The real Thailand: Singburi

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Arriving at Brown House

After our two hour drive from Bangkok, we eventually arrived at Brown House, our home for the next two weeks! We had already been split into our rooms, so in we moved and to my sheer joy I found out that although the rooms can hold 6 people, two people had not turned up for the program so we had two spare beds! Naturally one of those has become my storage space! It was then dinner time and time for me to discover that Brown House is a vegetarian house so I would be suffering a severe meat shortage over the coming weeks! Depressing much! We then found out all about the house rules and chilled out for a bit in the make-shift shack of a bar that existed just for us on the opposite side of the street. It was then off to bed to prepare for our lessons that were to begin the following morning!

"Thai Culture Naaaaaaa"

Over the next few days, we followed a similar routine of various types of lessons and visiting various temples. Our two co-ordinators at Brown House are a guy called Oliver and a girl called Paris (both are Thai). Oliver is hard to understand sometimes and he says "Naaaaa" after everything he says which is like a polite expression in Thai (a bit like our "please") but it is just so funny to listen to. Unfortuantly he doesn't have much of a clue half the time as to what is going on so luckily we have Paris around!

Our lessons involved Thai language lessons which were a lot of fun especially trying to mimick their pronounciation and also the fact that, like in Mandarin, the same word can have several different meanings! But it has been useful and I now know most of the greetings and polite expressions off by heart! We also had some Thai cooking lessons which were fun and very simple to make even for me such as Papaya salad and Pad Thai! I am determined to like Thai food by the end of this trip but so far it does not look promising as I am not a huge fan of having plain white rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner!!!

The rest of the time was predominatly spent visiting shopping centres and temples! As beautiful as the temples are though I believe I have seen enough to last me a lifetime!! We visited the Heroes of Khai Bang Rachan Monument and Khai Bang Rachan Park which refer to the villagers of Bang Rachan who bravely fought against the Burmese army in 1765 and in spite of many more troops than the villagers, the Burmese had to make eight attacks before the villagers were defeated due to their shortage of weapons.

The evenings at Brown House were pretty much filled with going to the make-shift shack like Bar, where we had lots of fun drinking Beer and some drink called Hong Thong, which is all they sold, and killing as many mosquitos as we possible could. I believe our record one night was 42! We also had an evening of entertainment provided when a group of local children came by the house to perform for us some traditional Thai dancing which was incredibly cute and then they gave us flowers and dragged us up to do the dancing with them. As payback we decided to teach them some English dancing. However that ended up being the Hokey Cokey which worked out fine as they seemed to enjoy themselves!

The rest of the introduction week also involved visiting some nearby towns/cities to Singburi. One day was spent in the town of Lopburi which has been completely overrun by monkeys running wild. Another day was spent visiting the Tesco Lotus in Suphanburi (which we proceeded to go back to about another 3 times). But the best day out was when we visited the town of Ayutthaya which used to be the ancient capital of Siam. Whilst there we got to see the elephants giving rides out around the city and although some people went for a ride, I did not because I didn't like the look of the way they were treated. We also got to visit an elephant centre where these two baby elephants were just roaming around freely. They were so cute but they kept play fighting and butting everyone out of the way! I really enjoyed this part of the trip though it upset a few others because the elephants were mostly tied up. Unfortunatly though, as a nice english man who worked there was informing me, there are no wild elephants really left in Thailand anymore and they were either used by the locals or killed off. So all the elephants at the centre were retired ride elephants who also bred and due to the nature of elephants being so huge, they have to be tied up for everyones safety. We also visited a few temples and a museum whilst we were there but the best part of the day was the dinner cruise we did up and down the river in the evening. We got to see some great sights including the first church and mosque I've seen since being in Thailand and though I am not sure whether this was a bonus or not, it was also a karaoke boat. Hmmmmm. Luckily our group were the only ones on the boat!!!

Thus the introduction week was a pretty slow one and as a result some people ended up leaving the program for various periods of time to see some of the rest of Thailand as they were leaving straight after the program. But then it was time to move into the culture week, where things would begin to pick up slightly.

Culture week

So the main emphasis of this week was to experience an overnight stay with some monks. So, off we began on our one hour journey to arrive at this temple which, I must say, looked more like a disused school! So we got seperated into boys and girls areas as Buddists are not allowed to socialise with girls, so the boys got to sleep with the monks whilst us girls had to go to a building around the back which looked a bit like the psychiatric hospital out of Girl, Interrupted. We then went and got changed into our white clothes that we needed to wear whilst at the temple and headed out on a tour of the grounds led by Oliver, where we saw some of the monks doing some gardening. We then had some free time before we entered the temple to join the monks in evening chanting. There were only five monks who joined us and three of them were children. We then began about 15 minutes of chanting in Thai which was quite difficult and we had no idea what it was we were saying! We then got taught for about an hour the various types of meditation including sitting, standing and walking meditation which I quite enjoyed as it was so peaceful. Only downside was that it left me feeling very tired so the rest of the evening was quite a chore! Finally, we then got to meet the Abbott which was a pretty sureal experience as half way through he started speaking on his mobile phone to some woman in the UK through which he got another Sophie in our group to talk to this woman for him! Also, in the corner of the room we were in, there was a skeleton in the corner which turned out to be the Abbotts father!!!! All in all, about an hour later we were ready to leave and go to bed!

The following morning we got up at the insane hour of 5.45am to go out and receive alms with the monks which involved walking around the town in our white robes and watching at a distance, people giving food to the monks. All in all a pretty boring experience but we got to see what happens every morning for the monks etc. We then had free time for several hours which involved most people goig to bed before we had a quick final chanting session, said goodbye to the Abbott who gave us all necklaces and headed back on the trucks to Singburi and back to Brown House.

So has this experience changed my ideas about Buddism? Quite possibly, though I still thought them to be quite a peaceful religion until Oliver and Paris took us to this temple, where outside there were all these figures covering about the size of a football pitch and showing Buddist ideas of hell and popular historic stories. Seriously, this hell place was disgusting. It showed people having their tongues ripped out, babies being burnt alive etc etc and in the centre of it all was a huge cactus which showed naked people being forced up it and impaling themselves, with one person at the top having its eyes pecked out!! Seriously! Apparently, it is what they believe will happen to you if you sin. Weird stuff. As for the ideas, I still think the idea of essentially having no principal god is interesting and they have good morals to live your life by but they are still many years behind the times with regards to women, especially in Thailand where women have to go to place like India if they want to be monks. I guess its similar in most other religions too though

Other experiences we got involved making traditional Thai things such as basket weaving and painting some Thai courtisan dolls which was all fun. We also got to make our own beaded bracelets. There was also a zoo trip in there somewhere were we got to pay with orangatans and feeds baby lions and tigers etc. Only we found out the next week from a friend of ours who was doing a volunteer placement there that they treated the animals appalling and that is why she left!

And thus we came to the end of the culture week and the end of our time at Brown House. So us trekking people packed all our things up and headed off to a beautiful golf resort for one night in preparation for the trek.

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Photos

The temple of the Buddhas footprint
The temple where you had to choose which stairs you wanted to take: riches, happiness or love, and then hold your breath wishing it the whole way up.

Monkeys take over the town
In Lopburi

Comments

[Mum]

I'm so jealous!
I've always wanted to stroke a tiger. I didn't know Buddhists had a hell-I thought you kept on being reincarnated until you reached Nirvana or something.

[Marissa]

There actually is very little sexism against women in Buddhism in Thailand, women can join in the monastic community, but they do not become Monks, they become Nuns, and partake in religious ceremonies just like the Monks do. The Inequality that does exist between women and men in Buddhist Thailand is not because of hatred of women, it's something that dates back thousands of years to the very begining of Buddhism in the world. On the surface it does look like sexism, but once you dig a little deeper, you find that it's not at all the case.