Thai Cultural Center

I’m back in the country after a week in Bangkok and its nearby provinces, feeling like I need a vacation to get over my vacation! Happily, the weekend’s coming, and I can slumber away and perhaps do something to soothe my sunburned skin. The Bangkok climate being not much different from ours, everything we did was under the sun, from riding a boat along the River Kwai in Katchanaburi to exploring ancient temples in Ayutthaya to hunting for street food along Walking Street in Pattaya.

The only times we were able to sit in the shade were when we watched Siam Naramit, the world-famous cultural show I wrote about last week, and another show we caught at Nong Nooch Tropical Garden & Resort, which is about 15 kilometers south of Pattaya. Nong Nooch Tropical Garden, all beautifully-landscaped 500 acres of it, is the biggest botanical garden in Southeast Asia. It hosts a variety of plants for research and conservation purposes. However, the icing on the cake for me is the show at its very own Thai Cultural Center.

The cultural show was no Siam Naramit, but still comparable. It was a showcase of different traditions from different parts of Thailand—indigenous sports and martial arts (Muay Thai), tribal music and dance, an elephant joust, and other performances by trained elephants. As usual, the stage design and costumes were magnificent. You really have to applaud the Thais for their attention to detail.

My favorite part of the cultural presentation was the quick Muay Thai scene, which was combination dance, martial arts and slapstick. Muay Thai traditionally begins with the Ram Muay, a dance that shows respect to the teacher. In this scene, the two fighters took the dance to a performance level.

The cultural show is followed right after by the Elephant Show, which features the different skills of their trained elephants. Now, I’m not quite sure where I stand officially when it comes to keeping animals in captivity and training them to entertain people, but I’m of the opinion that if it keeps them well fed, well taken care of, and, basically alive, it’s way better than just leaving them to fend for themselves in a world that’s becoming increasingly too small for them.

The Elephant Show was amazing. The male host spoke in his own style of deejay-Thai-English slang, and I could only catch some phrases here and there, but the elephants didn’t need any voice-overs. Their actions did all the talking for them.

Garbed in shiny and colorful costumes, all the performing elephants introduced themselves by running in an elephant chain inside the performance area, trunk to tail, from biggest to smallest. I’m pretty sure the host introduced all their names (I could only understand “Miss Christmas”) as they ran in and out. One baby elephant struggled to hold on to the tail of the elephant in front of him because the bigger elephant kept putting it between his legs.

For the show, the elephants, mostly the young ones, entertained an audience over a thousand strong by playing football, basketball, darts, and bowling. They also went cycling, in which they managed to steer the three-wheel contraption by themselves. The darts part was very impressive—the elephant (I believe it was Miss Christmas) really took it seriously, aiming carefully and bowing happily only when it managed to hit a balloon target.

The elephants also did some painting. Guided by their handlers, they used a special kind of brush and dabbed different colors of paint onto a clean white shirt. Their masterpieces (flowers and trees) were for sale right after the show. Nice souvenir, if you don’t mind the elephant snot.

After each of the performances, the elephants went straight to the audience for tips (if it were bills, they promptly handed it to their handlers; if it were food, they quickly gobbled it up). Fortunately for the elephants, they were able to get more out of the Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean tourists. My friends and I (and our peso to baht conversion rate) were seated at the back.

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