During the Vegetarian Festival, each of Phuket City's several shrines mounts a parade into downtown, and the prime weekend days are reserved for the two biggest. Duk and I had intended to arrive at the Bang Neow parade much earlier, but we caught some exciting moments at the tail end.

Though the Samkong shrine's parade two days earlier had plenty of firecrackers, the insane din from firecrackers during this parade was a couple orders of magnitude heavier. It was painful to walk up the street to get a look at what was going on. Young men carrying the sedan chairs for the Chinese gods were revelling in firecrackers, setting off huge strings of them in the middle of one street and making a public show of withstanding the noise and many small burns on their bare torsos from flaming shreds of firecracker paper flying around. When we came across them, most were covered in spent gunpowder, looking a bit like they had just come off a battlefield. When they had set off all their fireworks, many of them posed for a group picture in the middle of the street.

As we left, we saw a couple more scenes parade by -- much more sedate. A non-exploding group of young men passed by carrying what must be the last of the sedan chairs. And one more maa song tonguing a huge saw.

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Up the street from our apartment, about 300m to a T-intersection then left for another 100m, sits the Samkong Shrine, a Chinese temple and one of the focal points of the annual Phuket Vegetarian Festival celebrations. I didn't have any sense of how big a deal the festival is for Phuket until the couple of weeks beforehand when workers erected booths lining the street in front of the shrine. Lights were strung across the street. Yellow flags, a traditional symbol of the vegetarian festival, started appearing along every major road. By the beginning of the festival Sunday, the area surrounding the Samkong shrine was decked top-to-bottom in yellow and red and had taken on a carnival atmosphere.

As with all Thai festivals, food is very important. In front of every shrine I have seen in Phuket City, the streets are lined with food booths. On sale are amazing all-vegetarian foods, from egg rolls to noodles, soups and spicy main dishes made from bean curd.

Not wanting to miss any of the dozens of ritual celebrations, I had planned to be on-hand at the Samkong shrine for the raising of the Ko-Teng pole, a symbolic conduit that the god can use to transit from heaven to Earth, and the hanging of lanterns at the top (presumably to light the way). Unfortunately, we missed it. I had thought the ceremony at the Samkong shrine would be at midnight, but one of the maa song, or "enchanted horses", told us that they finished the ritual earlier in the evening. If we waited around, he said, we could see them usher one of the gods into the shrine. We were pretty tired, so we took some pictures and talked more to the maa song, who are responsible for the rituals and who will perform superhuman feats, like firewalking and piercing, later during the festival. Then we headed home.

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On a gloomy, overcast morning, I stood outside for an hour beginning at 6:30am. I read RSS newsfeeds on my iPhone while I waited for the minibus to pick me up and take me to Ranong, Burma so I could get a new 90-day entry stamp on my visa.

But the minivan never showed. I called the company that arranged the visa run at 7:30am only to learn that the driver of the minivan thought I had cancelled and never stopped at the pickup location. So no visa run for me today. I hopped on my motorbike and drove back to the apartment feeling totally frustrated.

The morning set off a bout of culture shock, and for much of the rest of the day I just slept at the apartment, listening to jazz and reading news of the presidential campaign back home.

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Five days ago on Sunday, one of Duk's massage clients told him about a concert of traditional singing and dancing in Phuket City. The concert was part of the Wai Pra Chan festival to respect the moon. Phuket has a strong Chinese influence, and Duk said the festival came from the Chinese tradition, when the people would gather to offer moon cakes and fruit and to wear Chinese costumes in hopes that the moon would bring good fortune and wealth.

So after sunset, we took the motorbike to the Chinatown area downtown. (Chinatown is basically right down our street. We live on Yaowarad Road, though a kilometer north of the center of town in an area called Samkong. In Thailand, Duk explained, Chinatowns are usually located along Yaowarad Road, and in Bangkok along Yaowarad Road is where you'll find the capital city's burgeoning Chinatown.) We ate dinner there at an interesting-looking restaurant in an old building, which Duk estimated to be 75 years old. It was smack-dab in the oldest part of Phuket City, and the building was among the clutch of Sino-Portuguese buildings bearing the unique building style of Phuket, which draws influence from the Chinese and the Portugese.

After dinner, and after our server directed us to the correct location for the concert, we drove to the public assembly hall, Larn Nawa Min, which literally means "ground for the King." There was a crowd outside taking pictures, which is pretty typical of public events in Thailand. Along the sidewalk was a long table heaped with offereings to the moon. Duk and I have been eating rather a lot of moon cakes lately, and I've developed a taste for them. So I really had to restrain myself from grabbing one off of the table and having dessert.

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