ayutthaya

Kenneth and I went to Ayutthaya, the previous capital of Thailand, for a day while in Bangkok. It is a 40 baht (1 US dollar) for the hour ride on the train, but sometimes you have to stand.

The moat is still protecting the city, so to get to the old city and all the temples (wats) you can either walk the length of a block and go over the bridge, or you can pay 2 baht and take a ferry. We took the ferry, because it was more fun. Marginally more fun. Well, no, more fun. It was stinky because of the loud lawnmower type motor on the boat, and it was a really short ride, but I guess it beat walking. And hell, it is always fun to be in a boat. Maybe. Actually, no. Never mind. Anyway, we took the boat.

There was a typical Thai market there, with stinky things being cooked and vegetables and meat for sale, and cheap clothing, piles of pig skin, some pig's heads, lots of trinkets, cell phone holders and lottery tickets. (The pigs heads were a little creepy. It wasn't just that they were pig's heads hanging out in piles on tables, it was that their eyes and mothes were sewn up in such a way that they looked pleased to be there.)

After wandering the market, we went looking for the cultural museum. The museum was nice, and it was small, and it had enough English in it to give us a vague idea of what Ayutthaya used to be. (The capital, and a huge trading port, being at the intersection of a few rivers.)

In addition to the historical info, the museum also had tons of schoolkids. There would be one waves of, say, green shirts running around at about waist height, writing down answers to the questions their teachers had given them, then half an hour later there would be a wave of yellow shirts running around like locusts writing down answers to the questions their teachers had given them. I think the museum is a big spot for the schools to visit.

Next we hit the wats. There are a whole lot of old temples in Ayutthaya. They are just scattered around everywhere. As we walked to the museum we ran into two or three, without even trying to find any. They are all centuries old, but no one cares. There are so many that the town just can't preserve them all. There was some guy washing his car and smoking on the grounds of one of them. I think he was living in the trailer parked next to the ancient ruins of the wat. There is just so much of that stuff around there that the unimportant wats are just crumbling, because there are so many more significant temples around.

The other day Kenneth saw some guy pulling brinks out of the city wall of the town we were in. He need to build a fire (on a median) and wanted some bricks to put around it, so he just started tearing apart the wall that is as old as the city. Hundreds of years old. Cultural heritage. Nope, need to make a fire.

And so, in Ayutthaya, there were a lot of wats to see. Some really big ones. Also lots of chedis (or stupas): these big monument things that may contain relics or ashes. We walked all around and it was ridiculously hot and further than we expected. We saw the various groups of kids from the museum going from wat to wat in big cushy tour buses. Not idiots, those kids.

And of course there was a 20 meter high Buddha to see. There is always a huge golden Buddha lurking in these cities. You really have to watch out.

I think I know what the smell is that I don't like, which seems to permeate Thailand. I figured it out this morning. It is sewer mixed with fish sauce.