Trucks and Buses Showing their Colors

Trucks and Buses Showing their Colors

This post is about some of the wildly colorful trucks and buses that I see every day. Of course, not all of these vehicles have flashy paint jobs; in fact, most are plain white, tan, or silver – which only makes the colorful ones stand out more.

Trucks

Quite a few people in this village and in neighboring villages work as truck drivers, so trucks are always rolling through. There are several homes and businesses nearby where trucks park over night. I ride past them on my bike every day. Most of the brightly painted trucks are Isuzu, which seems to have the lion's share of the market for the medium-large trucks that haul rice, sugar cane, other crops, and sometimes animals -- chickens or pigs.  Nissan and other Japanese trucks are also very common.

Here are a few examples of the more beautiful trucks I've seen.

 Of course, they also get dirty, driving on all these dusty roads:

Here is a well-adorned truck parked behind a plain white one, making it harder to take the pictures.

The tailgates are rarely this clean!

As you can see, some of the designs are very symmetrical, with repeating shapes that suggest leaves or other images from nature, while others are more fanciful.

The truck in the pictures below was parked next to the temple one morning, just waiting for me to take its picture as I passed it on my way to school. This is one of the most elaborately painted trucks I’ve seen.

I don’t know what to make of the Indian in a war bonnet on one side and the eagle on the other.  Not sure how the driver can see out of those windows either, or the windshield, for that matter -- but let's not think about that too hard. I haven’t seen the Indian and eagle images on Thai trucks very often, but have seen them here in other contexts, such as costumes worn at parades or marathons (no pictures of that, sorry).

From seeing the above pictures, you might conclude that pink, red, and blue are the most popular colors for truck-decoration – and you might be right. However, I’ve also seen a lot of green, purple, and yellow. Here is one with more green than blue, parked next to the temple on a different day.

Here are two more trucks that live nearby, just for fun.

Many Thai people who can afford to own a vehicle have a pickup truck instead of or in addition to a car. Toyota and Honda seem to be the most popular pickup trucks, which are usually plain colors -- black, silver, tan, white, etc.  I’ve never seen a pickup decorated with any of the designs seen on the trucks pictured in this post. These elaborate decorations seem to be specialized for trucks that haul stuff.  People who can't afford a car or truck ride motorcycles -- called "motocy" in spoken Thai. Maybe I can do a separate post on them at some point.

Buses

Most buses are pretty much monochrome -- yellow, tan, gray, etc. Hundreds of buses head out of Thai bus stations in major cities in all directions at every hour of the day and night. In general, most buses that travel standard routes, transporting people from one place to another, don't have colorful paint jobs. Tour buses and charter buses, on the other hand, can be quite gaudy, and there are a lot of them -- tourism is very important to the Thai economy. Here are just a couple of pictures of buses to wind up this post.

Both these buses happen to be blue, but bright red, yellow, and pink are also very popular.  The bus in the picture on the right is one that our school rented to take students on a field trip in early October. It has a dragon or "naga"motif, but flowers, people dancing, jungle scenes, and many other images are also used. 

The colorful designs on trucks and buses make my day brighter and so I pass them on to you.

Graduation at Ban Naseenuan School

Graduation at Ban Naseenuan School

March 2014

This post is long overdue, as I (gulp) realized while doing some much-needed sorting and organizing of my iPhoto files. But here are some pictures anyway, with all best wishes to my former colleagues and students at Ban Naseenuan School, in Sakhon Nakhon Province.

The graduation ceremony was held in the assembly hall. Students had decorated the stage the day before in the school’s colors, white and sky blue.

The three words above the stage mean Nation, Religion, King.

In the pictures below, we see the teachers arriving, wearing their academic robes. The colors and stripes differ depending on the university and the teacher’s major discipline. The women in the first picture are carrying the certificates that will be handed to the students.

Here comes the marching band, followed by students who will graduate. Notice that the students are wearing their everyday uniforms, not academic apparel.

And here you see everyone at the stage, teachers seated in front, with the school principal in the center, and students behind them holding their certificates. As I remember, the handing out of the certificates went very fast and I gave up on trying to take pictures of it.

In the brief video below you see boys in traditional costumes carrying in the stand that holds the strings for the string ceremony. The strings are in the school colors too.

And here is part of the performance by the student dancers, well trained by the excellent dance teacher who taught at the school while I was there.

Finally, here are students with strings tied around their wrists and good luck messages written on their shirts and blouses – the Thai equivalent of having your friends sign your yearbook. Ban Naseenuan School didn’t have yearbooks, and I don’t think Thai schools do in general.

In this last picture, you see teachers singing and playing for the students -- a warm-hearted conclusion to the event.

Round and About the Rabbit Hole

Round and About the Rabbit Hole

This post is just an excuse to show you a few pictures I’ve taken near where I live in Ban Rang Krathai (=Rabbit Hole), Kanchanaburi

King Naresuan

These pictures were taken at an education center near our district’s PESAO (Primary Education Service Area Office).  In the photo below left, Ms Krongthong Pothong, the PESAO supervisor, and I are taking a break from talking with students who were there for an English camp. The second picture is of me next to a crumbling column, the only remnant of a temple that used to stand here.

 The students had just heard a lecture and watched a video about the history of the area, which is not complete without King Naresuan. Below we see him on his elephant, ready for battle. Born in 1555, he reigned as King of Ayuthaya from 1590 to 1605. He is most famous for defeating the Crown Prince of Burma in an elephant duel in 1592. 

The duel between King Naresuan and the Burmese prince is reenacted in January of each year in the neighboring province of Suphanburi, where the battle was thought to have taken place. In recent years, excavations have uncovered many bones of elephants, horses, and men at a site in Kanchanaburi – evidence that the battle may have been fought here and not there. I watched the reenactment of the elephant duel in 2013, soon after arriving in Thailand, but didn’t get any decent pictures. Maybe I can remedy that in January 2015.

Fields in November

Riding my bike one November afternoon, I decided to take a picture of this field with some patches of ripe rice flattened by wind.  When I rode the same route the next day, the rice had been combined. All that was left was the straw in neat rows.

Before

After, with shadows

Meanwhile, nearby vegetable fields were being sprinkled.

And the cane was as high as an elephant's eye.

Or maybe higher . . .

I've been told that when the sugar cane is tasseled out like this, it's past the best time for harvesting. I'll try to keep an eye on this field to see what happens.

Chinese Cemetery

This cemetery is located on the same road as the rice fields in the "before and after" pictures above. Cemeteries with graves are uncommon in Thailand, since Thais practice cremation. However, there are many ethnic Chinese in Thailand -- about 14 percent of the country's population. They are well integrated into Thai society while continuing to practice some Chinese traditions.The graves in this cemetery are all alike, in a horseshoe shape, presumably to protect the spirit of the deceased person.

The sign simply identifies the site, in Thai and Chinese, as the cemetery (Su Saan) of Pra Thaen, a town about two kilometers away. In the other picture you can see how the graves are constructed, with a little hill or embankment partly enclosing the gravestone. All the graves in this cemetery face the west -- the picture was taken with the sun starting to go down behind me.

Orchid Farm

On a bike ride in a different direction, I saw this sign for an orchid farm. It was very early on a Sunday morning, so I didn’t go in, just took a few pictures at the entrance.

I haven’t been back to the orchid farm because to get to there, I have to ride my bike past a dog that bit me several months ago – I know he hasn’t forgotten, because he chased me when  I rode by very fast a couple of weeks ago. Maybe I’ll try again before I leave Kanchanaburi.

That's all for today on sites and sights round about the Rabbit Hole.

Loy Krathong 2014

Loy Krathong

November 6, 2014

Loy Krathong is a Thai tradition celebrated on the full moon of the twelfth lunar month. A traditional krathong is made from a chunk of banana stalk decorated with leaves, flowers, candles, and joss sticks. The krathong may be modest in size, like a flower arrangement for a table, or very large. The tradition is to float (= loy) the krathong in the river by moonlight; while doing so, people pray, ask the river’s forgiveness for using and/or polluting her, make a wish for good luck, and release all their negative thoughts with the krathong.

Last year, I didn’t float a krathong myself. I attended two Loy Krathong celebration parades and wrote about them in the post titled “We keep our traditions alive.” 

This year, my kind colleague Yu Pin, whom you can see in pictures in previous posts, made a beautiful krathong for me.  Here are two pictures of it on the porch of my host family’s home. If you are on Facebook, you’ve seen most of these pictures already.

The krathong is made almost entirely of leaves rolled into shape and stuck into a banana stem.  The green “flowers” are made by splitting a leaf down the middle, folding part of the first half over several times to make the center, then folding, turning, and wrapping the other half of the leaf over and over to make the bud or blossom. – Is that as clear as mud? It wasn’t too clear to me, although Yu Pin tried to teach me how to do it. The flower I made was so ungainly that it seemed best to leave this art to others.

I went with my host sister, her mother, and a couple of their friends to the nearby town of Tha Ruea to float krathong in the river. In the picture, I’m standing between my host sister and her mother.

The park near the river was decorated with lights as for a carnival. There were musicians and other performers and many vendors selling snacks, balloons, and other festive items.

As we made our way down to the river, we lighted the candles and joss sticks on our krathong. 

And here I am putting my krathong into the river.

I have mixed feelings about the loy krathong festival. Obviously it’s a tradition that Thai people hold dear, it’s beautiful to watch, and it gives visitors to Thailand an opportunity to participate rather than just watch. On the down side, all those krathong do tend to clog up the river, which seems to contradict the act of begging the river’s forgiveness for exploiting and polluting her.  The Bangkok Post reported (November 7, 2014) that clean-up crews counted more than 980,000 krathong floats in Bangkok waterways, up 13.5% from last year. Of these, 885,995 (90.22%) were made from natural materials (leaves, flowers, and banana stems), compared with 88% made of natural materials last year. This presumably reflects a growing sense of environmental responsibility, at least in Bangkok. It definitely means less styrofoam to dispose of than in years past. Still, the person-power needed to pick up the krathong, count them (!), and haul them away is significant. Clearly it can be a challenge to bring tradition into balance with concern for the environment.

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Disclaimer: The content of this blog is mine personally. The opinions expressed do not reflect the views of the Peace Corps or its employees, the United States government or its agencies, or anyone but me.

Mother's Day 2014

Mother’s Day 2014

At Ban Rang Krathai School

This post is about three months overdue. Mother’s Day in Thailand is on August 12^th, the birthday of HRH Queen Sirikit. This year, the royal birthday fell on a Tuesday, giving us a four-day weekend, Saturday through Tuesday. That was the weekend I spent in Sukothai, described in two blog posts published earlier. For various reasons I didn’t get back to Mother’s Day until now. Better late than never?

At our school, Mother’s Day was observed on the Friday before the weekend, so students spent much of Thursday making Mother’s Day cards or flower arrangements and decorating the cafeteria. Below you see students working on the decorations around a portrait of the Queen that was hung especially for the occasion. This particular portrait of her is a very popular one, seen perhaps more often than any other.

Student on ladder adjusting ribbons

Trying to get that rosette just right

Students ironing yards, er, meters of tulle fabric

On Friday morning, the first order of business was to line up to give gifts to monks: packages of rice and other food, bottled water, juice, soy milk, kanom . . . . The sixth-grade students in the picture below were amusing themselves while waiting for the monks to arrive.

 After all nine monks had filed past the row of students and teachers to receive the gifts, they opened the Mother’s Day ceremony with chanting and prayers.

When the monks had finished chanting, there was a ritual of lighting candles and pouring water at the altar in front of HRH the Queen’s portrait. Virtually every formal meeting in Thailand opens this way, by having key individuals pay respect to the Buddha and to the Royal Family.

Next, the emcee invited the students’ mothers to the front of the room, by grade level –  preschoolers first. The children then came to sit with their mothers, as you see in the picture below.

When students in the higher grades come forward, they bow down and touch their foreheads to the floor three times, then hug their mothers and give them cards and bouquets. The public display of reverence to their mothers is very emotional for the students. Quite a few tears are shed.

 Some students’ mothers couldn’t be there, so teachers stood in for them. I sat on the floor and hugged several of my students whose mothers weren’t there, including one whose parents died when he was very young. I don’t have a picture of that though.

After each grade level had come forward to honor their mothers, student dancers performed for everyone. By now the hand and arm movements of traditional Thai dance are probably familiar to you.

Some schools have more elaborate programs for Mothers’ Day. At my school last year, the older students did skits, sang songs, and recited poems, and the marching band played several ear-splitting numbers. My current school is much smaller, with only 200 students, so the pool of performers is limited.

Finally, here is a slightly blurry picture to show you what was done with the tulle the students were ironing the day before. The words above my head say Wan Mae (=Mother's Day), followed by the date. Mothers could sit here to have their picture taken with their children.

When Thais ask me about Mother’s Day in America, they want to know whose birthday is celebrated on this occasion. No one’s, I say, and explain that it’s on a Sunday in May, celebrated mostly in people’s homes or in restaurants. This surprises them. But it's all in a day's work:  Part of our responsibilities as PC volunteers is to help people in the country we're serving understand more about American life and culture.