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Lopburi Monkey Buffet: Tinku "Punch Your Neighbor" Festival

The document summarizes several unique festivals from around the world in 3-4 paragraphs each. The Lopburi Monkey Buffet describes a festival in Thailand where villagers lay out buffets of food for jungle monkeys. The Tinku "Punch Your Neighbor" Festival explains a violent fighting festival in Bolivia where people die but then everything returns to normal. The Feast of Anastenaria details a fire walking celebration in Greece and Bulgaria. La Tomatina describes a massive tomato fight in Spain. Finally, Beer Day explains Iceland's nationwide drinking celebration to commemorate the repeal of a beer ban.

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Juan Pablo Guzmán
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69 views3 pages

Lopburi Monkey Buffet: Tinku "Punch Your Neighbor" Festival

The document summarizes several unique festivals from around the world in 3-4 paragraphs each. The Lopburi Monkey Buffet describes a festival in Thailand where villagers lay out buffets of food for jungle monkeys. The Tinku "Punch Your Neighbor" Festival explains a violent fighting festival in Bolivia where people die but then everything returns to normal. The Feast of Anastenaria details a fire walking celebration in Greece and Bulgaria. La Tomatina describes a massive tomato fight in Spain. Finally, Beer Day explains Iceland's nationwide drinking celebration to commemorate the repeal of a beer ban.

Uploaded by

Juan Pablo Guzmán
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lopburi Monkey Buffet

Celebrated on the last weekend in


November of each year in Thailand is
the world’s biggest primate party. The
jungle dwelling monkeys around the
village of Lopburi are known to be
gluttons, harassing visitors for their
snacks and food. In 1989, the villagers
decided that the best way to deal with
them was to embrace them. Every
year, they lay out a buffet of morsels
for the monkeys at the Pa Prang Sam
Yot temple that include peanuts, cucumbers and raw crabs topped off with
some refreshing drinks of Coca-cola.

Tinku “Punch Your Neighbor” Festival

Each year in early May, the hills


and towns of Bolivia erupt with
violent fighting. The weapons
are fists and stones. People die.
And after a few days, everything
goes back to normal. 
Having its origin in pre-
Hispanic times whereby the earth Goddess Pachamama demanded blood to
ensure a good harvest, the people from the Bolivian village of Tinku took
this quite literally and decided to provide her with as much as she needed.
The rest is pretty self explanatory.
In addition to the brawling, the festivals also include feasts, elaborate
dances and huge, choreographed musical events. Some of the biggest are
held in the towns of Macha and Potosi.
The Feast of Anastenaria
The Anastenaria or the feast of Saint
Constantine and Saint Helena is an
eight-day dancing celebration that
begins on May 21st. Celebrated in
Northern Greece and Southern
Bulgaria, revelers celebrate with fire
walking, dancing and stomping
accompanied by live music. As the
music gets faster, the participants
‘touched by Saint Constantine’ claim to
not feel the flames on their feet. The
legend behind this ritual dates back to
the Middle Ages when the Church of
Saint Constantine accidentally caught fire. As the flames engulfed the church, the icons
of the saint and his mother Saint Helena were heard crying inside. The brave
churchgoers who rescued the icons came out unharmed and unscathed by the fire. The
eight-day festivities are celebrated with all-night services and the sacrifice of a sacred
bull, where every village family is given meat and sandals made from the hide.

La Tomatina
From Buñol, Spain comes the largest
food fight ever where about 30,000
people; both local and tourists, fill the
main square to hurl locally grown
tomatoes at each other on the last
Wednesday of August. Tractors bearing
red, squishy tomatoes dump them
throughout the streets
as ammunition for a 90-minutes free-for-
all tomato-throwing frenzy. There is no
explanation for this tradition though it’s believed to have started between
1944 or 1945 in Buñol.  No one is sure, however, whether it was in
celebration of the town’s patron Saint Louis Bertrand, as a form of anti-
religious protest, or just a capricious impulse after a tomato cart overturned.
Beer Day

For those who love their beer, you might want to go to Iceland
every 1st day of March for a nationwide drinking party. An excuse
for a ‘runtur’ or ‘pub crawl,’ this is an all-day celebration that will
give you plenty of chances to raise glasses to the local brews of
Viking Dimmur, Thule, or Litli-Jón. Though most banks and offices
will not change their hours of operation for this holiday, you can
expect pubs to stay open longer than the usual. This celebration
started when the country’s 75-year ban on beer was repealed,
which apparently resulted in much rejoicing.

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