Golden Buddha

Bags taken care of, we headed to the Golden Buddha. Another gorgeous huge temple. I'm just astounded by the temples here, every aspect of their building is beautiful. The 2nd and 3rd floors had exhibitions on the Chinese in Thailand, specifically this area, and the history of the Golden Buddha respectively. I was tempted to spend a little more time looking at the different periods and styles of Buddha art, but decided I could look it up online and research it myself later (and more effectively, since I could save results.) Interesting stuff, the exhibition on Thai of Chinese descent was built very immersively. You walked through the “hold” of a ship, then into an early Chinese-in-Thai village, and so on. I liked it, good way to set up an exhibit. At the beginning was a video of a Thai of Chinese descent family, grandson and grandfather, talking about their family history and such. Sort of interesting, I think they were supposed to be sort of the “everyman” generic descendents of Chinese immigrants. Creepy commentary on the king though, so much “that's why everyone loves him” and “His Majesty has done great things for our country” and so on. Hooray for propaganda? The 4th floor had the Golden Buddha itself, another enormous, beautiful Buddha statue. Apparently it was plastered and lacquered over so they didn't know it was gold for centuries, potentially. I took lots of pictures, and on the way out saw the guy from the train station again. Walked over to the other temple there, more beauty, more pictures, left, took a wrong turn on the way back to the train station, reoriented myself and here I am in the train station again.

Another general note – pop bottles here are very tall and skinny. It's different and makes it hard for me to tell how much is actually in them. It's the little things.

Sunday, January 24th, roughly 5:05 PM local time