Life in Phana

Full Moon in Phana

We met the two new volunteers from Project Trust last week, our first week back in Phana after the summer break in England. The two girls are from Scotland so I guess they may still be just 17 years old.  How young they are (and contrastingly, how old I am) was brought home to me in our first conversation.

One of them asked me "Do you have full moons in Phana?" and I was well launched into a response that centred on Buddhist Observance Days, lunar months and so on, having firstly assured her that we do indeed have full moons as well as quarter moons, half moons, new moons and no moons. When she laughed I suddenly realised that she and I were not speaking the same language and this had nothing to do with her being Scots and me being English. It had everything to do with the 50+ years difference in our ages and interests.

Oh well, nothing much I can do about that.

The subject was topical because two nights later it was full moon.

Pensri had said that she was interested to try to follow the customs as they were when she was a girl. This particular month's tradition is to pay respect to ancestors, and Pensri had almost certainly not been in the village at this time of year for more than 50 years.

So before going to bed, Pensri prepared for the ancestors a dish of food which she intended to put outside at dawn the following day. Dawn in this case meant the official time of 3.30 a.m. when we would be awoken by the temple drum. But just in case we were not, I set the alarm, too.

Here is the dish of special delicacies (traditional ones, people know what the ancestors like) that she prepared. You may be able to see two small pieces of toast, one with marmalade and one with marmite, and a chunk of cheese. These were for my mother, Pensri said, because she might be out in the garden too on this special night.

We were woken by the temple drum, and soon afterwards here was Pensri out in the garden with her offering to the ancestors.

 

You may have noticed a certain creature heading for the dish. I am not certain whether Thai snails fancy marmite, but I am very sure that my mother would not have wished to share her little feast with such company. Or is this a manifestation of her karma, I wonder? As we turned to go back indoors, the moon was even more dramatic than it had been earlier.

 

But this was not yet the end of the old-style traditions. Pensri was up again at 6 a.m. ready to take an offering to the monks at Wat Burapha, where the ashes of her parents are interred. 

This offering to the monks is made in the form of a raffle, the name of the monk and the number of the offering matching. The idea is that no monk will be personally singled out even though some offerings may be more elaborate or more delicious than others. 

Pensri had a great time there, and all her various relatives were pleased to see her. The old ways certainly live on in Phana.

Long-tailed Macaque Twins in Don Chao Poo Forest

Ten days ago I saw a monkey carrying two young infants. The infants looked to be the same age but I had never seen twins in the forest here before. I know that sometimes a female will foster an orphaned infant, so that is a possibility too. At the time I did not have my camera with me, and my sighting of the mother + two was quite brief.

 

I have been on the lookout for them ever since, and today I finally succeeded. And I had my camera with me.

 

They look like twins to me. What do you think? And have you come across long-tailed macaque twins in the wild before?

Click on an image to enlarge it.

This post also appears on Thai Monkey Forest. Please visit that site if long-tailed macaques interest you.

Technorati Tags: Thai monkeys,Thai monkey forest,Isan monkeys,Phana,Long-tailed macaques

Study Centre is Busy, Busy

After opening on 8th March, the Rin-Homhual Mahanil Study Centre in Phana was busy two days later when the Phana Bicycle Rally came by. Then there were a few quiet days when we wondered where everyone was who had said they would visit. Slowly ‘business’ picked up. The Director of Phana Suksa called in with a good luck gift to the Centre, for example, and several people stopped by to do a little weaving.

But this last week has been very busy and has been everything we had hoped the Study Centre would be: a place for people to study, to hold discussions and meetings, and to drop in to browse through the books and magazines and study the exhibits and ask questions about them.

Three groups of children on school holiday are now attending the Study Centre twice a week for English lessons and practice. The largest group (16 of them at the last count) are of Primary One age or a bit younger. One group of them comes in from a village about 7 kms away in/on this vehicle driven by the mother of one of them. I guess you would call this a little-people carrier.

The oldest group (M1) is currently the smallest, but these three girls are very keen. They are joined by ‘Judy’ in the background, a Phanasuksa student who has just returned from a year as an AFS student in Brazil. She is helping out at the Study Centre and especially helping me with the teaching.

The other group, about to double in numbers next week, is Primary 4 and 5. After their class finished on Thursday they stayed on to play some English-language games on the computer.

On Wednesday we hosted a group of teachers and students from Benjamah Mahavat School in Ubon. They were following up an earlier exploratory visit to assess Phana as a possible focus for their off-site study programme. We started the day early after they had had breakfast across the road at the house of Acharn Kalyani, who is involved in the running of the centre.

After introducing them to the centre and looking at the history and monkey exhibitions in some detail, we took them on a tour of other possible educational sites in the village.

The Traditional Medicine Centre had not been expecting us, but when we arrived they had just done a presentation to a group from Si Sa Ket, so they kindly repeated it for us.

 

At Fai Rong Hin the group was most interested in the cooking, using methane gas produced on site with the help of a lot of pigs… (APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE)

… and in posing for a group photo:

After lunch we visited the weaving co-operative in Moo 9. Again, they had not been expecting us and it turned out that a training session was in progress. But again, we were welcomed, given lots of attention and lots of answers to our questions, and a couple of the teachers were sold some cloth produced by the co-operative.

And finally, to Don Chao Poo, where we took them on the Path of the Buddha:

Then it was back to the Study Centre for a plenary discussion. It looks very likely that a group or groups of students from the school will be making a visit of several days to carry out a varied study programme using all the facilities we visited early in the new school year which starts in mid-May.

And finally, on Friday evening the first of a planned series of meetings took place at the Study Centre, organised this time by Khun Chorkdee Pornsri. The idea was to discuss the ways in which the traditional 12-month festivals were celebrated ‘in the old days’.

Thirty-two people turned up, but they didn’t get past the first month! The next meeting in two weeks time will be to listen to the Chao Kana Amphur (the chief abbot of the District) talking about his recent pilgrimage to the places in India associated with the life of the Buddha.

So, a very busy week at the Study Centre, and a very productive one which promises well for the continued use and interest in the Centre.

 

Bicycle Rally calls at the Study Centre

Two days after the official opening of the Rin-Himhual Mahanil Study Centre we were ready and waiting for the bicycle rally to come calling.

CLICK on the images to enlarge them.

We had arranged an exhibition featuring the work of the weaving co-operative in Moo 9. Khun Pitsamai, leading light of the co-op, set up the loom and provided the ingredients for the indigo dying process. Pensri added the explanation of this process in terms of the chemistry, and also set up the microscope and slides showing the indigo being worked on by bacteria.

Also featured was the work of our four researchers, who have been studying Don Chao Poo Forest and the monkey population there.

Our first customers of the day were these people who were staffing the rally checkpoint and information point at the buea baan (lak mueang) on the other side of the road. Also there were the three people who had done most to get the project up and running.

There was quite a long wait before the first of the rally cyclers arrived at the checkpoint opposite us, but when they came they were in several inseparable waves and many of them came into the centre rather than wait in the checkpoint queue, and others cam in once they had checked in and listened to the information from the four staff girls who had been waiting for them in the study centre and practising their English-language speeches with me. They spoke very clearly and precisely though I would not vouch for how much of what they were saying meant anything to them. I guess it must have, because they had also learned the same information in Thai.

They seemed to hold the attention of our four researchers, anyway.

But these competitors didn’t seem greatly interested in the study centre, they were far more concerned with the impression they were making, which was pretty impressive, to be fair.

 

I was quite sorry not to take part in the bicycle rally this year, especially because I was so insistent last year that it should become an annual event. There were not as many people taking part this year and some of the preparations were very last minute, but people who took part seemed to enjoy it. As well as the short course which was similar to last year’s, there was a ‘professional’ event that was ridden over a 47km route. I have some pictures of that which have been kindly offered to me by my friend Khun Surayuth Singhnak. Thanks, Tong!

I’ll start with the charming young woman in the picture above. Here she is, needing both hands on her bike and so i\unable to make any gestures, rude or otherwise:

And here is someone who may have been expecting an easier ride:

 

And finally, here is Tong himself. At all these occasions he takes hundreds of photos (he was a photo-journalist based in Bangkok for many years) but he rarely appears himself.

Tong:

The Isan House that Moved

There is a house in Exeter, where I live half my time, known as 'the house that moved'. It was originally built in the late 16th or early 17th century and had to move to make way for a new road. Now there is a house that moved here in Phana; not quite so old, but old enough that lots of people are surprised we didn't demolish it and build a new concrete one. I have posted about this house at several stages of its reincarnation, Moving House in Isan Part 1 ,  and Moving House in Isan Part 2, and Keeping the ancestors informed . The work is finished now, and the upper storey is occupied, while we are still preparing the ground floor for a 'grand opening' on March 8th.

The renovation/restoration/refurbishment, call it what you will, has been carried out through donations from a large number of family members of descendants of Ta Rin and Yai Homhual Mahanil, as well as other relatives and neighbours in Phana. The generosity of all these people has been amazing, and those of us who have been closest to the work are most grateful to everyone who has donated.

These two pictures show the house as it now looks from the road:

Here we can see the ground floor after we moved some of the furniture into it, although when the picture was taken we hadn't finalised the arrangement.

The old doors at the back lead into an enclosed area that is part of the 'upstairs' accommodation. This largely open area on the ground floor is going to be a community study centre, containing a library, seating and meeting areas, a screen for showing DVDs, and temporary exhibitions. The opening exhibition will centre around the loom, with pictures and information about weaving and the process of indigo dying as it is practised in Phana.

Behind the closed doors at the back are these stairs and a shower room. The stairs lead to the accommodation we are providing for the Don Chao Poo Research Centre which will serve as the base for people conducting research into all aspects of the nearby forest known as Don Chao Poo, and especially in all probability into all aspects of the long-tailed macaques which live there.

At the top of the stairs is a 'kitchen area'. There is an electric hot-water jug, a 4-slice toaster and a double electric hot-plate.

 

The dining area is shown looking towards the front of the house. In the top right corner is the door to one of the three bedrooms. The doors and the bedrooms they lead to are the original ones, as are all the floorboards and the ouiter wooden walls and shuttered windows.

You can see our lab bench in the picture above, but here is a better view of it. The two microscopes were donated by Exeter University, and our other equipment at present consists of binoculars, a DVD video camera, a hand-held GPS, two stop-watches, and various glassware of a scientific nature.

And here, looking towards the back of the house. The kitchen area is to the right of the bathroom.

This is the sitting area. The chairs have been donated by a generous neighbour, Acharn Kalyani, who also gave us the old dooors downstairs, the stumps that form the front fence, the shuttered windows on the ground floor, and several other valuable pieces of wood that were used in the renovation. She has also provided the meeting table and chairs, three old wooden chairs and a small table, and lots of very interesting books -- all of which are in use on the ground floor. 

Next to the sitting area, towards the bedrooms and the front of the house, is this small library of reference books on academic subjects as well as local history, travel and so on. There are three bedrooms here, but we currently have four researchers in residence, so one has to sleep out in the main room as you can see. They have formed a rota so that this 'privilige' is shared among them.

As I mentioned previously, the bedrooms and their doors are original. Here is the middle bedroom door:

This is the bedroom that Pensri and I always stayed in back in the 1980s and 1990s. When I came to stay in the 1970s I wasn't senior enough to be given a bedroom, so like our fourth researcher I used to sleep on the floor.

Back downstairs, we are still in the process of arranging the study centre. We are presently awaiting a truck-load (!!!) of books being donated by family members in Bangkok. Also to come is a series of DVDs to help secondary school students to revise for exams in all their subjects. These have been offered by Pink, the daughter of a neice, who has just finished her secondary education and has been awarded a scholarship by a university in Japan, which she will take up later this year.

This view looks out towards a rice and noodle restaurant which our researchers have named 'The Shack'. They eat there a lot, especially at mid-day.

The blue house across the road is home to Panda, a white dog with black markings over his eyes. Panda was quite hostile to the researchers whenh they were staying at our house, but when they moved in here he had a change of heart.  In fact, he moved in as well, sleeping beneath the house for the first few nights. Now he has returned to the blue house, but he has become friendly and protective of the research centre and the researchers. Both have become part of his territory, no doubt.

 

I will post some more about the community study centre when we have got it ready for the opening on March 8th.

 

Keeping the ancestors informed

It was important to keep the ancestors informed before we ‘interfered’ with their house, and we duly did that in a small ceremony in the enclosed ground-floor area of the old house built by Ta Rin and Yai Hom. We told them that work was going to be done in the house, that this would improve its condition and that we were doing this out of respect for them and in their memory.

When the major work had been done, we held another ceremony. This was attended by a few more people and this time I had my camera with me. I remember well going through the same ceremony when our house was nearing completion back in the mid-nineties. One of the most memorable features was that an old man prevented us from entering until lots of questions had been asked and entered, and he had decided that we meant well, had sufficient respect for the ancestors who were the true owners of the property, and that we intended to use it wisely and maintain it properly. The old man guarding the property on this occasion was Khun Ta Peng, the husband of Pensri’s father’s half-sister; answering on my behalf (although it was me who was wearing the traditional ‘regalia’ of a hat and carrying a bag containing a hammer and a nail – with which I was going to ‘maintain’ the house) was Khun Ta Gert, father of the mayor of tetsaban Phana.

This was the condition of the house at the time:

Here we are, gathered outside the house:

It was a good opportunity for old friends and relations to get together:

Khun Ta Peng didn’t want to let us in!

But eventually he was persuaded and he helped Khun Ta Gert and me to attach flowers, incense and candles to the foot of the stairs.

Khun Ta Gert prepares to demonstrate MY willingness to maintain the house by hammering in a nail above the photo of Ta Rin and Yai Homhual, Pensri’s parents.

Then Pensri’s adopted brother, Tuan, did the honours at this little temporary shrine in what used to be Ta Rin and Yai Homhual’s bedroom.

And I did, too.

Afterwards, we sat around for a while in the big, sitting area outside the bedrooms. We chatted, but also there was an important presentation. Pensri is going to use the ground floor as a community library or study centre, and a neighbour, Khun Yai Somwang had offered to donate an old ‘accordion’ book which had belonged to her grandfather, the village herbal doctor born about 100 years ago. Here she is in the blue jacket, presenting the book to Pensri.

And here is a close-up of two pages of the book.

Some of the book was written in gold on black, some of it black on white.

Everybody had a good look at the book, which was in quite a fragile state in parts.

But the interest was obvious:

Now we have to decide on the best way to display the book, keeping it safe and intact, but allowing people to indulge their interest in what is certainly an item of historic importance. Pensri has already decided that Khun Yai Somwang’s donation will feature in the logo of the study centre.

Keeping Busy in Phana

 

The Phana Monkey Project is about to reach a crucial stage. A week from now five researchers, all recent Msc graduates in Animal Behaviour from Exeter University in the UK, will arrive in Phana to begin a project which will provide the basis for the establishment of Don Chao Poo Forest as a research field site as well as educational and informational material for schoolchildren and visitors to the forest.

This team will be carrying out most of the research which the Phana Monkey Project needs at this stage. In addition, they will be conducting some research of their own along lines that they discussed last Friday with Dr Joah Madden of Exeter University.

 

NO APE MUSEUM

As far as the Phana Monkey Project goes, we have not been idle in the last few months. We have held meetings with the Phana Municipality to clarify our role and theirs. At least one of the original intentions has been abandoned: the money is no longer available for an "Ape Museum" to be built in the forest. Although the promise of this was perhaps the key starting point for the then-named Macaque Project, I think all of us who have carried the idea forward see abandoning that particular part of the project as a good thing. There was every chance that had a building been provided, there would have been no money available to keep it staffed and maintained; on top of that, building inside the forest would have been a major disruption. There are already two small buildings in the forest which have been abandoned and left to the monkeys to play in -- their main playthings being ceiling and roof tiles, which they love to pull off and destroy.

COMMUNITY CENTRE

The Tetsaban have suggested an alternative to an 'Ape Museum' in the forest. The old market building is to be converted into a kind of community centre, and it will provide three main spaces. At one end will be a community IT centre with 22 computer stations. There will be a similar-sized space at the other end of the building which we will be able to use to show videos to visiting schoolchildren. The central space will be for occasional community meetings, and we will provide an exhibition detailing macaque information and photographs in that space.

The tetsaban is providing the materials for the conversion of this building but the community will provide the labour. In the following pictures you see the headman of Moo 7 and his wife working on the new floor, which they have completed since the photos were taken.

CLEANING UP THE FOREST

Last week we worked with the tetsaban / municipality and some students from the school they run, to clear the forest of litter. It is amazing how quickly litter accumulates, and monitoring it will be an important focus of the upcoming research, so that hopefully we can recommend some practical ways to reduce the litter produced and ensure that litter is removed frequently. Our monitoring will be made more useful because we have established a 'zero-litter' environment before the monitoring begins. This way we should be able to get a clearer picture of when, where, and how much litter is dropped over a weekend, for example. Already the tetsaban have put a new cleaning team in place to collect and remove litter and we are sure this will be a great improvement on the previous 'emergency' cleaning sessions before big events.

DON CHAO POO FOREST RESEARCH CENTRE

The Phana Monkey project has also been working to provide a centre for researchers to use while they are in Phana, and the team from Exeter University will be the first to do so. The building is almost ready, and the only thing which may prevent them moving in as soon as they arrive is that water and/or electricity may not be connected in time. Details of this centre will appear here as soon as all is ready.

ROAD TRAFFIC FATALITY

Last week we experienced our first recorded road traffic fatality, an adult male killed on the road outside the forest just before 8 am. As it happened, Pensri and I were on our early morning cycle ride, so Pensri put the still-warm monkey in a plastic bag (there were still plenty lying around at the beginning of the week) and took him home. Our first thought was taxidermy but it quickly became apparent that no-one locally had the skill and experience to do this; we soon realised, too, that there was litle point in creating a life-like specimen when we have more than 400 live ones! With advice from Prof Dr Suchinda at Chulalongkorn University, we decided to preserve and display the skeleton. The person in charge of the museum in the Biology Department at Chula sent us some insects (in a box, via the Railway parcels service) and for more than a week now these insects have been nibbling away at the cooked flesh and revealing more of the skeleton. When the process is completed we will post pictures of the skeleton and more detail regarding the process. For the time being, here are a few of the photos we took of our monkey soon after the accident. The monkey had been hit a glancing blow on the side of the head which had fractured his skull but not smashed it. Nevertheless, bleeding was still evident through his nose and mouth, so no pictures of his injury are included here. The blow struck him on the left side of his head, the side not shown here. He was a fine specimen as can be seen from his teeth. (CLICK on the photos for an enlarged view.)

 

We have learned a lot from this monkey and hope to learn more when we are able to examine his skeleton so we have named him "Ajarn Ling" in gratitude. He is not the first macaque to give his life to science, but he will be remembered in Phana, for sure.

( This post has also appeared in a slightly different form at www.thaimonkeyforest.wordpress.com . There is much more about the Phana Monkey Project at that site, so I hope you will visit it sometime soon.)

Moving House in Isan Part 2

Moving house here in Phana, Isan, has finished. What happens next is that the newly-located building is going to be renovated and adapted to new purposes. As I explained in Part 1, the house has been empty for some years and it has looked increasingly sorry for itself and uncared for. But in fact many people care a lot for it and want the house to be used, to be useful, and to reflect the life and memory of Ta Rin and Yai Hom who lived in it for so long and who brought up so many young people (not just their own children) in this house.

As I also explained in Part 1, we were not in Phana on the day that the house was moved back away from the road. But we were here and I did take some photos on the day that the house was raised to its new height. I hope that the pictures will give an idea of how this was done because I think my explanation would be tedious and would probably not offer any clarification at all.  All I will say is that the raising of the house was done with great care and patience, little by little, co-ordinated, and with lots of measuring and fine adjustments before the craftsmen were satisfied that the job was done.

Once the poles had been raised, they needed to have supports added to each of their bases. My father-in-law had a traditional rice store in the lane behind the house but this, too, had not been used for years, and the lane wound round it in a way that made little sense now that traffic (motor bikes) use the lane. So the rice store was dismantled, the ancient hard wood still in excellent condition. Just how hard it was was discovered by these men who had to saw it up, albeit with an electric saw.

The new bases were fitted to the poles and they were all bedded down:

As a reminder of how far the house has been moved back, here is a photo taken before that happened:

And here is the house in its new position, awaiting the renovation and new work:

So the house has moved! Over the next few weeks I will try to record the renovation and adaptation work as it happens. We are expecting that everything will be done by about mid-January. The workmen here don't hang about once they get started.

 

Moving House in Isan Part 1

Pensri's father built this house in about 1937. It has stood here ever since but now it is moving. It moved, or was moved, about ten days ago and will move again before too long, I hope. The men who are doing the moving have taken a break for harvesting, but they are expected back any day now. 

The house didn't look like this when it was built because like the more recent houses on either side, and like all the houses in Phana at that time, it was built on stilts. Even when I first came to stay in the house in 1970, it didn't look like this. 

Several changes have been made. The currugated iron rooof had been added not long before 1970 and was seen as a big improvement on the old wooden roof. Since 1970, the ground floor has been enclosed with brick, the old wooden, folding doors replaced by the sliding security gate, the windows and window frames replaced more than once. And most disastrously for the house and the people who have lived in it, the road out front, originally just a sandy track, has gradually been raised higher and higher. For several years this caused the downstairs room to be flooded in the rainy season but eventually (and again, in at least two stages) drains have been put in along the road. But getting into the house became a matter of going down several steps, and then later a ramp when my sister-in-law bought a motor-bike.

This closer-up picture might make the situation clearer.

But the house has stood empty for the last ten years, since Pensri's sister died. Her three children are scattered, two in Bangkok and one in Lamphun, and they each have families born and growing up there, though they come up to Phana to pay respects to ancestors most years. The house belongs to the eldest son, as does the family farm, but the three of them effectively have joint ownership by mutual consent. The fields are farmed by a second cousin who lives in the soi alongside the house and most people in the family get a bit of the rice each year.

For several years now the older members of the family have talked about renovating the house but it hasn't been quite clear what the purpose of that would be, other than out of respect for their parents and in memory of all the people who lived in the house in their childhood years. But finally minds have been made up, agreements made, money collected, plans made. I will write about these in a later post.

For now, this is what was done first. The walls enclosing the downstairs area have been knocked down. The bricks and mortar will serve as the base for the new ground floor, which must be raised to the level of the road, or above it, preferably.

  

 And here is the house after the ground has been brought up to road level by filling with sand.

In this picture you can see how the house has been moved back from the road, on some sort of trolleys apparently.

Unfortunately, this was done while we were in Ubon. We had expected that it would be done the following day and we would have watched, but the men worked hard and late so that they could go harvesting the next day, and so we missed it.

And that is how the house stands at the moment. The next stage will be to lift it higher, but that will have to wait about a week because the men who will do the lifting are the ones who have gone off to do some harvesting. Harvesting is better paid, and can't wait, so that's fair enough. We will just have to be patient.

Ceremony for the new Lak Muang at Phana

The ceremony for the new Lak Muang at Phana took place some time ago now, but I haven't had time to get around to putting up some pictures of it. Much of what time I did have was wasted. A good friend at the tetsaban, who takes most of their photos these days, agreed to let me have some (as I thought) of his work for this blog. In fact, when he came round to download them, there were 1057 of them! I looked at them all, and realised that just choosing a few to use would take me another lifetime. But when I came to do that (choose the pics, not start another lifetime) I couldn't find them anywhere. I've spent, or wasted as I said, a lot of time looking for them. I don't like to admit to him that I've lost them, so this blog will go ahead with the few pictures that were in my camera. I didn't take any of them, but gave my camera to Hannah, one of this year's two new volunteers from Project Trust. And she gave the camera to someone else for a few of them.

The rituals began in the evening preceding the main event. A large number of people, most of them in white, gathered at the old market place for a ceremony which made the site and various artifacts holy: a super-blessing ceremony which involves a lot of chanting that continued for about six hours. Pensri and I attended for a couple of hours, but I took no photos. My contribution was to present 72 little leaf-wrapped packages of a sticky-rice concoction, one package for each year of my life. The next day they would be distributed to people who attended the ceremony.  Far more than 72 packages were needed, so I was not by any means the only person offering them.

The first thing that struck me the next morning when we arrived for the ceremony was how much work had gone into all the preparations. I wondered who had done all this work. Amongst my friend's 1057 photos was the answer: people who work for the tetsaban, monks, old people, grandchildren, passing strangers ... just about everyone except me!

These two pictures give just a little idea of the elaborateness of the preparations:

Beneath the red umbrella is the 'pit' into which various sacred objects, flowers and so on, were placed for posterity. They will form the 'core' of the lak muang, and the pillar will be immediately above this holy site.

The next few pictures were taken during the ceremony itself. In the first you can see some of the sticky-rice packages and somewhere amongst them are my contribution. During (but in theory, after) the ceremony food and drink was provided for people and all this refreshment was provided as donation by individuals and groups. For example, some teachers and students from Phana Suksa School were serving noodles and the bright red and green soft drinks so beloved by Thais. And me.

 

 After all the ceremonies were done, the governor had departed, most of the monks returned to their wats, people to their homes, there was a little time to pose for photos like this next one before everything was dismantled and the old market-place restored to its usual rather colourless state.