A street-festival brought me and Asarin to Silom Road on this sunday night. The first time ever Silom was closed for traffic, and now filled with various attractions and mobile stages with a mixed offer of bands, disco-tunes and traditional, Thai cowboys playing country music and Thai clowns performing pantomimes.
Seemed all a little bit too western for me, but ok to make the attending farang feel like home of course.
Then the crowd started getting more & more dense, and a mass of hand-held fireworks was to be seen over the heads, while people were chanting in honour of the King's Birthday, on december 5th, but which kind of covers anything that goes on for the next couple of weeks. When the chanting finished, a large mass of light, towering high above the crowd on a pole started moving, and climbed down. It turned out to be a large, and I mean large, dragon carried by about 50 men on sticks and weaving itself at great speed through the crowd, all lined with shining and glittering light, spitting fireworks. The line of running men passed right in front of us, before completely disappearing in a side-street, it's tail swinging, and technically spoken, connected by several long electric extension-cords to a huge diesel-powered generator in the back of a pickup truck.