Last week I found out via facebook that there was a festival going on in town. The Chak Phra festival (which means "pulling of the Buddhist monks") is to celebrate Buddha's return to earth after a 3 month visit to heaven, where he delivered a sermon to his mother. According to various websites Surat Thani has the most impressive version of this festival, with floats on land and on the river, there were also boat races (but I missed them).
So on Thursday, I was supposed to meet up with a few people in town to go look at the floats but only one of them actually showed up. For 3 hours we walked through the huge festival market, tried some bugs, and then went to check out the dragon boat floats. All of the floats were beautiful! Most of them were hand-painted, a few were made out of carved wood, and my favorite was made out of seashells. Each float had a row of offering bowls attached to the side, where you make a donation of a couple baht, there were also piles of string blessing bracelets at each float.
Since some of my pictures turned out wonkey I decided to go back to the festival on Friday. On the way there I was almost killed by my students who freaked me out by incessantly honking their horn as the trunk in front of me suddenly hit their breaks. Luckily I didn't die...and once we got up to the stop light the students invited me to go with them to the festival.
Photos!
The bridge over the river(I have no idea what the sign says)
Shadow puppetsThe River Floats!
The Street Floats!!
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