Thailand- Vegetarian Style (Jackie)

The Vegetarian festival parade is a mind blowing experience not for the queasy or faint of heart. Even 24hrs later the only words that come to mind are 4 letter explicatives. Look at the pictures and see if you can do better!  Warning: If you don’t like seeing this type of bodily injury just scroll down past the pics…hopefully by then I’ll have thought of a way to describe the festival in words.

           (I'd look concerned too if I had a blade like that through my mouth )

           (This piercing freaked me out the most..I couldn't stop imagining HOW he got those candles in his cheeks)

 (Maybe toy helicopters in Thailand should come with an additional warning concerning intentional impalement)

                             

 ( This was ironic because it rained suddenly in the morning and he was the only person with an umbrella. It just couldn't keep him from getting wet)

                                      (The kids aren't allowed scissors at school.  Maybe this is why)

( Yes, that man has a pole that spans the entire street through his cheeks...perhaps the world's largest  fruit skewer as well)

(Not sure how I would feel about getting blessed by a man
with a sword through his cheek, but baby's seem to love it!)

 Whew, now you see what I mean! It’s entirely overwhelming and impossible to even try to explain in words what the Ma Song do for their religion. I’ll try instead to describe what it was like being in the midst of it. Imagine you’re running in a 5K event, imagine the chaos, adrenaline, noise, laughter, and confusion as hundreds of people pack into a single narrow street for the start of the race. The starter gun blows and you suddenly realize you’re hemmed in by other people and there’s nowhere to go except with the mass. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the course, now you couldn’t leave it if you tried. Now replace the water stations with fresh fruit and tea in tiny cups, the mile markers with firecracker stands, and give every teenage boy a Buddha litter that will occasionally explode with firecrackers and send billowing smoke and bits of paper flying everywhere.  Keep the adrenaline. Keep the constant jostling of bodies. Keep the constant weaving in and out of the living obstacle course and keep the ambulance. In fact, keep a few ambulances. Oh, that’s right, and this morning you shoved a metal object through your tongue or cheek. I usually hate being left on the sidelines but in this parade I was happy to just watch.

Because the streets were so narrow we got to see all of the Ma Song up close.  Sometimes I could barely wedge my way deep enough inside the crowd to avoid touching them. I lived in deadly fear somehow bumping one of the incredibly long poles that protruded horizontally from delicate skin. I don’t consider myself to be particularly delicate but seeing bulging and ripped skin, blood, and the enormous holes in people cheeks made me cringe and look away time after time.

After staring in fascination at the first few Ma Song I saw close up, I happily hid behind a camera to create some distance from the nauseating extreme close up’s.  From a few yards away the a devotee with a fantasy blade through his mouth looks incredibly exotic, courageous, and  cool. Up close it makes you think about how the man next to him got 1.5inch wide wax candles in his cheeks. Do they make a small hole and push? Do they measure the circumferences of the candle and cut the hole accordingly? What about some of the weird shaped objects? Nauseating. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it whenever I saw a strange object through some one’s cheek.  Luckily there were so many huge firecracker litters going off that I was busy avoiding getting any more ankle burns and trying to escape the choking smoke that billowed down the block.  I outright refused to go to the piercing ceremony today because there is no way that I could watch samuiri swords, guns,  hulu hoops, umbrellas, and hooka’s be shoved (no matter how gently) into devotees who may or may not be in a trance.