Merry Christmas Everyone!

Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope it's been a good one and that you all got lots of good stuff if you wanted it and not too much junk if you didn't.
Well, it's my second Christmas away from home (sorry 'rents, but probably not the last). We spent Xmas Eve day, wandering through the enormous Sunday market picking up Secret Santa presents. There were many cool things -especially art- I would've loved to have picked up for myself or you all but everything I liked was huge and heavy. I almost did you a favor.... Then we went to a Wat for "Monk Chat." It was cool, just talking to this young monk who was finishing monk university. Part of his English training is to sit and just talk about anything so we finally got some explanations about some of the things we'd seen.
Then in the evening, our guesthouse had a special party. They cooked up a huge dinner, brought in a guy to play (what else?) reggae music, and we all played a few kids games. I was in one against three other guys where you have to pick up a small coin at the bottom of a plate of flour with your mouth, then eat two of the driest cookies, blow up two balloons until they pop, and then down an entire bottle of coke. I failed miserably. We also exchanged presents with Secret Santas. I got two little puzzle toy things that have been driving me mad since. It took me fifteen minutes to get the first one apart and I still haven't gotten it back together. Finally, we sent off a few of the floating lanterns that I had seen the night before. They're paper lanterns with a small oil lamp inside like a mini hotair balloon. Apparently, some people send them up with fireworks dangling from below so they go off in the air, which is probably why I got confused.
After the party, a group of us set off to a bar and hung out until late, listening to good Dire Straits covers and horrific renditions of the Killers. It turned out to be a good group of people so we had a good time.
Today was a little surreal. They're having a flower expo in honor of the king's 60th year on the throne and every Thai person we met kept telling us to go see it. We finally did and it was... special. I don't know if it was the dippy Xmas jingles playing non-stop, the blinding sun, the outdoor air conditioners outside the oil company sponsored display on sustainability, or the endless captions lauding the king's wise and loving leadership towards the "New Theory" of agriculture, but the whole thing left us thoroughly blasted. Oh, and I learned that Zoo gets crabby if we don't feed her enough veggies.
As a side note on the king, Thais genuinely seem to worship the guy. A good tenth of the population wears the same yellow polo shirt with the royal logo on it on any given day. But this guy is far from glamorous. He's always portrayed with a rather odd expression -a blend of stern, loving, and bewildered- and always carrying a camera or playing jazz.
So that's it for now. We're flying to Luang Prabang tomorrow so I'll hopefully sign on again in a few days. Merry Christmas again.