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Published: March 30th 2009
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Laura Being Beaten
Laura gets blessed by a monk. So,
We found a taxi driver a couple days previous which seemed to be honest. We're not very sure as to where he took us then, but regardless we found that his prices were really quite cheap. We wanted to take a day trip outside bangkok to somewhere interesting, and Mr. Taxi Driver showed us pictures of Ayutthaya which looked interesting so we took him up on it. Laura got his card and on Sunday got the hotel receptionist to call him up and pick us up.
The driver came early, and it took us about an hour to get to the 'Old Capital.' The driver, Mr. Somporn, is an eloquent man with an English vocabulary of about 10 words.
'Numba 1!' he exclaimed as we passed by the first temple. He further explained that there were '9 Tempo' on this tour of Ayutthaya.
The first temple was pretty much what we expected in terms of a Buddhist temple. You got your gold gilding, your golden buddhas, your incense, your candles, your monks, your donation boxes. The best bit was Laura paying to be beat over the head with some incense by some monk.
Mr. Somporn
Part of Temple 2
Some ruins at Temple 2, taken from above. showed us how to do all the Buddhist rituals. Get the bulb flower thing, get the incense, take the gold gilding square out of the incense, light the candle, light the incense with the candle, place the candle on the shrine, place the incense in the shrine in the ash, press your little gold gilding square onto a buddha. Bow lots.
Temple Number 1 over. We were exhausted. It's hot in Thailand! We ventured down to some shacks where they were serving noodles. We sit down at a table, and have about 4 Thai servers staring at us, seemingly wanting us to order something. Being menuless we hadn't any idea. They continued to stare as we tried to figure out what to do. 'Pad Thaaiiiii??' one jokes to another. I laughed at her, and she satisfyingly got quite embarassed. Eventually we just pointed at some noodles they whipped out and got some very good food. Our taxi driver joined us and finally translated what we wanted to the waiters.
'Numba 2!' as we passed by the second temple. Oh god. 8 more temples.
The second temple was a sprawing complex of gigantic ruins.
'Take Picture!' Samporn would
Mr. Somporn
Our Taxi Driver enjoys a Pepsi with us in the heat. insist after passing anything remotely interesting. I obliged, not wanting to offend our courteous taxi driver. In the middle of the ruins was more ritual stuff. Hurray: bulb, incense, gilding, candle, shrine, ash, press, bow, bow, bow. The best part of this temple was being able to feed some very lucky turtles. You buy bread and throw it at them as they laze in the water.
Samporn at this point was also getting a little tired. He drove us to Temple 3, but this time decided to bathe himself in air conditioning in the taxi. This temple had the famous buddha head in the roots ruin. (You can google it) We opted to take videos of Japanese tourists taking pictures of the buddha head. We had to go across the park and hop a stone wall to get to the most impressive temple spire thingy (prang). Laura opted to not climb up a gigantic temple thing, but Marcin and I did. Inside was a tomb, also known as a dead end. As we were trying to climb out, a sippy cup of hot yellow liquid came tumbling down the steep stairs, and hit Marcin in the face. "Sowwy!" echoed
Part of Temple 3
Hey look another part of a temple! from above.
'Maybe 6 temple? Very hot.' I said to Mr. Samporn. He enthusiastically agreed. We drove to another bizarre shrine-like place, with cherubic clay statues wearing sunglasses and sunhats. 'Beautiful!' said Mr. Samporn. Venturing into this area full of trees and plants, we found gongs to bang on. Marcin enjoyed this thoroughly, banging each one with his usual gusto. At the back of this temple was a frenzy of fish in a river which you could feed by paying to buy a bag of cheerio-like things. Hundreds of fish with seemingly unlimited apetite would chow on the things.
'Ok! Last temple!' It was far too hot to go on much longer. We went to one that we could see from the distance from other areas in Ayutthaya. It was not nearly as touristy and was run by a lot of monks and impoverished people. There were roosters, cows and dogs everywhere. It was one giant prang which Marcin and I climbed to the top of. On top was a monk reading some book and looking very Buddhist, and you could venture further inside to a shrine with cheap figurines and incense. (I have pictures of everything but
Marcin and Laura Bang
Marcin and Laura exuberantly bang gongs. you'll have to see those later)
Finally, completely exchausted, we were resigned to go back to Bangkok. The trip between Ayutthaya and Bangkok is about an hour. We were too tired to really talk, but at about the 40 minute mark, Mr. Somporn busted out his DVD collection and stuck in 'Sexy Dance Girls IV.' Which featured bored-looking scantily clad thai girls dancing to techno music on a stage. Mr. Somporn seemed to enjoy this very much. It was the highlight of our trip to Thailand so far.
Somporn is going to drive us today in about an hour to the Airport so we can fly to Phuket. Should be fun!
- Mark
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Matt
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Who is taking these photos? They're good.