Every year Thailand celebrates a nine day long vegetarian food festival. When I tell a Thai person that I am a vegetarian, the usual reaction is something like: ‘Very good, that’s great for your health, I admire that, but I could never do it”. But during those nine days of the vegetarian festival many Thais actually switch to a largely non-meat diet. They consider it quite a sacrifice which is quite amusing for those of us who have been vegetarians for many years or even decades.

There is another aspect to this event. In some areas of Thailand members of the Chinese community practice quite weird and gruesome body piercing rituals while they are in a trance state. This allows them to perform severe mutilations on their body without feeling the pain and without suffering any physical consequences. I wrote an article which shows pictures about those trance piercings.

There are quite a few videos on youtube that show the piercings in action, but I have to warn you – this is not for the faint hearted!

This year I made a video which shows the food festival in action in Chiang Mai. No piercings here, nothing to ruin your appetite. Just the opposite, you will wish you were there and could taste some of the great food.