We had the second part of our Thai Cultural Workshop today. Again, these are the classes we need to take in order to keep our teaching license for next year. For this trip, we went to Ayutthaya, which was the capital of Thailand for about 700 years before Bangkok. It is a very historic city with many temples and old ruins.
The workshop went well and we discussed several aspects of Thai Culture and customs. I have to type up a formal report over these aspects. I will email the final report when I have it completed. For now, I will simply talk about these pictures that I have posted.
The first two pictures are of ruins from the old capital buildings or temples for the King. I'm not sure exactly what buildings these used to be, but I do know that they were important government builidings. From what the workshop leader told me, most of the buildings were diminished and turned to rubble from bombings and fire by the Burmese.
The next three pictures are from a temple that we visited. The first is of Buddha, or at least what I thought was Buddha. From what I've been told, this is actually an important monk, but not Buddha. I still like him and think he is a jolly man, so I will call him Buddha for my sake and because I cannot remember is real name.
The next picture is an actual Buddha. Apparently, this is one of the largest Buddha's in Thailand, for obvious reasons. You can see how big it is because of the people at the bottom of the picture. It is huge and pretty amazing.
The final picture is of some bells that are right outside the temple. People would go by and ring them. I'm assuming its supposed to bring good luck to ring them in order. A lot of the culture over here is based on karma and good luck. They do things because they believe it will bring them good luck. Another example of this is we went to an elephant show after the temple and they had an elephant stand on two different stools and people would walk underneath the elephant because it was supposed to be good luck. Elephants are seen as sacred over here, a sign of the Buddhist religion. To me, this is ironic because the Thai people parade them around the streets of Bangkok like a side show, trying to get foreigners to buy 20Baht bags of food so they can feed the elephant.
A few things about the temple that I noticed while I was there. You could not where shorts, so I had to go in jeans and it was hot. Definately a little uncomfortable for me. As we were leaving, some Thai woman came after us screaming about paying to enter the temple. I believe this is really a load of BS because no one else has to pay to enter the temple, but because we are foreigners, they think they can take our money for being tourists. She was cussing us out as we were getting on the boat.
The first two pictures are of ruins from the old capital buildings or temples for the King. I'm not sure exactly what buildings these used to be, but I do know that they were important government builidings. From what the workshop leader told me, most of the buildings were diminished and turned to rubble from bombings and fire by the Burmese.
The next three pictures are from a temple that we visited. The first is of Buddha, or at least what I thought was Buddha. From what I've been told, this is actually an important monk, but not Buddha. I still like him and think he is a jolly man, so I will call him Buddha for my sake and because I cannot remember is real name.
The next picture is an actual Buddha. Apparently, this is one of the largest Buddha's in Thailand, for obvious reasons. You can see how big it is because of the people at the bottom of the picture. It is huge and pretty amazing.
The final picture is of some bells that are right outside the temple. People would go by and ring them. I'm assuming its supposed to bring good luck to ring them in order. A lot of the culture over here is based on karma and good luck. They do things because they believe it will bring them good luck. Another example of this is we went to an elephant show after the temple and they had an elephant stand on two different stools and people would walk underneath the elephant because it was supposed to be good luck. Elephants are seen as sacred over here, a sign of the Buddhist religion. To me, this is ironic because the Thai people parade them around the streets of Bangkok like a side show, trying to get foreigners to buy 20Baht bags of food so they can feed the elephant.
A few things about the temple that I noticed while I was there. You could not where shorts, so I had to go in jeans and it was hot. Definately a little uncomfortable for me. As we were leaving, some Thai woman came after us screaming about paying to enter the temple. I believe this is really a load of BS because no one else has to pay to enter the temple, but because we are foreigners, they think they can take our money for being tourists. She was cussing us out as we were getting on the boat.
This is something I have noticed. Many Thai's see a westerner and they think, "They have a lot of money." Which, in comparison to the normal Thai person, we do make a lot more money than them. But they feel that because we are Westerners, they can exploit us for our money and its alright. I guess they justify it by saying that since we are not from their country and we have more money than them, its alright to try and take our money, whereas they would never do something like this to a Thai, because that would garner bad karma. Just something funny that I have noticed.
Aaron
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