Loi Krathong – ลอยกระทง

Thais do it right, they have holidays all the time.  Yesterday was Loi Krathong, which is a festival to honor the Water Goddess.  It translates literally to “floating crown”.  People make krathongs which are like little rafts made from bread or bamboo tree trunks or for the environmentally conscious, styrofoam.  They put incense and candles and money on them and then float them away on some body of water.

A giant krathong

Normal size krathong

Basically, the rivers/canals/ponds all end up with a bunch of garbage in them, which I find particularly ironic for a holiday that honors a water goddess.  There’s probably like a million Baht on the bottom of the Chao Phraya river.  Ca-ching.

Loi Krathong is also a fairly romantic holiday.  According to the newspaper “many young people will have sex on this day”.  Double ca-ching.  If your krathong floats away with your significant others, you are destined to be together forever.  If one of them flips over, sinks or suffers some other equally catastrophic fate, which is almost guaranteed to happen on the river… you get the picture…

Farang party

We farangs (the Thai word for white person) went to the river in hopes that it would be filled with lots of little floating flower ships with candles etc.  But we were disappointed when we got there and saw that basically as soon as your krathong hits the water, it bounces around in the chop and then flips over and joins the rest of the raft of garbage floating down the river.

After we shot off some fireworks, ate street food and drank beers from the 7/11 bar (aka, we bought beer at 7/11 and drank it on the street), we went to celebrate with these:

How strong?

Many of us saw the sun rise.