Today is a big holiday in Thailand, called วันเข้าพรรษา (wan khaò phân saá (audio)), which translates as "the day of entering the rainy season". Everything (except the temples) is closed. As the holiday falls on a Sunday, businesses will be closed on Monday as well.This is the first day of the rainy season (by the Buddhist calandar... in the Thai calandar, rainy season starts in April) and is often called "Buddhist Lent". Traditionally, this day begins a 3-month period in which the monks go into their temples, and stay inside to study. (Tradition has it that monks should not go walking during the rainy season, as it could damage crops.)
Anyway, there are big parades, and it's an opportunity for Thai people to dedicate themselves to being more devout. People go to the temple and pay respect to the monks. Candles are the traditional gift from the laiety to the monks, although lots of other things, such as flowers, fruit, noodles, rice, are given to help make it through the 3-month hibernation as well.
In 3 months from now, the celebration "wan awk phân saá" will mark the end of Buddhist Lent, and boat races and celebrations traditionally mark that date... as well as the mysterious fireballs of the naga, on the Mekhong River.
4 comments:
I guess it didn't work before because I was using a firefox plugin called 'NoScript' for security purposes. And your lovely tutorial shows pages in English whereas all the instructions in mine are in Thai, but that's minor point--everything's in the same position so it's easy to figure out. Example below. Ciao for now.
jd
คุณสามารถใช้แท็ก HTML บางประเภท เช่น
Hey Jil.
I liked the traffic blog on Thai driving/riding.
It never ceases to amaze me like you said when you leave a small gap in front of you and another bike or car for a safe distance to stop and the Thais very quickly cut into it and fill it up.
Jil I have had to revert my domain name back to http://thailandnortheastliving.blogspot.com/ from isaanstyle. You will need to change this on your links page mate.
Sorry for the hassle but it seems I pissed someone off in Thailand and thaipulse dropped me from their site.
Brunty
JD: Your problem is a very common Firefox + Blogger complaint that nobody knows a fix for. Blogger somehow figures out where you are visiting from, and automatically changes Firefox to display Blogger text in that language.
Brunty: Heh. Not a very good site to use if they invite you in, and then dump you at the first sign of a problem. I was thinking about getting in touch with them myself... but no thanks, now.
Hey Jil.
Vern runs a good site but he freaked out a little when someone called him (somehow got his number) and told him to drop Brunty or his site would be shut down.
I can understand him being a little freaked out and worrying about his entire site being black listed but also was a little disappointed as well.
Now it's just trying to get all of my old readers to find me again as my visits have dropped from mid 300's a day to 50 a day but it will all come back again.
Brunty
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