Offering

Temporary new year's shrine set up outside a restaurant on Intharakiri Road, Mae Sot.

Early new year morning

Making offerings at temple in Mae Sot, Thailand. Apparently even though the Burmese New Year is in April like the Thai, Lao, and Cambodian ones, it's popular for many nearby Burmese to come across the border and pray here on Chinese New Year's day.

This early, though, there were only local Chinese families making offerings and setting off firecrackers in the courtyard.

Dragon-strolling

Sadly I'm missing the acrobatic dragon dancing scheduled to take place over several floors of my local KL mall tomorrow -- I'm leaving disgustingly early for Java instead. So here's a more humble, laid-back dragon going from restaurant to restaurant in the alleys of Bangkok Chinatown in Feb 14. The city was very very red because besides the Chinese New Year decorations, Thais also go in for Valentine's Day...

Kuala Lumpur is still all vibrant red and gold madness a week after the new year, with lots more going on all over the city. I'd be sorry to leave, except that Yogyakarta beckons...

It's not what you think

The thing about being in a volatile place like Mae Sot and having read a little too much about drive-by assassinations, is that when you hear what sounds like machine gun-fire in the middle of the night, well, it really could be.

So it was a relief to walk around the next morning, Chinese New Year, and realise that it was actually just strings of red-paper covered firecrackers all along. As an added bonus, I also understood why there were little scraps of red paper everywhere too!

Photo: The courtyard of the Chinese temple in Mae Sot - I don't think its name was written in a script I could read but I think it's the only one, not far from the police station.

Happy New Year Again!

Raising the red lanterns in Yaowarat Road, Bangkok's Chinatown.

Sawatdee Pii Mai

Happy New Year from Thailand!!

But the incense was actually burning in Hanoi, Vietnam, at the Temple of Literature.

Happy New Year!

Today, New Year's Eve, we went to temple, like good pretend Buddhists. Specifically we went to Wat Phra Sing in Chiang Mai, which is having a full-fledged temple festival for the days around the changing of the year. Around the various temple buildings were stalls selling flowers, candles, and other offerings, and alongside the main temple there was a fair with clothes, knickknacks, and a bunch of food stalls.

Inside the main temple building there were many special types of New Year's blessings on offer. We chose a little banana leaf basket filled with spices, flowers, little bags of water and so on, with a little flag on which to write your New Year's wishes. We followed all the others in carefully inscribing our wishes, then bringing the basket up to place in front of the statues of Buddha where we knelt and prayed. Finally, we went to place the basket on one of the large trays holding the offerings. We weren't sure what the significance of the different trays was, so we went for the one that had a picture of an elephant above it. We didn't miss the essential step of posing for a photo while placing the basket! Then we went to the food fair and snacked on sweet sticky rice grilled in bamboo. All Chiang Mai seems to be gearing up for a huge party, even though the Thai New Year is officially celebrated in April with a big waterfight that we are sorry to be missing.

On the other side of the temple was a garden peppered with bilingual sayings on wooden signs. This one seemed especially appropriate for the season.

Happy New Year!