Veggie fest

Mai ben rai.....
This means go with the flow, no worries, chill out dude.....etc
This Thai phrase was pushed to the limit earlier this week when we attended the Vegetarian festival in Krabi.
Now, from the pictures above one may think there is a contradiction at play here. What's with all the bloody flesh if we're supposed to be celebrating vegetables.
Well....Veggie Tales this is not.
The idea behind this is that every year many Chinese Thais in the South of Thailand believe that nine deities can enter people's bodies but only if they have abstained from eating meat and have not had sex for....brace yourself....TEN WHOLE DAYS!!!! That means that half of Eugene should be able to take part in this festival of piercing, slicing, and exploding. The idea behind the festival is said to originate from a group of CHinese fishermen who were starving and by fasting and repenting through abusing their bodies they were saved by the gods.
SO...if you don't do these two things for ten days, and believe me, as a voracious omnivore the veggie thing is pretty cake here in Thailand. With skewers of fried tofu, gilled corn, squash curry, fresh OJ, pineapples falling of trucks, and papaya salad that I could happily feast on for weeks we're definitely not suffering. But, apparently this is the only sacrifice needed. Just don't eat the roasting ducks, pig intestines, and deep fried cockroaches for ten days and voila, you are susceptible to the spirits.
On the day of possession, CHinese people line up outside of homes and businesses with fresh fruit, rice, candy, and rice wine. Then you wait...and wait...eat some fried tofu and sticky rice....wait......and then you hear the first pops in the distance. Like the sound of machine gun fire the procession makes its way up the street being led by poles with M-80s tied to them blowing up at every intersection. As we saw these fireworks being held up in the distance all we could see were dancing figures below. As they got closer, things got really intense. With firecrackers in your ears, people walked up to each of the tables carrying the offerings and threw them in to the crowd or handed them to the people bowing to them at the offerring tables (I caught a Halls cough drop). But these were not just people throwing hard candy in a a parade. The people were possessed by the deities. As they walked up to each table some people who were waiting for them would go into seizures and join them in the parade (we saw two girls about 12 years old almost crack their head sopen as they threw themselves back in a frenzy). One in the tracne, the most popular look was to have your eyes rolled back, head shaking from side to side, fingers up in a mudra, and spittle dripping down your chin.
That was just the bare minimum. For the really hardcore, the truly possessed you would have to bleed. You could:
a) shove a sharp object through your cheek, ear, head, or arm
b) find a sword, knife, axe, or razor blade and use it to cut your tongue over and over again until you were covered with blood, or
c) use any of the above objects to shove, pound, or pierce into you as you danced around the M-80s, which, on more than one occasion caused people to bleed and/or have their clothes burned through. Yay!

It seemed you got extra cred the more outlandish your piercing item or pounding item was hence we were able to witness tire rims, fire extinguishers, tree limbs, deer skulls, and countless other objects go through people. This whole deal lasted about four hours as the procession made its way to the CHinese temple where someone would talk people out of the trance while others stayed in it so later that evening they could focus their energy climbing knife ladders or walking across burning coals. And finally, free veggie Phad Thai for everyone (icluding us farang....aka foreigners).
I'm beginning to think our parades in the US are kind of weak. When we get back there will be no more idly sitting on the float waiving like Miss America for me....I'm taking things a step further. Maybe I'll wear a bracelet really tight or cinch my belt a notch to far as I get pulled along by a pick up .....all I know is that I have some stepping up to do.