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.