Few days ago, I went to celebrate the Thai New Year's Festival as known as Songkran (Water) Festival with my boyfriend in Thai Buddhist Temple at Wimbledon. It was my first time celebrating a religious festival after quite a long time as I myself not really a religious person.
I had an early start for the day as when I arrived to the temple around 9am in the morning, there were already people preparing their stalls and also the temple worship had began. After giving food to 7 monks, outside the temple there was a traditional thai musical playing in the stage and there were plenty of food stalls.
After 1pm me and my boyfriend took a place right in the front near the stage and I got to see many different types of thai dance and there were also two beauty pageants. The first one was Little Miss Songkran 2015 were about 20 different girls performed in traditional thai dance featuring different types of era looking really adorable in their thai costumes. At the near end of the pageant for little girls, they had their fans showing their support towards their favourite by giving them colourful necklace. My boyfriend told me that it was a thai tradition to give courage and love towards their friend or children. The little girl who won the contest was very cute doing her thai dance steps continuously before she got crowned as the Little Miss Songkran 2015.
After the pageant was finished for the little girls, it was time for the big girls to compete. There were 12 girls wearing costumes representing different eras of thai history. Even though some girls weren't really fluent in Thai, it was fun watching girls living aboard showcasing their talent. In the end no 12 won the contest with no 4 & no 11 ended up as the runner ups. One thing that made me smile was that Miss Popular winner wore a red costume and her ornaments reminded me a lot of the nepalese living goddess - Kumari. The show came to an end with a very fun drag performance and everyone were dancing in the upbeat North-east Thai Country music.
