Demon Get Out Day

Last Friday was a religious holiday to drive demons out and bring in good luck. So people throw soy beans to frighten the demons. (I'm a little sketchy on all the details). What I do know is that we had soy beans with our school lunch.

Since it was a religious holiday we decided to go to the main temple in Takefu to see what went down. There was some chanting and men from the community threw food that had been blessed out to the crowd who was watching the whole ceremony. I think people like getting candy and fruit thrown at them more than soybeans because they taste better. It was snowing a lot and I was freezing so we didn't stay to see the food toss.

I thought this tree looked especially nice in real life. In the photo it looks sort of dreamy and like little marshmellows are raining down on all the temple goers.

No sitting

One of the temples in Bangkok called Wat nani nani - Here's a little bit of Japanese trivia for you... So, I don't know the name of this marble Wat because we saw about a million wats in Thailand, after all, Lonely planet describes it as the "Land of Wats". So there were too many to keep track of and all we saw was the outside. Plus, I am too lazy to get the afore mentioned Lonely Planet and look up the name. Back to Japanese. If you don't know the name of something you say nani nani which literally means what what. This comes up a lot in the classroom. Instead of saying something like "blank went to the blank to buy some blank" like we do in America they say "dare dare went to doko doko to buy some nani nani" Dare means who, doko means where, and nani means what. *(This many be too extreme of an example. Peolpe might not really say all of this in one sentence.) So I think this is really interesting, and it saves a bit of confusion at times. Hope that made sense...

Anyways this Wat was made out of marble and looked really expensive and nice. However what impressed me the most about it was this little statue of a horse right outside the gate.

Apparently no sitting is allowed. In my mind there was a sign somewhere in Thai saying something to the effect of "sit at your own risk"

Here we are infront of the Wat.

Neat-o temples and stuff

Without further ado I have a ton of pictures that I want to show everyone of Thailand but I keep on being lazy and not putting them up here on the website. So here they are...



I had never really seen Thai writing until taking this adventure so thought I'd share this sign with a statue infront of it with ya.