Loi Krathong or Roi Krathong is perhaps the most colorful festival in Thailand. A krthong is raft, traditionally made out of Banana leaves. Thai people float away Krathong in river on the Loi Krathong day to float away their ill fortunes. This festival is also to apologize to the river goddess Ganga. The people of Thailand apologize to the river goddess for polluting the water and promise to do better during the coming years.
Loi Krathong is celebrated during the full moon day of 12th Lunar month. This is normally during mid November. This year, 2007 the Loi Krathong falls on 24th November. It is Saturday and I expect a big crowd near the banks of Choprya River with devotees gathering around to float the Krathongs. Here is a colorful video which explains everything about the Loi Krahtong fetival in Thailand.

It is believed that the Loy Krathong fetival is originated from the Indian festival Deepavali which is also celebrated almost at the same period.

A while ago I wrote a post called Seo Bangkok which was about the search engine optimization I have been trying to do here in Thailand. At the time of writing that post the page rank of Bangkokbaby was PR1. But later after Google completed its update Bangkokbaby got PR4. Bangkok Boy (Sunny) wanted to learn more about search engine optimization and was actively browsing through webmaster boards like Digital Point and came across a post from SEO Bangkok about having a meeting at Bangkok on search engine optimization. So here is what Sunny says about the seo meeting.
To make the story short, we had our first meeting on search engine optimization here in Thailand at Star Bucks, Thanon Lang Suan at Bangkok. To my pleasant surprise there were about 15 people and many of them were Thai webmasters. Everyone looked pretty happy. This meeting was more of getting to know each other than a technical one. But I could see the Thai webmasters from Seobangkok.com giving some valuable tips to his fellow webmasters. I met William from amwso.com who explained the merits of affiliate marketing over google adsense. I could also here, some of my western webmaster friends sharing their experiences about search engine optimization and google adsense.

Photos from Bangkok Seo Meet

Big thanks to the seoBangkok team for organizing the meeting. I hope we will have more such meetings on search engine optimization in Thailand in the near future.
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Today is Valentine’s Day. Bangkok Baby loves to wish all of you a very happy Valentine’s day. May your love life be wonderful with full of joy and happiness. Most you must be knowing the story behind Valentine’s Day. For those doesn’t know, let me briefly put it here.
The day February 14th is named after a Christian priest named Valentine. During the third century the Roman Emperor Claudius II decided that the young men in his army shouldn’t get married. He believed that married men don’t make good soldiers. Because of the fear most people accepted the emperor’s order. But the christian priest Father Valentine believed in love and marriage and he secretly performed marriages between young couples. When Emperor Claudius II came to know about this he became furious and put Father Valentine in jail. From there he was sentenced to death. Lovers around the world celebrate Valentine’s Day in rememberance of the martyr priest who believed in love.

Valentine’s Day Celebration in Thailand
In Thailand lovers around the country exchanged gifts and flowers. The girls were mainly shopping for dolls and roses while the boys shopped for dresses and electronic gadgets. This year 665 couples got married on Valentine’s Day at Bang Rak district. Around 12 couples got married under sea water in Trang. But the highlight of the day was the marriage between Khun.Mak Charoensuk,and Khun.Ui. The Bride Ui was 86 and the groom Mak Charoensuk was 88, when they walked together to register their marriage among the other 34 couples at Nakhon Ratchasima in Thailand on Valentine’s Day. What a way to celebrate the Valentine’s Day!

Yesterday, it was music time in Bangkok. Famous western musician Eric Clampton and his band performed in Bangkok yesterday. The packed crowd at Impact Muang-thong thani was thrilled to hear Eric Clapton. The Thai people who lost their chance to celebrate New Year eve due to Bangkok bomb blast enjoyed every bit Eric Clapton’s music. The event was part of Eric Clapton’s Asian tour.

Eric Clapton in Bangkok Music Concert

The word SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. I am not an SEO expert. But I am not a newbie on the subject learning a lot about seo from forums like Digital Point. I know there are seo experts in Bangkok and if I search on google I can even see a site called seo bangkok.com Not sure how good they are doing with their seo work in Bangkok. Anyway I wish them all the best. But this is not the main reason I decided write about seo Bangkok. It is the latest google PR update.
For those who doesn’t know, PR is Page Rank, a value between 0 to 10 assigned by google for each webpage to determine the importance of a webpage. A higher value in PR means a higher quality page. The PR value can be found on the google tool bar. Though a higher PR value itself is not much of importance, webmasters around the world rely on PR value for their link building efforts. I must admit that, I have also given much importance to PR value in my seo efforts for Bangkok Baby. Every three months or so, google updates the PR value shown in the google tool bar. This year webmasters who are crazy about seo and PR noticed a changes in tool bar PR value from the second week of January 2007. But so far, there was no change in PR for Bangkokbaby. When I am writing this post this site still stays at PR1 though the site got many quality back links. Sad to see my seo efforts haven’t found any results. But I hope I will eventually win. 🙂

During this new year eve, I was at Hong Kong with my friend. Hong Kong time is one hour ahead of Thailand. After the countdown at Hong Kong, I called my friend at Bangkok to wish her happy new year and what I received was a bad news. She said, there was a series of bomb blasts on 31st at various parts of Bangkok and police alerted the public to avoid all gatherings and parties to avoid further problems to public. She sounded very sad. Next day, I came to know that 3 people died in Bangkok bomb blast and around 38 people injured. I felt really sad. Couple of months ago, we had a military coup in Bangkok and not even a single gun shot occurred and it was completely non-violent. I think, no other country in the recent history had such a peaceful military coup. I was proud of the peace loving people of my country.
But this bomb blast is really bad. This hurt all of us who love our country and people. I reached back Thailand on 1st January 2007 evening. On my way back to home from Bangkok airport, the taxi driver told me that, one “farang lady” lost her legs at Bangkok world trade center during the Bangkok bomb blast. I felt terribly sorry for her. The foreign lady might have come to Bangkok to celebrate her new year with her loved ones and look what happened to her. So far, nobody has a clue on who is behind these bomb blasts. Who ever it is, my plea is, please do not do this to Thailand. We, Thai people are peace loving people who only know to love others. We don’t want to spread hatred here. Lets make love, not war!

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A while back, I had posted the link to live Bangkok airport arrivals schedules from the Airport thai website. But it looks like, the original link is no longer getting updated regularly. So, today I just updated the post with new flight schedule checker with which you can check both departure and arrivals. All you have to do is just type in the names of the departure airport and arrival airport. if you are not sure about the spellings, don’t worry. The flight status checking system got an auto complete drop down menu which will give you the options. Just type in the name. It’s pretty easy.
Here is the updated Bangkok airport flight schedules. Click Here.
Have a safe trip to Thailand.

Today is Christmas. Santa is already in Bangkok and is gonna visit Thailand. Bangkok Baby and friends wish you all a Merry Christmas. Good luck to all of you. Have a nice time with your family and friends.