I forget the name of the temple I visited, but whatever it was called, it was rather bizarre. It was much smaller than I'd expected and rather tatty. The first thing you notice on entering is that it is completely full of smoke. There are literally hundreds of insense sticks burning and every new person who comes into pray takes a large bundle of jossticks and lights them all at once. In addition to this, there are large insense sticks burning all the time. The spirally shaped objects in the photo are actually insense sticks, which burn continually for a month or more. Apparently, the smoke acts as some sort of conduit to the Gods.
The other odd thing is the way tourists are completely intermingled with the supplicants, who, themselves, seem to be totally oblivious of all the tourists crashing in on them and snapping away with their cameras, flash and all. Of course, all the smoke makes taking photographs rather difficult. There weren't masses of locals praying, but there was a steady stream and, in contrast with most churches in the West, of all ages, from about fifteen to eighty.
The picture taken outside the temple shows another odd aspect, a lady just feeding sheets of paper into a furnance outside the temple. It's not a very special looking object, more like a brick-built barbecue you might see in Portugal. Apparently, they buy the special paper and burn it as another way of contacting the Gods.
At present, I'm having trouble getting the pictures to show where I want them, but I'll try to sort this out later.
This is all very different from the very impressive temples I saw in Bangkok, which I'll cover in a later blog.
Hope you're enjoying Bangkok. When we visited in 1988, it was the first place I'd been where I couldn't understand anything on the traffic signs - when we were in Russia, Greece, and Turkey I could at least read and pronounce the words, and in Egypt there were often English translations, but Thai signs were just squiggles. I was also impressed by the fact that, although there were hordes of people living in shanty shacks by the sides of the railways and klongs, they all looked incredibly happy and healthy. Fortunately, we had a guide, a nice young schoolteacher with very quaint English. When she got us checked in to the Intercontinental, she showed us to our room and pointed at the kitchen tap, saying "drink not the water from the pump". Then she opened the fridge, pointed to the bottles of water, and said "drink only the water from the Electric Chill", which I assume is a literal translation of the Thai word for fridge. To this day, we call the fridge the Electric Chill.
ReplyDeleteHave fun in the Tuk-tuks and the long-tails, and drink only the water from the Electric Chill.
They do that special paper burning thing in the UK too. It's called 'quantitative easing'.
ReplyDelete