Dear Friends and Family,

Yesterday my nose shrank a full quarter of an inch – as I faithfully kept it to the grindstone. I spent the majority of the day at one of the larger café tables, my rear attached to the hard wood chair, surrounded by notes and reference books, working on the written assignment – which I pretty much finished. Yesterday evening, I drafted 3 lesson plans for next week – this is first step in actual planning (which can take me forever); however, with such admirable work out of the way, I felt well able to slip from student to tourist today. And today was… memorable.

Rather exhausted of the frenetic busyness and business of Bangkok, my friend and I had resolved no more shopping and that it was past time for us to visit the Wats alongside the river. So, after a hearty “western” breakfast of eggs, bacon and coffee (where was the fruit?), my friend and I set out for the Skytrain and to familiar ground: the stop where I had first visited a Wat and where I found “my ruin.” We got off, headed to the river, learned about the “Tourist” river boat (100 B – for the entire day + map + 1 water), and while waiting for the boat, we visited the well-marked toilet. This particular visit was a squatting exercise for my friend and a commercial exercise for me as the bathroom was (comparatively) nicely decorated in silk flowers with little luxuries such as soap and towels (well, dirty ones) at the sink – yet per the usual, there was no tp in the stalls. Not so coincidentally, there was a lady comfortably seated outside the restroom in a padded chair with a table who apparently makes her living by selling tp to poor souls such as ourselves – so I bought a double helping of tp. Weeks into living in Bangkok and it is still hard to remember to bring your tp with you. Anyway, necessities through, we then briefly visited my first Wat and returned to the river in order to board our 9:30 boat.

I’ve previously described the Chao Phraya river as a wide, muddy brown expanse, with a noticeably strong current and populated with rusty commuter ferries. This description continues to be accurate except that climbing aboard the sensible Chao Phraya Tourist boat makes one realize that we aren’t dealing with just a strong current here: this river is strong and it has waves to prove it. Stepping on and standing in the no frills boat was not easy. Then the boat gunned its serious engines and started up river past the famous Oriental Hotel, past a hotel that strongly resembles my ruin (ok, now I’m even more curious), past deteriorating residences clapped in rusting sides but ever-decorated in plants, past men standing in doorways, past Thai Naval headquarters but stopping now and then to let people off at various stops. At one stop, I was rather horrified to watch another ferry belch a large cloud of black smoke and spill an even larger amount of black-oil infused ballast into the water. Happily, this is a working river with a wide variety of buildings and residences on it – sadly, this is not a river to go swimming or eat fish from.

We knew that we were getting close to our stop when the solemn spires of Wat Arun appeared in the distance. At this point, it might help you to know that the definition of a “wat,” curtsey of The Lonely Planet City Guide to Bangkok by Joe Cummings & China Williams, a wat “is a temple monastery.” And from a distance, Wat Arun appears to be a flat color and could be judged uninteresting if excluding its shapely spires. Known as the Temple of the Dawn, this Wat is very famous and pictures of it were some of the first pics that I found when researching Bangkok. Actually, I wasn’t fascinated then and as we approached, I wasn’t really that much more interested. Luckily, I’m always willing to admit when I am wrong and I was so very wrong about Wat Arun. It is amazing. Upon disembarking from the tourist ferry on the wrong side of the river, we quickly paid 3B to board a smaller ferry to take us to the other side of the river. We disembarked and were immediately amused by the wooden cut-outs of Thai dancers (available for bad tourist photos – and scam of 40 B) and immediately impressed by the huge Thai Warriors covered in ceramic tiles guarding a temple entrance. We walked past a row of merchants hocking Buddha amulets encased in plastic and while my friend investigated and found the amulets expensive, I stepped to one side to watch a monk bless a group of women. The monk, wrapped in saffron robes, was seated cross-legged on a slight platform right next to the merchants… with a wooden box to his side and a worn rug square in front of him. Four women took off their shoes, knelt down in front of him (feet pointed away dutifully), heads bowed, palms flat against each other in a respectful “wai” while the monk muttered something and shook sprays of water all over them using a bamboo swatch. My friend and me became a bit wistful that we couldn’t be blessed but we were soon distracted by a tree filled with bananas silhouetted against an amazingly multi-colored roof and beautifully fragrant flowers (as I was informed). We then walked into a courtyard with a small, tremendously ornate temple in the center but surrounded by colonnaded buildings that housed rows of golden Buddhas. The Buddhas were seated slightly above eye level, sheltered by a gorgeous red and gold painted ceiling and held away from nasty waters by tiles that appeared to carved memorial tiles for individuals. I felt rude counting the Buddhas – but I suspect that there were 109 – a sacred number in Buddhism. After we marveled and ran down our store of “wow”s and “oh, look”s… plus enjoyed a discreet chuckle about the monk that we discovered surfing the web on a full-sized computer with a flat screen monitor (he appeared to be looking a scenic landscapes – our amusement would’ve been complete if he had been looking at something naughtier), we picked our way through pathways to impressive part of the Wat.

Paraphrasing from Lonely Planet, “Wat Arun is a missile-shaped temple that was named after the Indian God of the Dawn, Aruna. It was at this spot where an important King stumped upon a small shrine used by the local people and interpreted the discovery as an auspicious sign for building a new Thai capital after their old one was badly sacked by the Burmese. The 82 meter prang (the missile part) was constructed during the first half of the 19th century – its brick core has a plaster covering embedded with a mosaic of broken, multihued Chinese porcelain, a common temple ornamentation from when Chinese ships called at Bangkok and used tones of old porcelain as ballast.” And the mosaic work is beyond amazing – the arrangement of plates, cups, bowls, shells, colored glass and so much more into detailed temple ornamentation is incredible. Beautiful. For me, it defies both photographing and description. Really, I do insist, if in Bangkok, you must visit Wat Arun.

Ok, I’m going to end this here – more to follow.

Much Love, Laura