Alternating Stripes: Thailand and Costa Rica

For some reason these flags are so easy to mix up, because they are almost the same.

First, Thailand:

This flag was adopted in 1917, when the king, after declaring war on Germany and before sending troops to Europe, seriously, changed the center stripe to blue from red. The past flags were variation of white elephants on red backgrounds, until the red striped emblem.

Today, they say the colors are for nation-religion-king (red-white-blue), which is also their motto.

Now, here's Costa Rica:

This is officially the civil ensign, but they show it as the national flag because it is an accepted variant. It was adopted in 1906, and up until then, Costa Rica had used variations on the same powder blue and white that's associated with Central American independence and still used by most of those countries (we'll see them later)(Argentina and Uruguay also use those colors).