Yes, of course this is quite late and out-of-sequence. But once the Vegetarian Festival got really going, I was out most nights and didn't have much time to write up my observations, much less process my photos. In the next day or so, I'll finish posting my account of this year's festival. And down the road I hope to have more time to dedicate to blogging so I can have more timely content.

Not much happened on the second day of the festival, except that Duk told me I should take care not to wear black. So I donned my Thai-style white clothes for the festival, which we purchased, of course, from the seasonal merchandise racks at the Big C Supercenter where we shop. We heard on the third day of the festival that people would gather for a big invocation at Phuket City's Saphan Hin complex, so that's where we headed after work.

Unfortunately, we  got there just as the ceremony was breaking up. The gathering drew several thousand people, a good number of whom were banging drums and cymbals or lighting off fireworks, and it was meant to invoke the Chinese gods who would be celebrated during the festival. We motored away from Saphan Hin to the nearest shrine, Bang Neow, which was a kilometer away, pretty much in downtown Phuket City.

As at Samkong shrine in our neighborhood, the streets around Bang Neow shrine were crowded with street vendors offering all manner of traditional vegetarian food. We stopped to eat some excellent spicy dishes made from soy protein -- Thai specialties that I had never sampled before. Turns out that many of the foods served at the Vegetarian Festival are only available during the time of the event. For the rest of the year, people prefer their foods with fish, pork or chicken, I guess. I could probably subsist very happly on the vegetarian foods we found outside Bang Neow shrine.

Finished with dinner, we went to the shrine to pay respect to the Chinese gods. Duk suggested that we offer ceremonial oil, and at each of a half dozen stations, we poured oil into lamps and decanters and wai'd to the satisfaction of the keepers overseeing the altars to the gods.

First off: a warning. I'm gonna get medical on your ass. Or my ass, rather. This post details my second experience in a Thai hospital, and the result is overwhelmingly positive. But the back story and the details are a little -- well, not so much gory as unpleasant.

This morning I dropped into Bangkok Hospital Phuket to see about what I thought must be a hemorrhoid on my ass, an external growth that had been getting larger during the past year or so. I first noticed it while I was on the ship after a bout of constipation. My diet is heavy on fiber and roughage, and I almost never get plugged up. But from joining the ship and processing food from the crew mess and passenger buffet, my innards got totally stopped up. After a couple of days, I saw the ship's doctor, who gave me a fiber drink that managed to get things moving again.

A few weeks later, when I first discovered the tiny growth on the outside of my O-ring, I thought I had blown it out. Which was unexpected. About 15 years earlier I had gone through a painful bout of prolapsed internal hemorrhoids. I'll spare you a rundown of the several types of hemorrhoids since Wikipedia has a clear explanation (with a nifty graphic). Suffice it to say that prolapsed internal hemorrhoids are very uncomfortable, and there's almost no relief from the dull, throbbing pain, whether seated, lying prone or floating in a bath of warm water.

Back then, I went to a proctologist for treatment, and the first thing he told me was never, never, never strain when having a bowel movement. His next advice was never use toilet paper and instead use a medicated wipe like Tucks. I took both pieces of advice to heart, though I modified the bit about Tucks. I figured out that Tucks is mostly made of witch hazel, so I got into the habit of dousing toilet paper with witch hazel before wiping.

By the way, the treatment for prolapsed hemorrhoids is brutal. I had to go in for three sessions, and for each one the doctor opened up my ass. He then attached electrodes to the hemorrhoids and sent in a cauterizing current. For the first session, I didn't bother taking the Valium he gave me to relax beforehand. For the next two sessions, I definitely took them. That was the most distressing and humiliating medical procedure I've ever experienced, worse even than an endoscopy I endured about a bladder problem. I hope I never have occasion to recount my endoscopy story here.

Anyway, during the 15 years since that hemorrhoid flare-up, I have been very careful about anal hygiene. No problem since then, and the first evidence of anything amiss was the growth I noticed one day while showering on the ship. Thankfully, no pain, and no blood. So I let it go for a while.

What prompted me to have it looked at today is knowing I must go through a medical exam to get certified for working on the ship again. I join the ship on Nov. 17, and I've scheduled a medical exam in Bangkok on Nov. 3. (I want to get the exam done here since visits to the doctor in Thailand cost a fraction of what they cost in the US.)

After taking a quick look, the doctor at Bangkok Hospital Phuket (the local branch of the Bangkok Hospital chain) declared that I didn't have a hemorrhoid. He even lubed up my ass and probed inside, giving me a clean bill of hemorrhoid health. The growth outside my ass was merely a "skin tag" that could be whisked away with a quick snip-snip. Which he proceeded to do after moving me to a minor surgery room and administering a prick or two of local anesthetic. I did get the electrodes again, but only a few jolts externally to cauterize the wound and stop the bleeding.

Here's the best part: I was in and out of there in about 45 minutes. The whole shebang cost me 2,577 baht, which works out to around US$80, including a packet of antibiotics to ward off infection. Bangkok Hospital Phuket is one of the finest medical facilities I've ever used, and the staff seem always to be unfailingly pleasant and efficient.

The slight pain in my ass left over from the surgery, and a bit of discomfort from a gauze bandage in my crack, is a small price to pay. No Valium required.

Since we live along the main route from Samkong to the center of Phuket City, the first of the several traditional parades for the Phuket Vegetarian Festival ran right past our apartment. Even more conveniently, it came by just before breakfast as I was getting ready for work. It had stepped off from Samkong shrine at 7:19am, an auspicious moment, and covered the 500m or so to our apartment in about 15 minutes.

Leading the parade were school children carrying yellow flags, the emblem of the festival. Behind them were trucks hauling images of minor gods and young men with sedan chairs for the more important ones. I don't know if it's a traditional part of the festival, but at one point a number of motosai saaleng (motorbikes with sidecars and awnings) came down the street distributing coconut ice cream cones.

The shocking part of the parade came at the end. I had seen pictures and braced myself for the sight of the maa song, who mutilate themselves to take on all the bad mojo from the devout followers of the festival's purification rituals. But the reality of young men with huge spikes hanging out of their cheeks or, in one case, several curls of flex tubing winding in by the cheek and out by the mouth, was a little unsettling. Plus, there was visible blood. Each maa song had a handler to guide them and to care for the wounds. Many were quivering and apparently in some sort of ecstasy, oblivious to the scene around them.

Much of the parade proceeded through a haze of smoke from firecrackers, and as the last group of flag-bearing school children passed by, followed by a group of dragon dancers, the street was littered with shreds of red-brown paper from spent firecrackers. Duk and I returned to our apartment 20 minutes later, but the parade carried on for another two or three hours.

Duk and I went out to Samkong shrine last night to pay respect to the gods as part of the Phuket Vegetarian Festival. As always, I drew special attention from local Thais manning the various stations where we knelt to pray and offer incense. A farrang following rituals at Buddhist temples or Chinese shrines is very conspicuous.

At the final station, the helper asked me where I was from. When he heard that I was an American, he spoke in halting English. "American banks," he said, making a falling-down gesture with his right arm. "Over."

"Yes," I replied. "American banks all over."