Tuesday 12th August is a public holiday for the Queen's birthday. Lots of Thais take the Monday off to create a four day weekend, so the city is in holiday mode. Yesterday went to see local 'festival' recommended by the landlady. I decided to walk there, an achievement in itself, as walking is not something which is done in this city. I followed the railway tracks for half a mile west, which I have been meaning to explore for a while. There is a concrete path by the side of the tracks which I have seen a lot of people using. The walk down the tracks was quiet, but pretty squalid in places as a shanty town has been built on the spare land between the railway and the next row of houses. I saw a group of men building yet another house out of sheets of corrugated iron, on posts stuck in the remains of a lotus pond.
The 'festival' turned out to be a gathering of all the people who had been invited to an audience with the Queen to celebrate her birthday - there were thousands of them, mainly women of a certain age in formal silk suits, and hundreds of girls guides and boy scouts in uniform, a bit like an english royal garden party. They had obviously all been told to gather at a certain spot where they could entertain themselves for a couple of hours by looking at an exhibition of the Queen's good works before they were bussed to the Chitlada Palace. The exhibition was open to the public and was a bit like a royal trade fair in a marquee, with yards of Thai silk draped everywhere and three 6' high balls of thread to symbolise the Queen's support for handicrafts. A lot of effort had gone into making it as pretty as possible: there were fairy lights, lots of hanging baskets and even more flowers projected onto an indoor waterfall.
Outside was a market where you could buy produce from the royal projects and lots of royal-themed souvenirs - I was quite tempted by an umbrella which said' Long live our Beloved King' in English (and presumably) in Thai.
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