Bangkok is a big noisy, polluted city and we haven’t been terribly impressed. Even the vaunted red-light streets are full of knockoff-Rolex dealers and touts for “hockey” played using what Nazma calls (in whispered tones) “lady’s private parts“, which I have to say sounded pretty intriguing, if nothing but from a purely mechanical point of view. There was little to no one conducting any serious “business” here (apparently that happens in other parts of town). Just one big circus.
But every big city has something to offer, and Bangkok has wats, wats, wats.
We took a river ferry to the home of the most sacred Buddha image in the country. The Emerald Buddha is actually made of jade, but everybody here loves it anyways. It’s housed in the big carnival-like Wat Phra Kaew just south of where we’re staying. Tourists everywhere and we were so overwhelmed by the size of the compound that we ended up paying a guide to take us around. This ended up being this old geezer who shuffled us the close-to-retirement express tour, while every other person was getting their guide’s first-born named after them. Uninspiring but the wat more than made up for it.
Just south of that is Wat Pho, which houses an enormous reclining Buddha. Apparently each rendition of the Buddha (reclining, standing, sitting, hands this way or that) represents a different stage in his development: reclining Buddhas represent the moment he received his ultimate enlightenment. I must say: with the heat I find myself reclining an awful lot, but any bright ideas are still pending.
Wandered halfway across town to Wat Suthat. We went in thinking it was the largest gold Buddha in the country, but we’d mixed up the wats in the guidebook and this one ended up being bronze. Still, nice to see real locals coming in to worship and the resulting tranquility, compared to the tourist-scrums in the other temples.
In the roundabout outside there’s this towering red arch: the “Giant Swing”. Back in the day, monks would perform feats of daring-do by swinging from the arch on ropes and catching money with their teeth. Needless to say, safety harnesses being what they were, so many monks were injured or killed doing this that they passed a law banning it. I can’t think of anything snide to say about this; I think it’d be pretty sweet if we had something like that at the PNE.
