My Passion Blog

In our own homes, we may see our dogs or cats as part of the family, but in Lopburi, Thailand, they hold a different animal as their honorable members. In order to honor these primates, on the last Sunday of November, on the ruins of the Phra Prang Sam Yot temple, the citizens lay out an incredible buffet accompanied with many other activities and ceremonies.

The event starts off with an opening ceremony that consists of a performance by dancers in monkey costumes. These dances are made to attract the monkeys, which may seem like it would be ineffective, but it actually works. They dance until the monkeys arrive, and then the sheets covering the many tables of food are taken off to reveal decorative spreads of fruits and vegetables. There are nearly two to four tons of food offered to the monkeys!

The history behind this seemingly odd festival dates far back. At least 2,000 years ago, the epic tale called Ramayana, where Rama, a divine prince, tells how he struggled to rescue his wife, Sita, from the grasp of a horrible demon lord. As the story goes, the monkey king Hanuman and his monkey army came to aid Rama in the retrieval of his wife. It is said that the monkey king then went on and founded the town of Lopburi, and that the monkeys surrounding the village are of direct bloodline of king Hanuman! Since this time, monkeys are honored as a sign of good luck and prosperity. Although the monkeys can be somewhat pesky, the buffet is an annual sign of appreciation for these monkeys.

This event attracts many tourists and there are many tips on what to do when you go to this festival. There are vendors of food for human consumption, so make sure to bring money! Also, after the monkeys have eaten, they apparently get a little feisty and have the tendency to go after any shiny object, ponytail, or any dangling belonging, so make sure to keep track of your bags and hold on tight!

Needless to say, this festival is a great way to get an up-close view of these monkeys, but it is also a good way to become acquainted with Thai culture. The townspeople prepare many traditional dishes and wear traditional clothing and although this event has attracted many tourists and has become slightly catered towards the benefits of the visitors, many customs are still carried out within this festival. This is one of the more popular events to go to when visiting Thailand for many reasons and has brought economic advantages to the country itself and has placed Thailand on the map with all of the press and media coverage that this festival has received. Overall, if you feel like monkeying around and watching these local macaques pig out at this buffet, Lopburi, Thailand is your next destination!

Bathing in mud is something that only pigs do, right? Well, at the Boryeong Mud Festival in Daecheon Beach in Boryeong-si, Chungcheongnam-do, Korea, you can do just that, and more!

Daecheon Beach, one of the largest beaches on Korea’s west coast, is quite famous for its nutrient rich mud. It is quite like a mud face mask because it has benefits for the skin. Although this destination attracts many visitors year-round, this festival, taking place from July 19-28 is the most popular time to visit.

There are many enjoyable activities to participate in when going to the Boryeong Mud Festival. Of course, there is the mud self-massage experience. This is basically a face mask for your entire body. You can apply the mud to your body, wait 10 minutes until the mud turns white, and then wash the mud off for smooth, soft skin!

The next suggested activity is the mud slide. This is a giant inflatable slide that is covered in mud. Once you cover yourself with mud, you can climb up the slide and shoot down with incredible speed! There is also a giant mud pool with facilitated activities just in case you have not gotten enough mud on you! You can lounge around, jump in, swim, and more!

The last main activity is the mud run. Here, in a giant inflatable obstacle course, you can race your friends or complete strangers in this muddy terrain. Be prepared to slip and slide and even fall! It’s all part of the fun!

In addition, for those who do not want to get too muddy, there are a few activities that do not require you to get completely covered in mud to have a good time. Various futsal tournaments are held throughout the days. Futsal is a game very much like indoor soccer, but the court is much smaller and harder with a smaller ball and touch boundaries instead of walls. There is a “mud tram” that takes visitors on a tour of the festival grounds. Also, for those more athletically inclined, but not coordinated enough to play futsal, there is a mudflat mini marathon. This is a run that takes you across a natural mudflat.

These activities are all during the day— this festival transforms at night. There are concerts and ceremonies during every night while the festival is going on. There are EDM, or electronic dance music performances, K-Pop performances, and general popular music performances. There have also been “World Skin Beauty Pageants”, fireworks, and raves at this festival.

Overall, whatever your interests are, you can likely find something exciting and different to do at the Boryeong Mud Festival. But remember, don’t be afraid to get muddy!

Ah, the classic food fight. You may remember a classmate in middle school yelling, “Food fight!” across the school cafeteria followed by a wave of sandwich remnants and chunks of half eaten fruit crashing over everything in the room. Food fighting has been a way of expression, or even just fun, from protesting to just playing pranks on friends throughout history and in modern days. A festival in Spain, which has been adopted in other places around the world, takes food fights to a whole different level.“Tomatina” festival occurs every year on the last Wednesday of August in the small town of Buñol. Although the origins of this strange holiday are disputed, it is consistently recurrent and attracts many tourists each year. One theory is that this tradition dates back to the 1940s where angry citizens threw tomatoes at city councilmen. The other, much less historically based, is that it stemmed from friendly food fights between friends and families.The festival itself is essentially a large-scale food fight using overripe tomatoes. Now, at first thought, this may seem slightly repulsive, but it seems as though the people who participate in this odd tradition have a lot of fun and enjoy themselves amidst the sticky tomato juices.

This is in fact the biggest food fight in the world, with around 40,000 attendants showing up to participate. In terms of how many tomatoes are used, about 150,000 tomatoes, or 40 metric tons of them are thrown. That is more tomatoes than anyone would likely see in several lifetimes without participating in this activity. Although this may seem as an unnecessary amount of food waste, most of these tomatoes likely were never going to be eaten, due to the inferior quality and taste of the tomatoes, which are bought at a very cheap price from the Extremadura region of Spain.

In the week leading up to this massive food fight, there are many celebrations and people preparing for the festival. Parades, fireworks, and paella cooking contests are just a few of the festivities that happen prior to the main event. People also plan what they are going to wear to partake in the tomato throwing. It is suggested to wear swimming goggles or snorkeling gear to keep the mess out of your eyes and nose and many people tend to wear white t-shirts to track how many tomatoes they get on them or they wear bathing suits in order to reduce the amount of laundry that they have to do after essentially swimming in the tomatoes.

This being said, tomatoes are actually very good for the skin. Since they are a natural disinfectant, after participating, your skin will, yes, be covered in tomato, but also be cleansed of impurities. After the battle, the townspeople will hose down the streets, leaving almost no trace of the red juices that covered everything just hours before.

The need to acknowledge the childish urge to participate in a food fight apparently never subsides, as shown with this strange festival. So, next time you find yourself thinking about how nice it would feel to throw an item of food at your friend, take a trip to Buñol, Spain and become a kid again.

Now, you’ve probably heard of “color runs”, where you run a short distance, usually a 5k, and the race facilitators throw vibrantly colored dust at you as you run by. These colored powders are very entertaining to play around with, especially during these runs, but they are not just dyes to make running “fun”—they actually stem from a practice in the Hindu culture.Holi, considered one of the most celebrated and revered festivals in India, is essentially a celebratory color war between family members and loved ones. According to an article describing Holi, “Everybody wants to be the first one to color the other. In the ensuing battle of colors, everybody is drowned not just in colors of gulal but also in love and mirth”.

This love-filled festival originated as a combination of mythological stories. The Story of Holika and the Story of Radha and Krishan both gave rise to elements of this celebration. The Story of Holika influenced this day by contributing the celebration of good over evil. Thus, the celebration of Holi is always marked with an extremely positive connotation and when Holi is mentioned, most people who know about it will light up with a smile due to the positive mood about the celebration. The Story of Radha and Krishan explains the element of spreading color as a sign of love, which in essence, is the entire holiday itself. Holi also celebrates the coming of spring and the harvest, which is very important to the entire country of India, as their history is mostly agricultural.

Although the history is steadfast and the practice is widely accepted, the vibrantly colored powder used may seem unsettling to some people. A common question people ask when they see pictures of people celebrating Holi are “is the color and dye safe?” Originally, these dyes were made from various plant sources. For example, the color green was from the ground neem leaf, the colors yellow and red were from turmeric, the color blue came from indigo, and charcoal produced the color black. These all-natural sources of color were non-toxic, and people knew where they came from. In modern days with increased technology and more intense chemistry, these dyes became synthesized, and could be toxic in some cases. “Gulal”, a modern, mostly benign dye is made out of 95% cornstarch and 5% synthetic dyes. This blend, known as FD&C in the United States, is what adds color to multicolored candy, so it is safe. But, lower quality dyes that sell for cheaper prices entice some customers. These dyes contain harmful ingredients like copper sulfate, mercury sulfide, chromium iodide, lead oxide, and aluminum bromide. Such chemicals cause symptoms such as skin lesions, burning, and eye irritation among other health problems. So, one must be careful when purchasing the dye to make sure none of these painful consequences arise on what is supposed to be a happy, joyful, pain-free celebration.

Some may think that these color runs exploit the Hindu culture, which is in part true. The symbolic meals and cultural significance of Holi are both lost in this new way of marketing a 5k to the general public. But, the theme of gathering together friends and being joyful is not lost, which is the main theme of Holi. In order to lessen the feeling of cultural appropriation, companies promoting these color runs could provide a brief background of Holi, so that participants around the world would become familiar with this amazingly positive festival.

Carving vegetables is a peculiar practice around the world. In the United States, we are most familiar with the pumpkins children and adults alike sculpt into gruesome or silly Jack-o-lanterns to put on display for the trick-or-treaters making their rounds to gather candy. We think of carving vegetables as a fall festivity, certainly not for Christmastime, where we make snowmen and sing carols, right? Well Noche de Rabanos, or “Night of the Radishes” goes against the practices that we commonly assume that the rest of the world follows.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, the radish takes the stage as a vessel for art along the streets. This tradition, officially starting in 1897, is where artisans and shopkeepers carve intricate designs into radishes. Traditionally, this peculiar art had the purpose of drawing customers into the marketplace on their way home from the Christmas church service on the 23^rd of December. Nowadays, the tradition is established so that those who do not attend church also make their way into the plaza to catch a glimpse of what new designs the artists were able to think up.

The radishes used in the carvings are grown to immense sizes, usually around 3 kilograms, or 7 pounds, and are usually 50 centimeters, or 20 inches long. To give context to those who may not know how unusually massive these radishes are, a common winter radish in the United States that you could buy at a grocery store is about 12 inches long and weigh around 4.5 grams or 0.01 pounds. These Mexican radishes are grown to extreme sizes! These radishes are inedible though—the massive size decreases the flavor and makes them very bitter, so they are just used as decoration, much like how in the United States, you would not use the pumpkin you carve and display for Halloween to make a pumpkin pie afterwards! Some of the carvings are sold for steep prices that the customers use for decorations and displays at Christmas dinner. There is also a contest where judges assess which radish carving is the most intricate and award the most beautiful creation’s artist with a 12,000-peso prize, which is about 620 United States dollars!

The radishes are harvested around December 18, so the artists have about 5 days to work on their carvings. Popular carvings include nativity scenes, local wildlife like snakes and alligators, architecture, and Mayan imagery. Although animals and architecture are not common symbols around Christmastime in America, we do utilize the nativity scene around the holidays in decorations and various festivities, so this holiday is not completely obscure and unrelatable.

The festivities for this Mexican holiday are not solely focused on radishes though. Since radishes, like most produce, begin to brown after they have been exposed to oxygen, the citizens do have to have other non-radish-based festivities involved in this celebration. On Christmas eve, there are local handcrafted floats that circulate around the marketplace and in the streets. On Christmas day, there are fireworks in the plaza and traditional Christmas dinners are made and served.

Although this holiday originally seemed quite bizarre to me, it helped me realize that this is what people who do not live in the United States think of some of our common practices, like the carving of pumpkins at Halloween. In essence, this holiday has many similarities to both Halloween and Christmas in the United States. Next time you find yourself pondering what to do around Christmastime and are in the mood to experience something unique, grab your loved ones and take a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico to partake in these interesting cultural festivities that bring such joy and cultural pride to the citizens that practice them every year.