Since 1932, Thailand has been a constitutional monarchy under a parliamentary democratic system. What does that mean? They still have a King and Queen, but they do not hold absolute power. Actually, they hold very little power. The current King of Thailand is King Bhumibol Adulyadeej (or Rama IX). He has been King since 1946, making him the world's longest reigning Monarch. So what exactly cant the King do? According to the Thai Constitution, the King is the head of the Armed Forces, and is a defender of all faiths in the country. He also retains some traditional powers, such as the power to appoint heirs and the power to grant pardons. He is mostly a figure head and a symbol of the Thai nation. He is very highly venerated and because of that, it is a crime to defame him or speak against him in any way or form negative. If one is found doing so, as a foreigner, you can be fined and expelled from the country. It has been rumored that his favorite color is pink, so on certain days of the week, people wear pink in honor of him. His birthday is a national holiday. On Monday, December 5th, the King turned 84! His birthday was celebrated the whole weekend, including Monday! Our normal sleepy town was totally transformed! There were stalls set up in the streets selling everything from food to hardware. At times the streets were so crowded it took 10 minutes to get nowhere! I have never seen so many people here. It was fun! They also held a beauty pageant "Miss Amazing Umphang". At the pageant, then have performances of traditional music and dancing, which was very nice to see. They tried to get Doris to enter but she declined. We did however, have a friend enter. She made it to the second round but did not win. All of the contestants had to wish the King a happy birthday. It was overall a fun weekend. Here are some pictures, enjoy! I am STILL figuring out how to add pictures, move them around, and type around them and it is VERY frustrating and time consuming. I can't even type at the end of this post! It keeps making it a caption for the last 2 pictures...grrrr! Therefore, they do not have captions, so some may not make sense. The picture with the shoes is just an example of what the had to wear and the other picture of the floor is to show you how bad the surface was that they had to walk on in huge platforms! The picture of the big black thing is an old school movie projector, the rest is self explanatory.
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| Smile Love, our representative |
