After Tara's house we spent a night in Roi Et at Michaels house. So cool to see so many people's towns and new cities in the NE part of Thailand.After Michaels we all went to Yasothon to Natalie's house for the ROCKET FESTIVAL.
A festival at the end of the hot season trying to get the rain god to send down some rain.
I think there were about 15 of us at Natalies for the festival.
Saturday was a huge parade down the main street of town. The street was lined with stages. Each group that made a rocket had a stage blaring music. As some of the only faran
g in town we were invited up to lots of stages and got to do lots of stage dancing.Day two was the blasting of the rockets. Thousands of people got together in a park to watch the rockets go off every couple minutes. If your rocket was a dud your group was thrown into the mud pit. There were a lot of muddy people walking around. We muddied our face with tribal war lines.
There was lots of down time where we sat around at Natalies and played games or watched movies and tried to stay cool. And lots of som tam eating.
It was quite a bitch to get home- 13 hours door to door and some long bus rides. The kind where they put little plastic seats in the aisles to fit more people in. The kind that seem to stop every 20 minutes to pick up more people. Tara was with me on my first leg, and thankfully we were so exhausted we could sleep for most of it. I made my
connection no problem and when I got off the bus Munglee came running to me. It was a nice home coming.PICTURES:
top: an elephant came by one night and we were feeding the guy
middle: a policeman handing out wooden penises, the other symbol of the rocket festival and apparently the entire province. That's Merissa
bottom: our war painted faces at the festival. Me, Tara, Emily, Natalie, Bryn.
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