8/6/2001 - Candle Festival, Panom Rung

Hello Everybody!

It’s been quite a while since we sent out an update, so you must be wondering what has happened to us in the mountain jungles of Thailand. Actually, we don’t live any where close to a jungle. Nor have we detected any rise in elevation in our province that could even pass as a hill. Stick a couple of palm trees in Nebraska and you have Surin province. (Lisa said that the other day to someone who, as it turns out, WAS from Nebraska – oops).

Being from the Pacific Northwest & Alaska, you can’t expect us to have stayed in Nebraskurin for the past two months, so you must be wondering what wonderful and exciting places have we visited. The first weekend of July we headed to Ubon Ratchatani (our second time visiting that city) for their Candle Festival. That weekend was the beginning of the Buddhist Lent, which roughly corresponds with planting the rice crop. Because of beliefs – if a monk steps on rice it will bring bad luck – the monks are supposed to stay in the temples during Lent, and people bring them candles to study by and food to eat. (Incidentally, the monks are still out around town in force, so we’re not sure what’s really going on.) Well, Ubon went a step further with the whole candle thing, and they carve huge candles the size of a parade float, and they have a parade. We’re told that they plan for each candle starting at the end of the festival the previous year, and that as many as 20 people work on each candle full time for the last month before the festival. Some of the floats were made the color of golden beeswax candles, and others (like the one here) were made white with various brilliant colors. We spent the weekend with several other Peace Corps volunteers, and besides the candles, the highlight of the trip was being in a city big enough to have a pizza restaurant (hey, what did you expect?). There is great shopping in Ubon (Lisa bought lots of cotton clothes) and occasionally the movie theatre shows movies in English. Unfortunately not this time, so Denny and some other volunteers had to see Pearl Harbor dubbed in Thai. The only dialogue they could follow was the Japanese admiral because his spoken Japanese had both the English and Thai subtitles.

The following weekend we headed down to Bangkok for Peace Corps committee meetings. Bangkok, alas, has not changed from the last time we visited. Our lungs are still recovering from the pollution, our ears from the noise, our noses from the smell of untreated waste wafting through the air, and our wallets from sitting in taxis in traffic. We did find an absolutely delightful guesthouse though – the price was about a quarter of what we pay at the hotels (150 Baht per night, a little more than $3, versus 600 Baht or more at the hotels). Lisa ate at a great Indian restaurant and Denny visited the local computer mall to buy a printer (it’s not a computer store, it’s a computer mall. It has 6 floors with thousands of tiny shops selling everything electronic with the best prices in Thailand). Since Lisa was sick last time when Denny went to the Grand Palace and Temple, she hooked up with a couple of other volunteers who had not gone either, and did the tourist thing. (The palace was last occupied about 4 kings ago). And, since Bangkok has theatres that show English movies in English, we went to see Pearl Harbor. Denny said it was much better in English. Although, he did say that watching it in Thai meant that he had time to pay attention to details that might otherwise be overlooked. Like, what was up with Benji the wonder dog? Denny also got to see Shrek – a movie that would be meaningless to watch in Thai, but which is wonderfully funny in English.

Last week we headed off to Buriram province (the province to the west of Surinebraska) with a 7th grade class from one of Denny’s schools for a field trip to Phanom Rung. “Field trip” needs to be qualified a little bit. All of the 7th grade class, some of the 9th grade class, and about half of the teachers from the school, a total of more than 70 people, crammed into a bus designed for about 40 people. We politely declined the whiskey and beer the teachers offered us at 7:30am. Phanom Rung is a 700-year old Cambodian temple built when Cambodians ruled this area. Historians know the dates of construction, (ok, for those of you who are going to ask, it’s 724 years old) and that it was built 6 years before the Thai alphabet was created. (The Thai alphabet is a derivative of the nearby and slightly older Khmer alphabet - superficially they look the same like our Roman and Russia's Cyrillic look the same, but they are not mutually intelligible). Although some of the ruins are just that – ruins – most of it had been restored and we could walk around the temple grounds and go inside the buildings. Being used to American historical places with everything roped off so that you can not get hurt or damage the structure, it was interesting going through a place with no barricades. If you fall into that 4-foot hole in the ground, learn to be more careful next time. Although many law suits in America border on ridiculous (hot coffee anyone?) Thailand is at the opposite extreme and they have very few safety regulations. Typical example: pile 30 kids into/onto a pickup truck and call it a school bus. Most cars and trucks here do not have seatbelts in the back seat and quite a number do not have seatbelts in the front either. An OSHA inspector would go into heart failure if they saw a construction site here… But back to the temple, Denny’s favorite part was that it was on a hill (which they call a mountain). The hill was about the size of the hills around Fairbanks (we were reminded of the view in Fairbanks, except all of the fields were rice fields instead of muskeg, and there were no mountains on the horizon). The hill was evidently volcanic at some point, and as a result the temple is built from volcanic rock. Lisa’s favorite part was the entrance sign. Written in Thai with Thai numerals it said: “Adults: 10 baht”. Next to that was, written in English, “Welcome visitors! Fee: 40 baht.” They were obviously presuming that we could not read Thai, and she especially liked how they listed the Thai price in Thai numbers (Arabic numbers are actually much more common here) so that we were not supposed to see that we were paying more. Actually, many Thai people see nothing wrong with charging foreigners more, and in fact the disparity at this temple was rather modest – for the national parks the Thai’s will pay a 20 Baht entrance fee, and foreigners will pay 200 Baht. This is a depressed economy and they figure if you’re rich enough to afford the airfare to their country (an expense well beyond what the average Thai could afford), then you can afford to pay an extra 30 baht (approx. 70 cents). They do have a point. And we could probably write an entire paper about tourism in Alaska doing virtually the same thing, only being less obvious about it.

After exploring around Phanom Rung in the morning, the bus then stopped at a small reservoir back in Surin, oops, I mean Nesurinbraska, where the teachers ate bugs (which we also politely declined) and other Thai goodies while the students were left to fend for themselves. Next we stopped at one of the department stores in our provincial capitol so that the teachers could go shopping and the students could play video games before heading back home after 7:00 P.M.

When we’re not traveling around, we’re compiling information on the dogs here and have come up with some interesting results. Observation Number 1: Dogs here do not play "fetch the stick" since they learn from puppyhood that Stick means get off my lawn. Observation Number 2: The idea of spay/neuter does not exist in the dog or cat world here. Nor have the concepts of leashes, fences, rabies shots, or flea powder kicked in yet. Observation Number 3: Dogs here have learned that people are in charge. You can bark at people, but if you try to bite, people will use Stick (see observation number 1). However, it is perfectly acceptable to start a brawl with the neighbor’s dog in the middle of a busy intersection. We are still working on observation number 4: Natural selection of dogs crossing busy streets. Somehow they have evolved to mosey as slowly as possible out of the way the microsecond before they get hit, displaying a nonchalant attitude the whole time (even the animals here are on "Thai time").

In more cheery news, the other afternoon we had a mama duck and about 8 ducklings from next door go swimming in our fishpond. Apparently they wanted a change of scenery from their own little duck pond in the neighbor’s yard. The ducklings were soooo cute, and the mama duck was soooo ugly! (All ducks in Thailand are domestic, mostly kept for eggs although occasionally for food.) The house on the other side of us is now empty, as the Cambodian refugees who lived there went to Bangkok to be closer to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) office. We miss them, and no one else has moved in.

That's a quick summary of our most recent adventures. We are not anticipating a lot of travelling in the next couple of months, but as with the trip to Panom Rung, one never knows (we found out about that trip a little more than 12 hours before it happened). We'll try not to take so long before our next update.

Denny & Lisa Wells