At the moment, we’re in Bangkok. We arrived on Sunday, after a thirteen-hour all-day bus ride from Phuket, where we had spent almost ten days. We happened to arrive in Phuket just as the annual Vegetarian Festival was beginning -- the Veg Fest is a nine-day extravaganza observed in a few cities in Southern Thailand, but Phuket’s version is by far the biggest. During the festival, which honors nine emporor gods and is observed mostly by Chinese-Thai Buddhists, devotees dress all in white and abstain from meat, alcohol and sex. There are daily parades and lots of drums and firecrackers and street after street lined with food vendors selling tons of yummy vegetarian food. Curries and stir fries and sticky rice and pad thai and spring rolls and doughnuts and coconut custards and mangos and fruit shakes and french fries and little fried potato balls and pancakes filled with chopped peanuts and sugar and I think I may have gained ten pounds in Phuket from all the eating.

The other aspect of the Veg Fest is that many of the devotees, in addition to giving up meat etc., also perform a range of other ascetic feats, from hot-coal walking to bladed-ladder climbing to, most commonly, piercing sharp objects through one or both cheeks and out their mouths.

What type of objects do people stick through their faces, you may be wondering. Patrick and I compiled a list of things we saw pierced through faces during one two-hour parade the other day (links are to photos, not for the squeamish).

Things we saw stuck through people’s faces:

Swords
Skewers
Parasols
Umbrellas
Beach umbrella
Rainbow-colored plastic straws
Giant Chupa-chups lollipops
Two-inch thick red candle
Large paper fan
Flower baskets
Metal rod skewered through dozens of oranges
Bicycle pump
Hubcap
Robot action figure
Cymbal on stand from a drum kit
Bathroom sink
Kitchen sink
Wrench
Pruning shears
Chandelier
Long beans
Flower bouquets
Leafy branches
Thorned blooming cactus branches
Ten-foot sapling
Badminton racquets
Power drill
Scale model of Eiffel Tower
Huge butterfly wings on a rod
Flag advertising local beer garden & restaurant
Flag saying “Long Live the King” in Thai and English
Miscellaneous other flags
Chair
Handcuffs
Barbed wire
Semi-automatic rifles
Battleship

So that is a whole list of things I never really thought I’d see. And between the food and the festival, covers much of what we did in Phuket for over a week. Seriously, we ate, watched (and marched in) parades, ate some more, browsed around in antique shops and art galleries, ate more, watched movies, and, um, ate some more.

Now it’s a few days later, and we’ve been loving Bangkok. Patrick’s parents have joined us here, and the four of us are bound for Cambodia on Monday. I’ll try to update the blog more frequently with little updates on where we are and what we’ve been up to -- but it may be a little hectic over the next month as I’m also trying to do National Novel Writing Month again this November -- and so far it hasn’t been all that easy to find the time to get my daily writing done.

Happy fall to all of you in cooler climes -- enjoy the changing leaves and the crisp apples. It’s still 90 degrees and humid here most days, and the only time I get to wear a sweater is in movie theaters, which Thailand chills down to about 55 degrees. Lots of love.