Tales of Thailand

I just returned earlier this week from Thailand, where I spent a wonderful 10 days enjoying the city of Bangkok and the beaches of Krabi with the other Luce Scholars for our mid-year meeting.

Despite the relatively relaxed nature of the trip (we only had one full day of meetings, as well as a brief check-in interview), I still managed to get not enough sleep and so am still recovering. But here I present several images and thoughts on Thailand.

So Thailand is a monarchy, though a constitutional monarchy. As part of this they have photos of the king and queen everywhere. Every house (even the Luce Scholars who are there) has a photo of the royal family, and you have giant portraits of the king and queen on just about every street. It's a little bit over-the-top, and that's coming from someone who spent the past couple months in China, where propaganda posters (though they're relatively benign nowadays) and Communist slogans are found on every street. But whereas most modern Chinese people think of the propaganda posters as a bit of a joke, the Thai people take the monarchy very seriously. According to my friends who are living there, a lot of people don't believe the king is going to die. He's in his 90s, and every king prior to him as eventually kicked the bucket, so...

I also walked through the Chinatown in Bangkok, because I was walking all around the city and it was marked on my map. They had traditional characters everywhere! It was confusing. Plus there was this cool traditional Chinese gate, covered in Thai script.

The Thai language is also really cool. It has five tones, which I can discriminate (because they're somewhat similar to the four tones of Mandarin, unlike the six tones of Vietnamese or the seven-to-nine tones of Cantonese), and sounds completely different from either Mandarin or Vietnamese. Additionally, the script is just really cool looking. There's not a universally agreed-upon method of transliterating into English letters, so anything Thai written in English doesn't work so well. Basically, I came back from Thailand having made the decision to study Thai at some point in the future. It will happen.

I also saw a lot, and I mean a lot, of temples in Thailand. They were everywhere. This one was right across from the Chinatown gate. They're very different-looking from the temples in China. Lots of pagoda-like shapes, just about always coming to a point like that. And they love gold on their temples.

  

Thailand is also a very Buddhist country, which was a little surprising coming from China, which nowadays is not religious at all. While China has many temples, they're not quite as common as in Thailand and they just about never have monks in them. Every temple I went to in Thailand had at least one monk, and I felt a little bit like I was intruding whenever I walked in and saw them there. They were universally friendly and welcoming however, it was just a little confusing for me.

The top photo of these two is a Thai "spirit house". These are little shrines found across Southeast Asia, on just about every property, in order to appease the protective spirit of a location. Offerings are often left outside them, and apparently it's very common to see businessmen, bustling down the street wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, stop and bow to the spirit house before continuing on their way to work.

Speaking of Buddhism, I saw a giant Buddha. The Reclining Buddha, located at Wat Pho, in downtown Bangkok, is 140 ft long and 50 ft tall. It is massive, and very impressive. When I showed the first picture to the students I teach, they were really impressed with my photograph skills and demanded to know how I managed to make the Buddha look so big. No folks, it really is that big. And the entire thing is covered in gold, except for bottoms of the feet, which are covered in intricate designs inlaid with mother-of-pearl like the one above.

 Here are some other pictures from Wat Pho, which was just generally a cool looking temple. They love their gold in Thailand, as it ended up on most of the buildings in the temple. Also, those pointy shapes. Definitely a motif in Thai temple architecture.

Also from that same Wat Pho, though this statue just surprised me. It looks very Chinese and I know nothing of its significance. But considering almost nothing else in the temples looked very Chinese, nothing in the architecture or in the style of the statues, this seemed very out of place. There were several similar statues as well, all showing warriors in various poses.

More temples! This temple we just passed by while on a boat getting a canal tour of Bangkok. Bangkok is filled with canals, especially the older parts of the city, and apparently used to be similar to Venice in its reliance on the canals for transport.

This is another temple we stopped at on our canal tour of Bangkok, though we stopped at this one and walked around. Very different looking than the previous ones, in terms of colors, but still with that sloping-to-a-point overall design.

These little guys also looked very Chinese to me. Same temple as the previous few pictures, we see the same guard looking fellow, this time accompanied by a Chinese-looking lion type statue. Don't know what to make of them.

We weren't in the city the whole time though. We took a day to go out to Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand and about an hour and a half bus ride outside of Bangkok. We walked around some of these ancient temples and then rented bikes and biked through them. Ayutthaya is now a modern, though small city, but every couple of blocks you have a giant temple compound, which was an interesting dichotomy. These temples are all several hundred years old and, despite the sacking of the city by the Burmese during the 1700s, most of them still stand. Again, it's interesting coming from China, where most of the buildings were made out of wood and so burned down on a regular basis. These temples were built to last.

This is a famous site in Ayutthaya, with a sandalwood tree growing around the fallen head of a Buddha statue. Unfortunately, I don't know much more about it.

One thing we noticed is that the majority of the Buddha statues around Ayutthaya, and especially at this temple (this picture and the 3 before it), had been decapitated. I believe it was done by the Burmese when they sacked the place, but it's unclear to me why or whether there's any real significance to it. It could also have been done during the mad rush for Thai artifacts during the 1800 and 1900s, when many statues and temples were taken apart in order to be sold to Europeans and Americans looking to take back a genuine relic.

This statue on the corner of the temple here is actually of Hindu origin, depicting a figure from the great Hindu epic The Ramayana. According to a hasty Wikipedia search undertaken while walking around the temple, the kingdom of Ayutthaya had strong Hindu influences.

This is another temple in Ayutthaya, probably the most interesting of the bunch. We were fortunate that we could walk around; last year when the Luce Scholars visited this temple, the ground was completely flooded, so they could only look at the temple from the parking lot.

More monks!

Some intrepid Luce explorers on their way down from one of the taller points of this temple.

We also went to a Muy Thai boxing match in Bangkok. Very different from the rest of the trip, it was definitely an interesting experience. I've never been to a Western-style boxing match, so I cannot really compare, but it was quite fun to watch. It was fun despite the fact that I had absolutely no idea what the rules were or how the winner was decided. Still, worth seeing.

  

 And I have fewer pictures from the rest of the trip because we spent it in Krabi, a peninsula in Southeastern Thailand, far away from the hustle and bustle of the city. We spent that last weekend relaxing on the beach, surrounded by some absolutely gorgeous rocks.

It was a bit of a trek to get to the beach. We had to fly from Thailand to Krabi airport and then take a van from the airport to the water and finally take a boat across the water to the beach we were staying at. We got a great view of the water on the way to the beach, and everything was just so clear. The air, the water...it was great.

One of the more active days at the beach was spent deep-water soloing, which basically means we free-climbed across rocks until we got tired or decided we were done, and then jumped or fell into the water below. We didn't do it on this rock, but I didn't bring my camera with me so this substitute image will have to do. Now, I can't rock climb at all, and this was my first time, so I only got up about 10 or so feet before jumping or falling into the water. The more impressive members of our cohort, however, climbed up about 50 feet, to the point where there was no more rock for them to climb, before leaping into the water below. I was sitting in the boat, and just watching them climb up there and then prepare themselves to jump had my heart pounding and adrenaline flowing. It was seriously impressive.

And that was Thailand. It was an incredibly fun trip, and is definitely a place I would recommend people visit. I didn't even mention the food, but it suffices to say, it was spicy and it was sour and it was delicious. Anyways, after my 10-day trip to Thailand I realized that I really want to be traveling more, so I immediately planned a weekend trip out to Hong Kong with a friend staying in Hanoi. In about two weeks. Yay! But for now, I have to get work done...