Chinese New Year's Weekend

This weekend we had a little more down time than the others. On Friday, we went with John, Jim, Ning, and Yao to a Thai Traditional Dance Show called Khon. It was like a play only they had people who performed the lines and the actors just performed the dancing and acrobatic moves. The story was interesting and we were able to follow the overall idea with the sub titles above the stage. It was a little slow at times and the person who was performing the lines was very loud and this kind of ruined the performance part but overall, it was pretty good. After that we went to an Irish bar where a Thai band was playing Beetles songs. We found this fruit that Jeremy had been looking for called a Darein, not sure about the spelling. On the outside it has spikes all over and it appears to be a hard shell. When you open it and smell, it has a bad smell. The taste was not much better and so we found out that it wasn't our favorite fruit. We stayed a while at the bar and then headed home.

The next day it was time to sleep in and relax. Later that night we went to watch our first movie, "Curse of the Golden Flower" with a Chinese origin. Before the movie they stand to honor the King and they sing their national anthem. Watching the movie in subtitles wasn't bad and the new previews in English were nice. The movie itself was like a Chinese Royal Family soap opera. I won't ruin the rest for those who haven't seen it yet.

On Sunday evening we went to the Chinese New Year Festival or what we thought was a festival. The festivities run around 3 days. We went down there around 6pm and knew that the Princess was going to be there and we thought there was going to be a parade. Well, early on we could tell there were people waiting for something and we realized it was the Princess. She walked by with many armed guards and people as she was going into a temple. You couldn't take pictures of her. Also, you couldn't watch her from a balcony because you would be higher than her when she passed you. So we saw her and headed to the stage looking for performances. Well, the princess went to a place by the stage and we find out later that she was actually eating. There were many people showing up and we decided to move down the parade route because of the large crowd. We found a spot and waited for around 2hours, maybe more. The event was supposed to start at 7-8 pm and we waited forever for something to happen. This is known as Thai time over here because things never start on time and nobody can every tell you when they are supposed to start. Anyway, around 9:30 to 10 pm the Princess walked down the street and that was the end of the show. There was no parade or anything else, it was only the Princess. We were disappointed that there wasn't more festivities but it was amazing that there was such a large crowd that waited so long to get a 30 second look at their Queen.

Chinese New Years Pictures



Additional Chinese New Year Video