I've never been to a fair outside of those I've experienced in Phang-nga but they strike me as the sort of place where one finds a lot of small children hyped up on pastel sugary things and adults indulging in unnecessarily fried items (oddities/goodies such as fried oreos, corn dogs and the infamous fried dough of water parks come to mind). Fairs in Phang-nga are, shall we say, same same but different. The first thing that struck me about the Red Cross Fair was that it had little to do with what I assumed to be Designated Red Cross Activities...like maybe a blood donation table (not that I'd ever trust anyone with a hypodermic needle at a fair) or random stands offering information about why MSG is dangerous or a "help the tsunami victims" table. Aside from that realization, the other thing that quickly dawned on me was the absurdity of the spatial planning on the fair. Practically any event in Phang-nga that is seen as slightly "new and exciting and potentially, OMG, WESTERN!" in nature (weekend markets, Mister Donut, etc.) brings with it an incredibly (as in not to be believed) large number of people. A good example of this is the Big C, which I've alluded to before. Big C = Walmart of Thailand. It's where I bought my fridge, dishes, candles (see previous post on candle + coral arts and crafts activity), Diet Coke (best discovery of the Big C), shampoo, ear drops (ear infections in Thailand are pretty miserable), wonton sheets and frozen edamame. I try to buy most of my actual food groceries from the local market, but Big C obviously also offers a whole lot of food/snack items that range from pig intestines (ew?) and really any part of any animal to instant coffee and seaweed flavored Pringles. But I veer from the subject germane to this blog post. The point of this description is not a laundry list (as any English teacher would describe it) of Things You Can Find at the Big C. The point is that the Big C opened in October and it still has the same eyes-to-the-ceiling aimless wandering effect on the locals that Times Square has on the fanny packed tourist. So back to the spatial planning issues of the Red Cross Fair. A lot of very eager people + three rows of stands with two walking lanes sandwiched in between (sort of the Club of space, if you will) = a very claustrophobic and highly sweat-inducing experience. Not to mention the fact that throngs of people moving at a very, very slow pace through a fair make for some unpleasant olfactory experiences around certain of the food tables. The sensory elements common to massive outdoor gatherings (fairs of this nature and summer music festivals and other such circus-meets-a-suburban-mall type experiences) are usually saturated with aggressive assaults to most of the senses. They are loud, smelly (as in there are a lot of smells but not all are necessarily bad), and brightly lit and each individual part begs your attention. The whole thing is, especially for someone who's been living in the pre-Fair small town of Phang-nga since September, sort of overwhelming.
Upon passing through the fluorescent archway of the Red Cross Fair, I was greeted by a literal wall of smoke whose scent can be best described as "meaty."
The first of the stalls at the Fair were the food stalls and in Thailand this means one thing: a whole lot of skewered meat ("meat" here is used in its most general sense as the "meats" range from orange-y BBQ chicken breasts to grilled squid on a skewer to kabobs of hot dogs that have been sliced in such a way that they resemble the cracked crusts of delicious baked bread).
Aside from the meats, the food section always offers pastries in the form of tables selling donuts, lots of crepe-like things filled with a gooey marshmallow paste and stringy brown sugar (huge disappointment...texture = cardboard with stringy sugar), and other baked goods whose appearance suggests far more culinary delight than they actually hold (the lack of butter in this part of the country is surely the main reason for this). The exception to this was the table that sold banana bread and muffins (I was in heaven).
The other stands that appear at every fair/festival I've attended include the chestnut stand (huge fan) and the fried bug stand (not a huge fan). At the Red Cross Fair, there was also a "Ministry of Labor" tent (sounds like something out of Harry Potter) that offered 150 baht (approximately $5) hour-long foot massages. Also please note the font chosen by the Ministry...and the person in the background actually getting a massage.
From the brightly lit stalls of smoke and scent, I was herded among the sweaty mass to find the inner circle of the Fair. There I came to the absolutely terrifying ferris wheels whose motors are the same ones used on the long-tail boats and are controlled by the exact same extended metal oar.
Other rides included a small roller coaster, a kids' train track loop thing, one of those physics-experiments-high-speed-maypole-with-metal-cars-flying-around-a-circle things, and two inflated climbing structures. Remember that all of this was constructed and put up in about a week and that it will all be dismantled and taken away on the 11th.
Across from the ferris wheel was a tent of small children hula hooping (in a previous post I mentioned the advantage of learning how to hula hoop from a pre-K age). It's clearly some sort of athletic achievement to be able to do this on command and the Thais appropriately prize it.
The strangest tent at the Fair was most definitely this one:
After paying the 20 baht required to enter, I was greeted by a lady in the blue mermaid suit of the above picture sitting in a lawn chair on top of some wood chips next to an inflated wading pool. In front of her was a cage with an absolutely enormous, Nagini-esque snake as well as some other animals (like turtles who really just paled in comparison). On the other side of this mermaid was what appeared, on first glance, to be a woman's head sitting in the middle of a table. Upon further inspection, it was revealed to (obviously) not be the decapitated noggin of a Thai lady but simply an optical illusion of mirrors on the bottom of the table that reflected the wood chipped ground and therefore made it appear that there was nothing (aka a neck) under the table. It was...odd. And rather disconcerting. And also a very strange job.
Towards the end of the Fair there were two stages. These stages are a commonplace entity at any large gathering in Phang-nga and their purposes are always the same. One holds some sort of performance (song, dance, karaoke, miming) that involves makeup and clothing prep of a Liberacean level. While this visual/auditory spectacle goes on, the other nearby stage is occupied by three to five Thai men (this is the case at every single Thai festival/fair/school function I've attended). These men are each armed with a micro- (sometimes mega-) phone and they stand in a sort of awkward barbershop-quartet-minus-one-barber-formation and appear to be addressing no one in particular besides each other.
After migrating from the above performance/speech/who knows (three men with speech amplifying devices do not make for a very pleasant noise), I headed towards the covered tunnel that led around the perimeter of the fair and back to the initial food stalls. The tunnel was cramped, as tunnels tend to be, and was packed with people and my immediate reaction was "if there is a fire, we are all going to die." The activities within the tunnel mainly consisted of various games (throw a tennis ball and knock over a stack of soup cans, shoot a pellet gun at a target in specific locations in a specific pattern that is unknown, throw darts at balloons, etc.) whose prizes were large stuffed animals, bottles of Sang Som (Thai rum/whisky...it's referred to as "Special Rum"), cartons of eggs or soda water. Not sure if you get to decide which of those you receive or if it's based on merit or who puts in the most effort or something middle-school-moral like that.
I will publicly admit that at an earlier festival Steve won one game and was given a large Pooh bear whose t-shirt reads "HAPPY" and I am now the proud owner of this bear and have used it in many classes (it's a great prop for teaching prepositions about relative space...next to/above/on top of/etc.).
The rest of the tunnel was full of stands selling clothes, sunglasses, watches, wallets, lighters, leather vests, teeny bunny rabbits in costumes...
and uncomfortable looking jeans.
And this concludes the monthly post about Phang-nga's social calendar and the fairs of which it consists.
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