Wat Wat

9/24/2006

This morning I woke up early to visit Wat Phra That Doi Suthep with Scott and several other group members. A wat is a temple. We had to take a 30 minute songtao (I've been spelling it wrong before this and don't feel like changing it) up a mountain to get there, and I saw some people cycling, walking, and even running up the mountain. I miss exercising a lot, but not enough to do that. The temple was to me just a bunch of buddha statues. Pants were required, so I had to rent some for 10 Baht. There was a monk there who "blessed" us by splashing water on our heads, and he gave us a thread wristband for good luck. I guess once that band falls over we're in trouble. One intersting thing is that monks are not allowed to touch women. I think they have to repent a lot if they do, so it's probably not a good idea for a woman to go up to a monk and touch him as a joke. That would be funny, but probably a bit too cruel.

After getting back to the guesthouse, Richard and I just wandered around the city for a couple hours. After lunch, we had the Chiang Mai Challenge, which was basically a scavenger hunt around town organized by Scott. We had to go all around town using the public transportation in order to do things like going to a wat to find a leaf fallen from a bodhi tree, have a picture taken with a policeman, find out the prices of specific goods at specific restaraunts, and various other things. My group didn't do very well since the other two group members weren't feeling very well. One of our tasks was to buy an interesting item under 50 Baht from the Wororot market, and I chose to get fried bamboo worms (kind of salty, not very good). Other things I could have gotten included fried roaches and grasshoppers. I really wonder if the Thai people enjoy these things.