(written by Dave)

Dinner with Forrest and his friend Dang was great.  They came to our hotel (The Irish Clock) where we ate and drank western food and beer.  There was a band as well, 3 Thai guys playing western hits.  We had a lot of fun catching up with Forrest.  He of course filled me in on all the Polycom news but more important, he helped us understand some of our burning Thailand questions.  He’s lived here for over 12 years (I think) and speaks Thai, so he’s much more informed than we are.  It was funny watching the wait staff interact with him still as they just don’t get Thai coming out of a farang’s mouth.  Sometimes he said things with little to no recognition, then Dang said the same thing and bingo, the staff understood.  At least to us it sounded exactly the same.  But then again like with many words, Dang’s name means a completely different thing if pronounced like dang or dan – and both would be spelled the same way.  In other words, maybe even Forrest doesn’t yet have complete mastery of tonal Thai.

Anyway, he’s helped us understand the temples and their funding model a bit better.  He informed us that the temples get no money from the government but that they are tax exempt.  The temples get most of their funding from events that they put on through out the year.  Events can be annual event festivals related to Buddhism or may be one-off events for members of the “congregation”, such as a wedding or a death in the family.  At all of these events money is collected for temple support.  Monks and the temples don’t pay for much.  They get free food via daily donations and free use of public transportation/services.  When it comes to maintaining the fantastic temples, the only expense is the materials as most labour is donated or completed by monks.  And often materials are also donated.

We didn’t get around to asking Forrest about the sudden appearance of the Princess’s photo here in the north but we did talk a bit about the King and royal family.  The King and most of the royal family are viewed with religious level reverence but they have no active role in religion.  The King is the world’s longest standing monarch and is over 85 years old.  He has been ill and in the hospital for most of 2011.  Even though Forrest has been here for a relative short time, he spoke of the King with great respect.  The King’s (and Queen’s) opinions are held with the highest regard and have often put end to political issues that folks can’t resolve otherwise.  In fact, there was great debate about Buddhism being named as the state religion in the 2007 draft new constitution.  That was until the Queen weighed in that “Buddhism is beyond politics” and the issue was virtually closed overnight.

Dang and Forrest were not able to confirm that our dog-stopping word “chet” means stop or no but they noted hat some words in southern Thailand are different.  Whatever they say, I’m still planning on “chetting” every dog I see until I learn the equivalent word’/phrase to use in Laos.  Thanks to Forrest (and Dang) for meeting up with us and giving us so much better understanding on Thailand.  It was a fun night.

We didn’t do much today other than hit the mall next to our hotel for some supplies.  We did venture out on a limb and try the western breakfast in our Irish hotel.  It was pretty good but how can you go wrong when getting brekkie from the folks who invented blood pudding (no, we didn’t have any!).  We did try to purchase maps for Laos but had no luck.  I’m not overly stressed about this as we’ve not yet found good maps for a region, before arriving in that region.  I’m sure that we’ll have better luck in Vientiane on the weekend.  Nancy, being a better planner than I, is slightly more worried.

For dinner we decided to head out to the Loy Krathong festival.  This festival is one of the reasons we’ve stayed here in Thailand for almost two months.  Loy means float and Krathong means floating circular object.  They seem to float objects either rafts on a lake, or in the form of giant hot-air balloon like lanterns, up in the air.  This year, we’ve read that the 10th is set aside for the “floating day” but also read that the Udon Thani town council has extended this to the 8th, 9th and 10th to cheer folks up from the flooding.  So, for dinner we went to the lake where they are supposedly doing the floating but as we both sort of suspected, there was no floating going on.  A couple locals confirmed that it was indeed tomorrow night.  We got a nice sunset and saw a nice Chinese temple, but no floating…  There is clearly a festival going on, with lots of stalls for eating, selling and gaming.  Just as we were eating, we saw one single lantern float skywards but this must have been someone jumping the gun on tomorrow.

We’ve decided to head for Nong Khai tomorrow.  It is the border town, just this side in Thailand.  It’s a short ride so we’ll get in early to get a good place to stay.  If there is floating going on in Nong Khai, it should be pretty good as the Mekong River forms the waterfront.  Rafts and balloons should be a good show – assuming we have not misread the festival timing again.  We’ll see…

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