Thai Father's Day

Tomorrow is the King's Birthday/Father's Day in Thailand. One difference I've noticed from this holiday and the Queen's Birthday/Mothers Day (which was back in August), was that Mothers day seemed to be more about Mothers... but Fathers Day seems to be more about the fact that it's the King's Birthday. Elli and I really wanted to go to the Grand Palace and be two of thousands of Thais who stand wearing yellow shirts (yellow is the King's colour) and waving these yellow flags and wait for the King to make a brief appearance on his balcony. But instead I'm going tree planting with P'Patch and some of her friends who went to America with her last year. It should be fun/interesting. This morning at school we had a ceremony which was similar to the one on Mothers Day (certain students' dads came with them and went up on stage to get special gifts...), except this time the whole thing took place outside. They had set up this nice big stage at one end of our soccer field, and all of us students were lined up neatly in rows covering the entire field. For 3 hours. In 30 degree weather. In the end they let me leave and go sit in the shade because I was overheating. I contributed to the whole ceremony by helping Cherry and her friends give food to the monks (they did the same thing on Mothers Day, but I didn't help them that time...) We waited along a line with all of the Buddhist students while the monks made their way along, collecting food in their alms bowls. Before we could give them the food, we each had to hold it in our hands and say a Buddhist prayer. Since I don't know any Buddhist prayers (or ANY prayers for that matter), I just held the food and Cherry took a picture of me looking like I was praying. When the monks reached us, we all gathered around eachother, and I put my hand on Cherry's back who had her hand on someone elses back who was touching someone elses back etc., so that we were all somehow connected to the person who actually gave the food to the monk. While we did this we had to have our shoes off. I'm not really sure why. The best Cherry could explain to me was we must have our shoes off because the monks don't wear shoes. I took pictures during ths whole thing, but I'm still having internet troubles here, so I won't be able to upload them just yet. After we gave the monks the food, we all squatted down around a little tree and did the whole touching eachother thing again, while one person poured water on a leaf, and a monk sayed a prayer over the microphone. Honestly, I have no idea what this whole act is supposed to signify...

My class has been spending the last few days presenting their math projects in all of our math classes. Today I noticed that one of the boys who was presenting had swastikas decorating his project. I'm sure he isn't a Nazi supporter, he just didn't realize what this symbol stands for. I must admit, I'm amazed that there are still people in this world who don't know what it means. I'm not saying that all Thai people are unaware of the whole Nazi thing, but it sure seems like there are alot of Swastikas around Thailand, and that people don't realize they are a bad thing. They just think they look cool. While this does suprise me, it really upsets the German exchange students, as I've witnessed before, esepcially around Elisabeth. We were at a bookstore at the mall which sells alot of English books last week, and she was looking at a biography about Schindler. She said how much she wishes there had been more people like him. I don't know how to explain it, but the amount of emotions she was experiencing in that moment really reached me. I was amazed by how much even her life seems to be affected by WW2. I had always heard about WW2 from a Canadian or American point of view, and never really viewed it from a German point of view before. Speaking of Canadians/Germans/Americans, just the fact that students from all over the world are able to become friends with students from all over the world (some from countries who were always enemies) proves that AFS has accomplished what they set out to do.