Thai Parades

Thais love parades. I have been in more parades in my 5 months in Thailand than I have 18 years in the States. But the parades here in Thailand are a little different than the ones in the States (at least the ones I have participated in).

Monday afternoon, Ron Pat (kinda like a vice-president of the village) asked me if I wanted to go into the city the next day. I said sure thinking that he meant Nan. I asked him what time and he said 8:00am...which was bit strange because we don’t start work until 8:30 so I thought that was a bit early but oh well. He told me that he would pick me up at my house & one of my coworkers said that I needed to wear a yellow shirt. (Side Note: The yellow shirts are infamous in Thailand. They adopted the color to celebrate the King’s 60th Anniversary as King and the yellow shirts have become the unofficial uniform of Thailand…go anywhere on a Monday and you will see yellow shirts EVERYWHERE!). I thought it odd that I needed to wear a yellow shirt to go into the city on a Tuesday so I figured that they had something planned.

Sure enough, when they picked me up the next day, we did not head into Nan, but went into Santisuk (the city that is about 5k away from my village) and I could sense the early stages of a parade. You see, the Thai idea of a parade is to have each village make a poster/sign/banner with their name on it and all of the villagers walk behind the sign carrying flags, pictures of the King & Queen, and shrines to honor Buddha. They take it pretty seriously and even have people with walky-talky’s running up and down trying to get everyone organized.

Now I find Thai parades very amusing because all of the villagers are IN the parade and there is no one standing on the sidelines to WATCH the parade (usually a village will designate one person to stand on the sidelines to take pictures).

We ended Tuesday’s parade by marching onto a soccer field and broke into rows for each village. The mayor of Santisuk gave a speech (and I know that he said that there would be different activities throughout the day including a soccer match), they then lit off some fireworks, and then everyone went home because it had started to rain.

I still haven’t completely figured out why they had a parade. I tried to ask & they said something about quitting smoking…maybe it was supposed to be a sort of health day but I have no idea as we never went back to see any of the activities that they had planned…the parade was the important part.