Bangkok not good today

I've arrived and just finished up a great first day in Thailand. I wasn't planning on posting so soon - but thought the family might like an update so they don't worry too much.

I arrived last night (Jan 31) at about 10:00 PM. I didn't sleep at all on the plane and so I was feeling exhausted and so happy to plop into my cab and finally be here. My cab driver gave me a very friendly "Good Night !". I replied eagerly "Good Night !" - happy to be on my way. As we pull away from the curb he said "Bangkok not good today" (pause) "Have bomb. Now it's all dusty" and he waved his hands at the air a bit to indicate the dust (I guess). His English wasn't great, and so I assumed I must have misheard. Perhaps he meant there was a storm and it had rained. When I arrived at the hotel I thought about asking the receptionist (Um.. I think my taxi driver said something about a bomb ?) but I thought I'd look like a paranoid westerner and there was no sign of anything unusual at the hotel so I didn't ask. I mostly forgot about it today - and was out sightseeing all day. No one mentioned anything that I heard all day. When I got back to the hotel this evening I thought I'd come up to the Internet kiosk and check the CBC website just in case... and indeed, there were some bombs set off yesterday. A couple sites said to avoid crowds while in Bangkok - but that doesn't really seem possible, it's a pretty crowded city. I'll only be here for another day, and then head to Kanchanaburi.

Now for my day. It was fabulous, I can't believe I've only been here for one day. I'm staying at the Sheraton, which is on the river, so I was able to take the river ferries up and down to visit a bunch of the temples today. I'm not sure if it was a special day today or not, but all of them were packed with Thai people. The amount of ceremony and ritual going on in the temples is fascinating to my non-religious eyes. I'll focus on writing about that as there is a line up for the computers so I can't stay on here too long.

The first place I went to were the Royal Grounds which house the "Grand Palace" and "Wat Phra Kaew". (Wat means means temple in Thai). These grounds are surrounded by a wall. One of the gates was open and I saw people flooding in, so I followed along but soon found that there was a very efficient guard at the gate who quickly picked out any non-Thai and diverted them to walk around to different entrance. At that entrance, you could purchase long pants and shirts with sleeves if you hadn't come prepared. I noticed that just inside the entrance, the Thai visitors were lining up to buy a package that included a candle, two sticks of incense and a flower with a closed blossom. Further inside, they would light the candle and their incense and pray in front of one of the buildings. They would then toss their flowers onto a huge pile with others. Some people were first pulling open the leaves of their flower and folding them into pretty designs. I would have loved to take more photos of this, but mostly this would have required me shooting pictures directly into the face of people praying and I didn't feel that would be appropriate so I only got a few where I could take a shot discreetly. (Most of the other tourists didn't seem to share my concern - and were shooting photos madly)


In other locations, people were dipping the blossom of their flowers into a big silver bowl of (holy ?) water and then tapping the blossom on their head so that the water would end up on their heads. In this temple area and in others I visited, there would be monks sitting here and there with groups of people sitting around them. The monks would be playing music and speaking, often with the aid of a microphone.




At Wat Arun, inside one of the buildings, people would get into a line with others down on their knees and crawl past monks who would sprinkle water on them and give them a saffron string that they would later tie around their wrist. At this same temple, there was a long long string tied to the top of the temple, that was gradually being filled with money that people would staple onto it. There was also a long table filled with black bowls. The process seemed to be that you would give the 'teller' some paper money and he would change into small coins and put it into a small silver bowl for you. Then you walk around and distribute your coins into the black bowls as you like. I noticed signs up on the table labelled with the days of the week (in English !). I supposed the idea was that you would get blessings for that day of the week if you put money in the corresponding bowls.

OK - I think that's enough for now - except to say that I ended my day with a 1 hour, extremely vigorous, foot massage. (Actually more of a foot/leg massage that included a quick head/shoulder massage at the end). I may have bruises on my calves tomorrow to show for it - but it was great !

Oh- and I manged to upload a couple photos, see the link on the right.