Len Lom

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Len Lom…Play with the wind

Weow and Wind

In the past few days I have seen the stands of kite sellers crop up along the highway, flashing thier bright wares and hollering out discounts to beat out their rivals. I’m not a big fan of activities that encourage me to run…I left that with my gymnastics past, but I bought one anyway…

Our kite or weow (sounds like “wow” with a southern drawl) caused quite the stir. For example it’s day three and Miles is outside with two neighborhood kids trying to tie it to a bicycle fender to fly around the village on the bike…

The wind has picked up in the cool season and it’s the perfect time for kite flying.

Kites are said to have become popular during the Sukhothai period in Thailand (translates to a long long time ago) In numerous periods in history King’s have entered competitions, written rules, discarded and rewritten the rules again. Today numerous large gatherings and competitions are held in the cool season.

I frankly just love the kids faces when the kites are out…even the littlest ones know where to look. They get so excited! There is a large flat opening in our neighboring village, Rotary Sai and with Rotjana’s permission to transport he little ones in the sidecar motocyc, I piled all those who wanted to play into it and we set off to get our kite into the air with a good size group of others.

We didn’t get the kite up very high…it’s a bigger one and the wind just would not catch. It didn’t matter at all to the kids…they were happy to let the string out a few meters and take turns running like mad to get it into the air behind them as they charged across the filed. It became a competition not in how high the kite went, but who could keep it in the air during hairpin turns by the runner.

By far, Tum and Miles beat out the other kids…it may be because even when they stumbled they just kept going…the girls wimped out if the kite got too saggy. But hey, we had fun and the kids have asked to fly the kite (len weow) every day since I brought it home. I’m happy to oblige…I need to run off a few (Thai food) pounds anyway!

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