A Monk Holiday

One of the rules of being a monk, is that you can't touch women, or have really anything to do with women.  Now that sounds weird, so let me explain.  If you are a woman and you want to give the monk food, he can't take it directly from your hands...it either has to be placed somewhere where he can pick it up, or go through a third person who is male.  One of the holidays that we had involved us giving things to monks, and heres how we did it.

 I walked over to my grandma's house (her house is like 50 meters away, just like in Canada :)) and she had this tree tied to one of the support posts.  I was a little confused as to why it was there, but they soon showed me.  They had tried to explain it, but I didn't really follow, therefore I can't really tell you much about this holiday. 

 This is my host grandma sitting there with a plant.  The pink flowers would eventaully have 100 or 20 baht bills attached to them, and it would be given to the monks as a present.

 So heres what we did.  We would take the different things (soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, tobacco...shampoo...)  lots of different things, and we would tie it to the tree.  My job was to tie it to the tree. 

Here is my host mom helping to put the things on the tree.  Our tree had quite a bit of stuff on it-ranging from food, to money, to bathing things.  It was quite interesting.  The next day at 5:00 am, the monks would come around and collect the articles off of the trees.  I made an honest attempt to get up to see it, but...I'm a teenager, and I learned that I like my sleep just a tad too much.  :)