Loy Krathong

Lots of people at our temple

Full moon, as good as my camera will get it...
More news! Saturday night, we had the full moon of November, which is the 12^th lunar month (don’t ask me why). In Thailand, this day the Loy Krathong festival takes place. “Loy” means to send away and a “Krathong” is a little boat made of banana leaves. To celebrate it, I went to our local temple with my host family (about 10 minutes away by foot) and everyone “sent away” such a little boat, on the Temple’s pond. Before sending it away, we lit the candle on the Krathong and made a wish. On the Temple grounds, there were many people, pretty much everyone from our neighborhood. Some monks were speaking to the people, there was a lottery, some shows and of course A LOT to eat (we’re in Thailand). After the temple, I went to downtown Bangkok to catch some of the atmosphere at the Chao Phraya River, the main river of Bangkok. But we got stuck in traffic, so we didn’t have much time once we were there.

On Friday morning, my school had its own Loy Krathong festival. In first period, there was a show with some singing and dancing. Thursday, the head of the English department had asked me if I wanted to sing the Loy Krathong song in English on stage in front of all students. Sure, why not, some Thai students sang with me, so it was no problem. They even gave me some traditional Thai clothes to wear.
That’s it for now
Klaus

Sports Day

The parade

And the band

The teacher's soccer team.
I decided to translate my Blog to English, so it is not only for German speaking people. It will be basically the same as the German version, but I probably won’t translate the posts until now. OK, here we go:

Last Wednesday and Thursday was the Sports Day of my school (if anyone speaks Thai, this is my school’s site: http://www.dmj.ac.th/). Sports Day is one of the biggest events in Thai schools. The whole school had been preparing for it since last semester (in Thailand, it’s 1^st Semester: May-Sep and 2^nd: Nov-Mar). Most of the competitions were on Wednesday, every student played soccer, badminton, basketball, volleyball, table tennis, or even Boule/Petanque. My host brother Min (17 years and in 12^th grade) won a gold medal in Badminton.

On Thursday, there was the BIG parade. Usually, the school day starts with the assembly of all students, singing the national anthem, praying together and one or more speeches by teachers, maybe some awards for students and maybe singing the school’s song or the King’s birthday song (he will turn 80 on December 5). But that day, it was a parade of almost all students. They were in five teams of colors (yellow, pink, green, orange, and blue, like the days of the week) and each team did their own part of the parade. My host brother carried the flag of his team, the yellow one. You couldn’t recognize some of the girls as they could finally take off their school uniform and dress up. On the soccer field, they then had some shows. After that, there was a soccer match between students and teachers. And since I’m German, of course I had to be in the teacher’s team. I guess they expected a little more skills from me, but our team still won 3-1. Maybe the students didn’t want to be mean to their teachers, but some in our team were really good.

After soccer, there were the runners. In the heat of Thailand, a few of them had problems and someone actually fainted. In the end, they had the awards for the best teams (pink won this time) and everyone sang “Auld lang Syne” together. Was a fun day!