We’ve just returned from a long trip to Cambodia and Thailand. It was fast-paced, interesting experience.
Here are the top 5 reasons that I’m happy to be back:
- It’s no longer necessary to convert from baht to dollars in my head (divide by 3, then by 10, then add a little back). And the bills and coins are familiar and easily recognizable.
- I can read the signs here.
- I am so over those clothes I was able to pack in my carry-on luggage.
- I can brush my teeth with water straight from the tap!
and last, but not least, - No leeches here in Montana!
My next few posts will be about our trip, but not to worry: I’ll be posting about lettering I saw there as well as the sights. In some ways, not being able to read the language made it even more interesting to look at the letter forms there. I asked about the different styles of lettering, but I wasn’t able to get a definitive answer about what I was seeing. So I’ll be posting my own speculations with photos of the lettering styles.
When we left Bangkok at 6 am on Tuesday, it was 90°F and about 100% humidity. When we arrived in Bozeman at 1 pm, it was 0°F. What a difference 10 time zones and 32 degrees of latitude makes!
We arrived only a month and a day after their beloved king had died. At the royal palace, long lines of mourners waited to pay their respects to the king. Toward the end of our visit, firecrackers reminded us that the crown prince had become the new king that afternoon.
We spent the first night and day in Bangkok, staying at Ariyosam Villa, an oasis of a hotel in the center of Bangkok. Breakfast was served on the patio by the pools, and it was both beautiful and delicious. Passionfruit (top left), pineapple, and papaya to start. All of the fruit — we could eat anything without the skin — was delicious.
We began a full-day tour of Bangkok at Wat Pho, a huge temple complex in the middle of Bangkok, next to the palace. Shown at right is the entrance to the main building.
The architecture of both Wat Pho and the Royal Palace was interesting and unfamiliar to me. Everything was embellished and gilded, and the grounds contain monks’ living quarters as well as a number of chedis, or stupas — Buddhist shrines.
We got Thai massages at the Wat Pho Thai Traditional Medical and Massage School, right on the grounds of the complext. That 30-minute massage was the best massage I got the entire trip. Heavenly! The 18th-century inscriptions on the walls nearby were commissioned by King Rama III to preserve and make public both religious and secular knowledge. The 1,431 stone inscriptions were named a UNESCO Memory of the World site in 2011.
These statues were a surprise. I was told that they were Chinese statues, and other pairs did look Chinese. Later, I read that they were included as ballast on the Chinese ships. But these evidently captured what Europeans looked like to the Chinese. They look to me like they belong at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
We finished up the day with a canal trip on a longtail boat. The canals were quite crowded (as was all of Bangkok — over 6 million people!).
As we waited for the drawbridge, I snapped this photo of our boat’s name, ting to imagine which elements were essential to the letters and which were styling. I think of this style as “blackletter” Thai.