Friday April 23rd…..Day 10. Part 1
Woke up this morning a little tired, but feeling pretty good. Ran down to the Bus Stop for breakfast, and hit the convenient, but overpriced Internet café across the street from the Dynasty. A short time checking e-mail, and trying in vain to get even remotely caught up on the Club Hombre board activity. Fun, but frustrating activity. I generally log on once or twice a day to see what is happening with my fellow mongers. I have found that when I am traveling, easy access to the internet is generally hard to find, unless one attends an internet café. I guess I will have to increase the frequency of my Internet café trips as I find that I miss a lot while I am gone, and it is often times very hard to get caught up.
Next, I ran over to see Jum for my daily pipe cleaning, and got my card stamped. Only one more and I will get the freebie!
I headed down to the river and went to the Royal Palace and The Temple of the Emerald Buddha”
Here a few picks taken along the way
A typical street side shrine
Even when converted to western script, the names are still a mouthful!
On to the Royal Grounds. The first pics are general pics of the grounds as you first enter. An interesting event here. There are big signs telling everyone which clothes are and are not acceptable on the Wat grounds. No Shorts, short sleeve shirts etc., The interesting point was that sandals are not permitted. They wave you over to the right, to a shed, where you must place a 100 bt deposit for THEIR shoes. You must pay 15 baht to purchase a pair of sock, if you are not wearing any. They then issue you a pair of “shoes”, which ironically turned out to be…..sandals. Further, they were cheap sandals with soft black soles which would have left 5 times the scuffs as my leather Gucci’s. Since you get the deposit back in full, I cannot see a money making angle here, and the rules seemed to selectively enforced, as many Thai’s were wearing sandals. Since everyone is required to remove their shoes when entering the Wat anyway, it just seemed a little stupid. I suppose someone in the government might related to a sock manufacturer, although at 15 bt ($0.45), I doubt there is much profit there……strange.
As you enter the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, there is a sign telling Falong where to go.
General pics of the Grounds.
Continued in part 2.