“I want one of those, and one of those, and that!”

- Ajaan Bob’s imagining of Rama IV

On Sunday, Bob took me to a Royal Palace and the city and ruins of Ayutthaya.  This was possibly the most memorable day trip of the lot.  We started by taking the Bangkok subway, which uses these really cool one-trip token things.  They're plastic and have a computer chip inside that records where you are going and how much you paid and controls the gate that lets you in and out of the subway.  The tokens probably are not actually that interesting, but I thought they were cool. We rode the subway to the train station (sa-ta-nee rot fai), where we got 12 baht, 3rd class tickets to the palace.  

3rd class train is quite the experience, let me tell you. It’s basically open-air, because all of the windows were open before we left the station. Each set of benches is slightly smaller than a car’s backseat, but most of the time you cram three people onto them anyway.  I sat next to a mother with two kids, one about 4 the other not yet walking. Vendors push around all the bodies in the seats and in the isles, hawking everything from rice, juice, water to nylon hammocks.  Two of the men sitting by Bob, across the isle from me, bought four or five hammocks from the vendor.  They thought it was the sweetest deal ever.  The mother sharing my seat bought her four-year-old some rice.  And she promptly got train-sick while eating it. As the train began to fill, people ran out of seats and began crowing in the isles.  This did not deter the vendors traveling up and down the train. One man standing near me had a fish the size of someone’s face in a bag of water, as though it were a goldfish he were taking home from the petstore. When we were a station away from our stop Bob and I got up and made our way to the door of the car. This was necessary because none of the station stops were very long. I ended up standing in the space between two cars, watching the ground fly past below, thinking it wasn’t so different from riding the accordion of a two-car bus. 

The palace we went to see is located in the country about a two-hour train ride from Bangkok. It was built by Ramas IV and V in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  The idea behind the palace was to build one of everything that Rama IV saw on a European tour.  No joke.  They had a French palace, and English manor, a Chinese palace, gothic cathedral turned buddhist wat, among other buildings and parks. It was crazy.  All of the buildings had very vibrant colors as well - the french house was yellow, the english one was purple, chinese red, observatory yellow and red stripes... very interesting and rather strange to see them all crammed into the same place instead of hundreds of miles apart. 

Once we had exhausted the palace, Bob and I took a boat up the river (the traditional means of travel around Thailand, especially around Bangkok) to Ayutthaya.  

After the kingdom of Sukkhothai fell out of power, the kindom of Ayutthaya became dominant in Siam.  The capital city once held at least one million people and was a great center of trade between India, Europe, China and the rest of Southeast Asia. In 1776 it was ransacked and destroyed by the Burmese, who came in, burned everything they could, stole and melted all the Buddha images, and killed as many as they could - including monks.  This is especially strange to me, since the Burmese are Theravada Buddhists, as are the Thais/Siamese.  Seems you might kill different kinds of Buddhists, but your own sect?  I don't know. 

This destruction had a different result than the destruction of Sukkhothai.  Sukkhothai was destroyed and then left as ruins.  Other cities became important, diminishing new construction, so the ruins in Sukkhothai are all that is left in Sukkhothai.  Ayutthaya on the other hand, has been rebuilt around the ruins.  You have to drive thru a growing urban center to get from one ruined wat or palace to another.  Also, some of the ruined temples have rebuilt active wats inside them.  I'm not certain how I feel about this difference or exactly how it affected my experience viewing the ruins.  I didn't always feel that the ruins were as impressive as at Angkor or Sukkhothai, but at the same time, it was really interesting to see a ruined jedi at one end of a soccerfield, or a gleaming new white wat situated in the center of a walled-in group of ruins.

"I AM your father!"

 - Darth Vader, to Luke.

Random? Not at all!  

Tonight Jena and I decided that the Bangkok airport looks oddly reminiscent of Star Wars.  Particularly the walkway between plane and gate.  That looks EXACTLY like the walkway where Luke meets Vader after leaving the Ewok village. 

Yeah. Weird.

And... The entry way (exit way?) of the airport looks like the medical ship where Luke gets his metal hand. It was trippy. 

Here in BKK we're staying at the Christian Guesthouse. I am surrounded by so much Jesus right now.  More than any other time this semester.  It's also a little weird.  Where did Buddha go? 

The most ironic thing about the guesthouse is it's location - right next to one of the largest red-light districts in Bangkok.  Prime real estate here. If everyone were not leaving for the beach at 8:30 tomorrow morning I'm fairly certain we would be out exploring.  

Countdowns:

1 day til I take the Praxis

2 days til Bob and I go to Ayuthaya

4 days til the longest day ever (aka we fly home)

16 days til graduation

Jan. 15-17 Recap: Bangkok

January 15th we arrived in Bangkok! With our delay in Chicago and then Narita/Tokyo, we arrived in BKK in the early afternoon. The day was gorgeous, sunny and in the 80s (compared with the double digits below zero in the Midwest!). We took taxi buses to our guesthouse by the train station, to unload luggage and then wandered the city. The group of us 9 students travelled around in a huge group this first night, and a couple of times we heard locals exclaim something like "Farong line!" enjoying the sight of us like ducks in a row.

As we wandered the city, I kept wishing I could read the graffitti we saw. Graffiti in the U.S. is fascinating enough, but this was in Thai! I was so disappointed that I couldn't read and truly appreciate it. (And no, I don't care about the road signs, just the graffiti).

Bangkok is a much busier city - or at least more chaotic in its busyness - than the U.S. cities I've been in. There is such a rush of people everywhere - on foot, on scooters and motorbikes, in tuk-tuks (glorified motorbikes), and in other vehicles. And it seems only turn signals and stop lights are required. Crosswalks, lanes, speeds, even sometimes whether sidewalks belong to peds or bikes are all up for interpretation. My mom would be horrified by how close vehicles drive to one another (if her comments to me are any indication!).

The taxis here are very brightly colored - hot pink is our favorite, but they also come in fire truck red, bright blue, irridescent purple, orange and often have another color of stripe along the side (green, white, yellow and blue are most common). Emily, Casey and I are thinking about painting my car when we get back.

That night we had dinner as a group so that we could learn how to order food for ourselves. This meant that our profs taught us the word for "I would like" and then we are supposed to point at the menu: "Kaw... (point)." Also at dinner we learned how to say "excuse me" - kaw tope. This simple two syllable phrase proved quite difficult for our group, however, due to Thai tones. In english a rising tone indicates a question, and (in english) you can change a statement to a question just by raising the tone of your voice on the last word. So, when we were practicing "excuse me" in Thai we would say "kaw tope" and give both words a rising tone, since we were trying to ask for confirmation or correction of our pronounciations. In doing this though, we completely destroyed the meaning of the phrase.

On the 16th (Friday) each of us students woke up at various times anywhere between 4:00 am and 10:00 am, due to jet lag. It's pretty amazing - we're all in bed by 8 or 9 and most of us get up by 7. Our parents would love us in Thailand so much more - no more angry, sleepy mornings! By 9:00 we were leaving the guesthouse, again as a large group of foreign students, to try to find ourselves some food. We had wandered past a bunch of delicious smelling food stands in BKK's Chinatown (it has a Chinatown and an Indiatown) the day before, so we decided to try to find these stalls again. And this brings us to our first cultural lesson:

Food is not as readily available in Thailand as it is in the US. Our wanderings did not bring the same bounty of smells and people that we had seen the night before and eventually a local who took pity on the "lost" farong told us that, 1 - it was too early to get food (since most stalls and vendors do not open until 10:30 for lunch time) and 2 - we were not in a safe part of town to be wandering around in. Oops. He suggested we take a tuk-tuk or taxi to the other side of town and see the sights. This we did not do, since we were going later that day with our profs, but we did cross the couple of streets to the "better, safer" side. As we did this, the first stalls began to open and we were able to purchase chai yen (milk tea) and some rice dishes for about 45 baht total (just over a dollar), making it the cheapest meal I have ever eaten.

That afternoon we took a boat tour around the city. Originally, the only way to get around Bangkok was by boat; there were no roads. Even today, gridlock around the city's streets can become bad enough that sometimes water taxi is still the best option. Our tour took us first to a Snake Farm, which had a zoo-like area and also included a snake show. During the show they milked a cobra and did a bunch of other stunts with mildly to very poisonous local snakes. I touched a python, had a monkey repeatedly grab my knee looking for food, and I fed nuts to a bear.

The next stop was a wat (buddhist temple) called Temple of the Dawn. It is built in the Cambodian style of temples (meaning it had a lot of tall, narrow towers), and was decorated with broken pottery imported/stolen from China. Here we spent a lot of time looking around at all the different buddha statues in various areas of the temple and most, if not all, of our group climbed the extremely narrow stairs to the highest public level of the main temple (about halfway up the tallest spire). These steps were so steep that to climb them you were almost on hands and knees and had to turn your feet sideways on the step if you wanted to have any chance of them fitting on the stairs. It was intense. (I hope to post pictures once we reach Chiang Mai; I apologize for not being able to now.)

Our final stop was an outdoor market at a pier. Translated the pier is called "Elephant Pier." One part of the market is famous for it's large amount of buddhist amulets. There was so much food and drinks to partake in at the market. We all bought various fruits - rambutans, mangosteens, various banana varieties, mango - and some sort of food, whether a rice dish or skewers of meat. Chai yen and rosella juice have become the groups favorite drinks, while we have also tried guava juice and soda, pineapple soda, strawberry soda, chrysanthemum juice, parsley juice, green coconut juice, tangerine juice, and some sort of fruit punch. I am the only one who despises green coconut juice - it was such a weird mix of sweet, bitter and salty, but I was the only one who disliked it. And parsley juice was surprisingly good - it tasted tangy and fresh, like raw parsley, but also sweet. Very refreshing.

I know how to say hello (swa-tee-kah), lonely (wa-way), excuse me (kaw-tope) and I'd like a thai iced tea (kaw-chai-yen). Basically, I'm ready to move here! (NO.) I think I really need to figure out Yes, No, Sorry, Thank you, Just walking and Bathroom/Toilet because I keep trying to say these things in Spanish or English - neither of which are helpful. Drex and John (our professors) keep using their Thai skills, with taxi drivers or vendors or to get random tour people to leave us alone; its like they're teasing us. I can't wait to start Thai classes at Chiang Mai.

Today (Saturday, Jan. 17th) we continued our tour around Bangkok, seeing Wat Pho - home of the Reclining Buddha (which is HUGE) and another wat attached to the Royal Palace that is home of the Emerald Buddha. I will post more about these places and pictures tomorrow, however, since I need to go meet the group for our train to Chiang Mai! So excited!