools. Just a handful of locals, kneeling properly, and the monks moving through mist that hadn't burned off yet.

The tension in Luang Prabang's morning ritual isn't really about tourists being present — locals have always had witnesses, in one form or another, for six hundred years of this. It's about the transaction being reframed as a photo opportunity you pay your way into, basket included, rather than an act of merit-making you're quietly permitted to observe. The difference is entirely about which side of the street you choose to stand on, literally: the main road, thick with basket-vendors and tour buses idling with their headlights on, or the side streets, where the same procession happens with none of the infrastructure built around it.

I went back four more mornings before I left Luang Prabang, always to the same side street, never with a basket. By the last morning, one of the older monks had started giving me the same half-nod he gave the row of kneeling locals — not a special one, just the nod that says he's noticed a fixture. It's the closest thing to belonging I've felt on a research trip, and I got there mostly by learning to be still and stand somewhere with nothing for sale.