The King’s Birthday

His Majesty, the King of Thailand celebrated his 80^th birthday a few days ago. My wife, her daughter, and her nephew watched the celebrations via Thai TV, which is beamed into Australia by satellite. I was asked to record the show, so now there are 2 DVDs with the broadcast encoded onto them here, waiting for me to finalise them.

This year, the local celebration was held on a Saturday (8 Dec), where in previous years it waited until Sunday. This was because there is a new religious group which has opened up here, and being new, it doesn’t have a regular place of worship. So they have booked the hall for Sundays. This meant that the Thai community had to settle for Saturday.

The proceedings were scheduled to start at 10 AM, and attendees were asked to bring some food and offerings. My wife, having a culinary bent of a Thai type, prepared some of the specialties of the restaurant where she works, including large numbers of curry puffs, spring rolls, a dozen quail - quartered and fried in some sort of Thai sauce - and several other items whose names elude me. She had awakened early to prepare all of this, and she had help from the 2 older youngsters.

It seems to me that these functions are largely organised by an Australian lady named Nellie, she is the person who told me about this new religion having booked the Sundays, and she also told me that she had booked all of the Thai gatherings for the Sundays of next year, the religious people can have the Saturdays, and that tells me that she has more than a passing involvement. Nellie’s day-job is with an organisation which provides settlement assistance to immigrants, as well as assistance in keeping the various communities together. She speaks Thai very well, something unusual to find in Australia. Anyway, she is the person who makes it all happen.

There were three Monks in attendance, and they were brought to the venue in an 8-seater van. The guy who drove the van for them had the right idea, when he deposited the Monks on the doorstep, he parked in the shade, climbed into the rear, and went to sleep. He came into the hall late in the proceedings, presumably to see how much longer he would be waiting.

Attendance was down on last year, presumably because it was on Saturday, and a fair number of the Thais here have work on Saturdays. There were only about 70 people in attendance, excluding the monks and their driver.

The ceremony got under way, and the chanting droned on for about a half-hour. I often wonder about the chanting; I can’t make out any Thai words in the chants. I sometimes wonder whether the Buddhists are doing what the catholic church used to do until some time in the 60s, reciting their services in some long-dead language. In the case of the catholic church, they recited their mass in Latin, even though there had been no native speakers of the language for about 1,500 years. In the Buddhist chants, maybe it is Pali or Sanskrit, or some other language. I don’t know, but I still can’t distinguish any Thai words in the chants.

It would not have been wise for the monks to draw out the chanting as they would not be able to eat once mid-day had arrived. That meant that they stopped their chant at about 11 AM so that the attending people could feed them. First, the people with rice lined up and the Monks walked along the line accepting a spoon of rice from each donor. It might not sound like a lot, but when you think about it, some 50 spoons of rice is a lot of rice...

The Monks returned to sit at the front of the stage, and people would file past with their offerings, allowing the Monks whatever took their fancy. I took the curry puffs and spring rolls. The Monk who led the chant spoke reasonable English, and he remembered these little delicacies from his last visit, and he took a goodly number of the little nibbles. The other two Monks saw his example and followed his lead.

Once the Monks had their food, the remains were put onto the large table behind the seats, and it was buffet time. It’s always a bit of a lucky-dip with a buffet of Thai food. You never know just how pet [spicy] some of these Isaan ladies make their larb moo [pork-mince salad], and there is one who adds chilli powder to her tossed ham salad. And beware those barbecued drumsticks, they could have been marinated in Tabasco sauce. I managed to get a reasonable plateful of food that was at an acceptable level of pet, and I even managed to get in before my wife’s kanom [dessert] of deep-fried and sugar-coated dough-balls all disappeared.

When the crowd dispersed and the dust cleared, there was nothing left except a small tray with the sweepings from the floor – bits that had been dropped on the floor and picked up so that they would not be trampled in the stampede.

My wife likes to be able to say that her trays were the first to be emptied, and so it was this time around. Her curry puffs and spring rolls were the first to be exhausted, and she proudly drew my attention to these empty trays as she placed them back in one of our carry-baskets. The one that didn’t disappear so quickly was some sort of green curry/soup which had large chunks of unidentified substances in it, that lasted fully half-way into the food foray. When people found out what the quail was, it was quick to suffer the fate of the spring rolls and the curry puffs.

And so, another Thai get-together drew to a close, and I headed home for a well-earned beer, and a large handful of the goong [prawns] that I had the good sense to not take to the King’s birthday celebration.

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