Bangkok, Thailand
Our tour through Bangkok covered a lot of miles. We went to quite a few Buddhist temples and saw many different Buddhas: Sitting Buddha, Standing Buddha, Reclining Buddha and the Emerald Buddha. The Sitting Buddha shown below is a 15-foot tall, 5 ton (10,000 pound) solid gold statue that was made 700 years ago. Also, each shrine has beautiful artwork, interior and exterior design. People burn incense, leave fruits and marigold flowers and donate money to the monks who take care of the shrines. At the Reclining Buddha temple, we put 129 coins into 129 metal cans for good luck. With a lot of people doing this, it made quite a bit of noise.
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The shrines make a lot of donations from visitors and from locals who pray for good luck or something good to happen.
Our tour guide’s name was Ling and she lives in an apartment without an air conditioner.
We saw and ate some strange fruits and saw some foods that we do not have in Texas! In Singapore we had BBQ Sting Ray served on a big banana leaf, very good.
Above is the lychee fruit, it was pretty good. We also saw dragon fruit, durians, star fruit, mangosteens.
Tuk-tuks are a very common way to haul people, animals, produce, trash and flowers around Bangkok. We had a good ride in one.
The pictures below were taken at the Grand Palace in Bangkok – home of the King of Siam for over 150 years. It was built in 1782 and is a giant walled area
There are pictures of the King of Thailand on every store, on billboards, on all money as well as many statues. The people in Thailand love the king, who was been king for over 60 years. Interesting fact, he was born in Massachusetts and went to school and college in Switzerland. People think he is a good king, he is a figurehead like the Queen of England. Thailand has elected official and a Prime Minister to run the country.
The statues above show human and monkey demons, the humans have on shoes, the monkeys do not so you can see their toes. I think they had watched too many Planet of the Ape movies as they also had hundreds of murals showing wars between humans and apes
There are hundreds of large painted murals that are in many of the galleries at the palace. They depict life in Thailand, wars, famous battles between demons and the King of Siam. They are pretty violent but very interesting. There is even a wall devoted to human anatomy that was used because there were no doctors 300 years ago.
We took a ride in a long boat around the canals in Bangkok to see how people had traditionally lived around the rivers and canals.
