Mother's Day in Nakhon Pathom

Happy Mother's Day 2015

royal standard of HH Queen Sirikit 

Today is the birthday of Her Highness Queen Sirikit of Thailand, which means that it's Thai Mother's Day, a national holiday.

Yesterday at school the students put on a small cultural performance with traditional music and dancing in honor of the Queen.

For the two previous years, the day fell in such a way as to give us a long weekend, but this year it's on a Wednesday. We still get the day off, of course, but it's too short to really make a big trip out of it.  I was planning on staying in and doing some laundry, but luckily for me, the family of one of the students who I tutor on Saturdays invited me to travel with them to their home province, Nakhon Pathom, immediately west of Bangkok.

Puthamonton, a park built by the Thai Council of Buddhism to celebrate the 2,500th year of Buddhism, was our first stop. The park itself is beautiful, and lots of people were out riding bikes, jogging, or just enjoying the morning. The biggest feature there however is the large Buddha statue, one of the largest in Thailand.

me and my student

One of my favorite things about traveling around Thailand with Thai friends is that they know about lots of great places that aren't necessarily in the tourist guidebooks, like the Jesada Technic Museum, a classic car museum with hundreds of old and rare cars.

cool cars at the museum

classic Mini Cooper 

88mph

Next, we went to the Thai Human Imagery Museum. It's a small wax museum, but unlike Madame Tussauds, it depicts important people from Thai history, and scenes from daily life in Thailand. Some exhibits show famous monks, and the most impressive, in my opinion, was a display showing the eight previous kings of the current Thai kingdom (the current king, King Bhumibohl, is also known as Rama IX, being the ninth king of the ruling dynasty).

the eight previous kings of the Ratanakosin Kingdom