Relaxing

Well, it's Monday night in Chiang Mai, and here is the weekend report. This weekend was Loy Krathong, and we got to experience the rest of the weekend without incident while having a lot of fun. As per the previous post, we witnessed the celebration by the river on Friday night and experienced the madness. On Saturday, we decided that we'd had quite enough of that and simply took part in the festivities at our hotel. We love our hotel, the lobby is so cute and nice, and all their events are very cute. Each night they have some sort of live music - the guy with the acoustic guitar doing American classics is my favorite - "rastin aray ageen in malgalitavirre"...if you follow.

On Saturday night we got tickets to the Loy Krathong party at our hotel. At about 5pm we went down to the lobby and were taught how to make "krathongs". The base of a krathong is made from a disk of the trunk of a banana leaf tree. You then proceed to decorate this disk with banana leaves that are folded in all sorts of neat ways. Then you add flowers to make it pretty. Then you put a little piece of foam in the center of the disk and stab some incense sticks, a candle, and more flowers into the foam to make the top pretty. People who wanted to made their own krathongs, and the hotel had a zillion others premade for everyone else. There was a band of children playing traditional Thai music on strange instruments, and there was food and traditional drinks - which were kind of gross. At about 7pm they moved everyone to the pool to set off paper lanterns into the sky (as described in an earlier post). They had a lot of them so that all the guests could light one.

After the lanterns, we all got our krathongs and took a walk down to the canal - there were probably 30 or more people with us! We all filed to the nearby canal and lit up the candles and incense on our krathongs and set them in the canal to float away with all of our "bad luck". Traditionally you put your krathong in the river, but the canal is closer so I assume they figured it would be easier to tote 30+ tourists 2 blocks instead of 10. It was very fun anyway.

And the next day, they even gave me pictures of Kane and I that they had taken while we made the krathongs and as we released our lantern - like I said, I love this hotel.

We didn't go out after that, and instead called it an early night and read for the remainder of the evening. Sunday had an uneventful morning (sending out pictures takes forever). Sunday evening, however, is the weekly market in Chiang Mai. It's huge and awesome. There is food and about 6 city blocks-worth of streets are closed off and completely lined with vendors selling all sorts of fun goods. There was also a parade that night for Loy Krathong, which we watched part of (neither of us are terribly interested in parades). By the way, I think "parade" is the most difficult word to discern from a native Thai saying it in English. They say "palade" and put accent on the first syllable instead of the second. Took me a few tries the first time someone said it to us.

So, we walked the market, bought a couple things, found the cake stand - yum!, and then came home nice and tired. That market is awesome, we're definitely going next Sunday too.