Parades

People here love to have parades!  I do not mean the kind we usually think of in the States with floats and balloons and such.  No, the people here simply all pile into their cars, drive around town honking their horns, with their lights on, the passengers hanging out the windows and the windshield wipers going (yes, in a country that does not get much rain you got to use them for something).  The people here use just about any excuse to have a parade, be it a wedding, winning a football (soccer) game, passing your test in school or just about anything else you can think of.

Lately we have been seeing a lot of parades with people carrying flags.  When we win a soccer game, people parade around with the flag, but these flags have been bigger than the ones they usually use for soccer, and they are not always our national flag.  We asked some friends and they told us it was for the king's birthday.  We didn't feel like this was a good answer because it is not the king's birthday now, and we figured that many people couldn't have gotten the date wrong.  We finally got another answer that seems to fit better.

With all the unrest going on in countries in this part of the world, people want to have parades to let the king know that they like him and they support him.  With all that we hear on the news, I am thankful to be living in a peaceful country.  A majority of the people are very happy and proud of the king.  Obviously everyone is not completely happy, but the issues that they have are not that big and are dealt with peacefully.