Loy Krathong (Festival of Fire)

Loy Krathong is a three day festival in November around the time of the full moon. There are several activities which occur during the festival. People will often make boats out of banana leaves and decorate them with beautiful flowers. When they send the boats down the river they are symbolizing letting go of their sins and/or sending bad spirits away. A similar activity involves lighting "lanterns" of fire and releasing them into the sky, also sending away sins. One of the favorite activities is setting off large of amounts of US illegal fireworks in public streets, bridges, neighborhoods, or wherever. People have been setting off fireworks for several weeks now. They go all day and into the night making it kind of sound like we are in a war zone. A lot of the fireworks last night were definitely Fourth of July quality (set off about ten feet away from us... we moved quickly.)

Before...

After... (Those are supposed to be floating in the sky at that point.)

The colored lanterns didn't do so well, only two of ours actually ascended into the sky. Others, as you can see, ended up burning in the street. As we were getting ready to launch the lanterns a crowd started to gather (maybe they foresaw our doom). As we started to wonder if our lanterns were ever going to rise more people kept coming. We tried to throw them into the air, but one went up up and then down down. Thankfully the guy it almost hit was one of the crowd watching us and he was able to push it into the air. At one point Ooy was trying to push the lantern into the air with the fused end of a long firework stick. Yup. We were quite the show. Thankfully, we witnessed other people's lanterns dive bomb the crowd, get stuck on power lines and light poles, and be doused with water puddled on the side of the road. Whoever thought a holiday with large quantities of fire and fireworks anywhere and set off by anybody was a good idea was pii baa (crazy).

This was part of a float that was in a parade in Chiang Mai city last night.

This is the Ping River, we are standing on the bridge which was one of the biggest firework hot spots.

A view of one of the inside of one of the lanterns. The outer rims get super hot while you hold it waiting for it to rise.

One of the floats in the parade.

This was our trial run from Sunday night, which actually went way better than the real thing.

This was a scary moment, our lantern got caught on the power line, rolled toward the house, got stuck under the ledge of the house and power line, floated up a little and got wedged between the power lines. Sarah and our outrageously long wooden broom saved our house (and the neighborhood) from burning down.