Ayutthaya

This is one of my English co-teachers, Ed, and her husband, who also teaches at the school. They took me to Ayutthaya for the King's birthday, which is also Thailand's Father's Day, on December 5th. Which is pretty amazingly kind and awesome of them, when you consider they gave up a family holiday to show a farang around Thailand. It was like being taken on a day trip by an indulgent and camera-happy aunt and uncle--they must have had me pose for pictures in about fifty different places.

We went to three different temples, two of them in ruins and all of them beautiful. Here is the first, which was closed for restoration after last year's floods:

The second was a fully-functioning temple, and as we went in there were many people kneeling in prayer/meditation. There was also a curious rattling sound, which turned out to be little cups full of sticks, each with a number on them. You take the cup and shake it back and forth until one stick falls out, and there's a fortune that goes with the number on that stick. The one that fell out for me had a number 9 on it. This is the fortune that went along with that number that day: You will be successful, happy, and wealthy, but your hopes in love will not be met just yet. Also, this temple had a huge seated Buddha image. I cropped all the people out of the photo below, but to give you an idea, you can see picture frames at the bottom on either side of the doorway--those were just above head height.

After seeing the inside of the temple, we lit incense at a little altar outside. They also sold little bits of gold leaf you could rub onto a smaller Buddha statue outside.

Right next door to this temple were the second set of ruins we visited. It cost 50 baht for a foreigner to enter, and 10 baht for Thais--what I found funniest about this was that the sign had the Thai price in Thai numerals, probably in an effort to keep tourists from finding out they were being charged more. It was worth it, however, and I spent a good half hour or so walking all the way around the site and taking loads of pictures. Here's one of my favorites:

I haven't been able to figure out why some of the Buddha statues (like this one) get a wrap of saffron cloth (the color worn by the monks here) and others are left bare. I'm sure it's some sort of mark of respect. Or possibly it's cultural modesty--if so, I'm more in favor of this method than the carved fig leaves used to cover Greek and Renaissance sculptures.

We stopped for lunch and had som tam, sticky rice, fried chicken, and some kind of sweet beef. Our last stop was the floating market, where there's plenty to see and not enough words to describe it. There was an international section, where there was a blue Statue of Liberty (I think it was made from some kind of foam), post boxes from China and Thailand, a British phone box, a mini Eiffel Tower, a mini Tower of Pisa, and other international symbols. I decided against another elephant ride (they get pretty expensive), but I did go for a fifteen-minute boat trip through the market--you can see the boats to the right in the picture below.

It was a beautiful, packed, and memorable day, and I fell asleep during the two-hour car trip home.