Holiday

So yesterday was another Thai holiday…I think that they have about 3 a month. This one happened to be a religious holiday celebrating the “birth, enlightenment, and death of the Lord Buddha” so they told me that I had to go to the wat (temple) at 6:30 in the morning (I feel my days of sleeping in dwindling). Now women are supposed to wear a dress/skirt when they go to wat and I was no exception…the only problem was that it was too far to walk so I had to ride my bike in a skirt (not something I really want to do again). I got to the wat and we gave our offerings to Buddha and then we sat and worshiped. Now I think that I have mentioned before that sitting on the bamboo mats that they have on the floor is not comfortable…and even less comfortable when you are sitting in a skirt for over an hour! The “service” was the same as the one I attended earlier (at least I think so as I couldn’t understand what they were chanting) but this temple only had 2 monks (the lady I was with made sure to point that out) – although there are so many wats (about 1 every couple of miles) that I am not surprised that some of the wats only have a couple of monks…they would have to run out sometime!

Anyway, when we finished I was told that Ron Nyoke Pat (he’s the “vice-mayor”) was going to come to my house to take me to temple again…but they didn’t mention a time. So I got back on my bike and went home…and fell asleep until I heard “Kellie! Kellie!” coming from the front of my house. It was 9:30 and they had come to take me to wat again. (I am sorry to say, but I think I have been to “church” more in Thailand in the past 5 months than I have in the States in the past 5 years…sorry Mom). We drove for a while and ended up at a fairly large temple and there seemed to be kind of a carnival type atmosphere. Music was playing, food vendors were out, and you could hear the monks chanting in the background. We went over to this statue thing (looked a little like a steeple) and we had to kneel before it then the men walked around it and sprinkled water on it. Now you got that right…I said men…the women were not allowed to walk up the stairs so they waited patiently at the bottom of the stairs hoping that a man would come along so that they could give him their bottle of water to pour on the shrine…and the poor men who were trying to leave the shrine after they had emptied their own bottle because the ladies kept coming & kept handing them more bottles…it was a bit amusing actually.

We sat around for a while until the Nyokes (mayors) of the different villages got up and started pulling on some ropes to raise a bucket of water so that they could douse the top of the “steeple” with water.

We then left the wat and went to different houses to eat some food and drink alcohol. I have kinda made it my policy not to drink hard alcohol while in my village…which is very hard because whisky is a way of life here in Thailand. I have seen them bring out a bottle at church, at work, and at schools. So whenever someone poured me a shot I would shake my head with a grin and say “Mai ow” (I don’t want). Thankfully there was another female with me who was also not drinking because they kept trying to trick me by then asking if I wanted a drink in the Northern dialect and then in Lao. After the first house, Ron Pat was pretty drunk and a younger guy that was with us ended up driving us to the next house. I think that we visited 5 in all, and I did end up taking one shot of whisky but only because it was a different kind. I think that it was home brewed because the bottle was filled with pieces of bark and leaves and other stuff…and it was actually pretty good…I think the stuff in the bottle added some interesting flavors. I ended up getting home at around 4:00 – the last 4 hours had been spent making the rounds to different houses (a bit like a neighborhood party). They had planned to set off fireworks at 3:00 but it was pouring so that did not work out very well.

In other news, I killed another scorpion. Score: Scorpions – 1, Kellie 2.