Wednesday 4th May 2016
Now for the 3rd Thai experience – a visit to the Grand Palace. Actually we visited 3 temples.
The first temple – Wat Traimit or Temple of the Golden Buddha. The statue is about 6 centuries old but was only discovered as a golden Buddha in 1955 when being transported and accidentally dropped. This cracked the outer casing of stucco and plaster to reveal the hidden treasure which stands (or sits) 5 meters high.
Wat Phra Kaew or Temple of the Emerald Buddha at the Grand Palace is the most important temple in all of Thailand. The Buddha is carved from a single piece of jade and is 66cm tall. So it is quite small in comparison is the other huge Buddha’s we have seen, but very precious. The Palace complex is huge and of course there were plenty of visitors but we still got the chance to view the Emerald Buddha and sit for a while in the temple and reflect. There are many temples in the grounds of the Grand Palace, but it is not the Palace where the King lives.
Wat Pho or it’s full name – Wat Phra Chettuphon Wimon Mangkhlaram Ratchaworamahawihan – or better still for English speaking folks “Temple of the Reclining Buddha” is the largest Buddha I think there is. The building was built around him so he touches head to toe, the end walls of the temple (15 meters high and 43 meters long). It was a much more peaceful visit at Wat Pho as there simply were not the crowds. We just about had the place to ourselves and the artifacts we saw were incredible. There were rows and rows of Buddhas, more than 200, mostly gold, but some were black. The facial expressions on each Buddha reflects the happiness or otherwise of the particular region or village it comes from.
We visited a modern Bangkok shopping centre for the experience – we didn’t buy anything. We did enjoy a Thai lunch of Tom Yum Soup – very spicy and quite delicious. The shopping is something else. There are rows upon rows of tiny spaces about 3 meters wide and about 4 meters deep (we have storage spaces larger than that) and there are thousands of these tiny shops crammed with all manner of clothing and other goods. We are in the wholesale clothing district (which is the middle of the CBD) and this is where I presume retailers from around the world converge to purchase garments for re-sale overseas.
Dinner tonight was down a dinghy little side street (they all are) where we enjoyed some great Thai food cooked on woks in the open. Geoffrey was as happy as a pig in mud being able to watch the preparation and cooking process.
