Monk Smiles

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Monks, Photography

Kidding. This is just the latest edition to my Monk Shot! category of posts, but since I’ve done both cute kitten and cute puppy posts this week already I’d thought I’d continue with my new Mr. Rogers persona. While any monk is a good monk to photograph in my book, I’m often drawn more to baby monks and ancient ones. But I don’t know if the baby monks should really be considered monks. First because they are not, they are novices. And second because their saffron robs are more the SE Asian version of the uniform worn at parochial schools in the States. Though I don’t believe the SE Asian version is responsible for quite as many sexual fantasies; I doubt if being a novice monk is as rife with the danger for abuse as is being an altar boy.

I took these photos in Luang Prabang, a town overflowing with baby monks. Most are students at any one of the hundreds of local wats. And most seem to spend as much time gathered with friends doing what kids do the world over as they do practicing to be little Buddhas. Even in uniform, they still manage to show their own unique personalty – whaddya want to bet that kid with the jazzy yellow hat is the cool one in his class?

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Bonus Shot: Wat Panping

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Chiang Mai, Photography, Wats

Small, but colorful, Wat Panping doesn’t get lots of press but is worth a visit when in Chiang Mai.

Wat Panping in Chiang Mai is certainly not the smallest Thai temple that I’ve featured in a post. Nor is it the smallest wat I’ve visited, some others make a corner 7/11 look spacious in comparison. So it should merit being featured here in a full post; other temples not much larger in size have been, and have been worthy of a Bonus Shot post too. So it’s not a size queen’s disappointment in stature that earns the temple nothing more than a Bonus Shot post. It’s that there is so little information about the wat available. Which is surprising because it is one of the few wats that has installed a nice – appropriately-sized – plaque that explains the wat’s history as well as its architectural highlights and why they are deemed to be of interest. And then small that it may be, it was partially destroyed by a big fire a few years ago which made big news – so you’d think there would be greater interest in this cool little mini-wonderland of Thai temples. At least enough to flesh out a full article on the place. But there’s not.

Maybe it’s that Wat Panping sits directly across the street from Wat U-Mong (not the forest one), a much larger and more popular temple among the touri crowd; if you’re hitting numerous wats in Chiang Mai it’s easy for one to blur into another. I thought it might be that since Wat Panping is how it’s identified on the sign out front, but Wat Baan Ping is the name used on its explanatory plaque, that might cause some confusion and may be responsible for the dearth of information available on the ‘net. But that’s pretty standard practice for Thai temples. Some have close to a dozen alternate spellings of their name. Maybe it’s just one of those little jewels people want to keep to themselves; the temple’s visuals – a large gleaming golden chedi out front and several diminutive but vividly colored buildings leading inward – are enough to attract visitors so I have to assume a lot of folk have stopped by the wat. It’s just that few feel the need to write about it.

Dating back to the beginning of the Lanna period, remnants of the 535-year-old wat’s original chedi can be seen in the garden at the rear of the complex, a fact conveniently left off the temple’s explanatory plaque that instead points out in great detail the wat’s architectural highlights such as the two tangled Naga depicted on the door lintel of main wiharn, a not often seen deva arch at the right hand side of the wiharn’s stairs, and the 20 Chinese bricks salvaged from the original temple and used in constructing the new one in 1932. No mention is made of the 2003 electrical fire that destroyed 70% of the wiharn either. Google and Wat Panping seem to be in a competition to se which can provide the least amount of information about the temple. But maybe that’s a good thing. Discovering a cool little wat on your own is one of the treasures of visiting Chiang Mai. And despite knowing little about the temple and its history, it is its look and ambiance that really is the draw here anyway. So a short, photographic Bonus Post might just be the most appropriate way to feature Wat Panping on this blog after all.

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Bangkok, Markets & Shopping, Photography

At least those are colors found in nature.

I’m not a big fan of bottled water, generally preferring to quench my thirst with something that has a taste. And if your bottle of water does, that’s not a good thing. While I get the importance of hydrating, walking around a urban setting carrying a bottle of water with you like you are on safari or trekking through the desert seems just a bit affected to me. It’s not like we didn’t have water or bottles before the two began being marketed together. But how often did you see someone toting water with them everywhere they went thirty years ago?

Thanks to the heat, humidity, and the need to wash the city’s taste out of my mouth occasionally, when I’m spending the day out and about in Bangkok I do tend to carry a bottle of ice tea with me. I’m not sure why. But every morning my first stop is the closest 7/11 to buy a bottle. I never drink the stuff at home. But can easily go through several bottles a day in Thailand. Maybe it’s just my iconoclastic answer to all the touri carrying bottles of water with them. It’s not like there isn’t a place selling liquid refreshment on every corner of the city.

Juice stands are almost as ubiquitous in Bangkok as are 7/11s. Just a lot more colorful. They always catch my eye, even when in passing. Trying to figure out what juice each color represents is a mild form of entertainment. I doubt if my guesses have ever been 100% accurate, ‘cuz those that bother to label their tanks of juices always seem to use some strange names. I’m not sure what a logan is. I am sure that my first thought on seeing a chrysanthemum is not how good its juice would taste.

On my first visit to Bangkok – far too many years ago – it wasn’t until we hit the Weekend Market that I felt the need for something to replenish my body’s fluids. Chatuchak is one of the few places in the world where carrying around a bottle of water makes sense. (Though even at that market there is a vendor selling ice cold bottles at every corner.) Thinking a nice cold Coke would hit the spot, I experienced my first (and last) ambient temperature coke in a plastic bag. It is not exactly a refreshing drink when the temperature is around 100 degrees and the crowds are packed around you like a scrum waiting for the gates of Hell to open. For all the advertising Coke does, you never see them use the coke-in-a-bag motif. No matter how popular that treat is in SE Asia.

With the bright, vivid, exotic colors and myriad flavors available, juice stands would be and should be a bigger draw to me, beyond as a photographic subject. I know back home purple liquid is grape, even if its taste has nothing to do with what grapes taste like, so it’d be interesting to try purple in Bangkok to see what flavor the Thais associate with that color. But I am already familiar with what they believe orange juice is supposed to taste like from being served a glass at almost every free hotel breakfast I’ve ever had in the country. It’s closer to the taste of oranges than the color orange is back home, but orange juice in Thailand is more about sugar than it is about citrus. That’s not the kind of surprise you need first thing in the morning. And what kind of surprise is waiting for me if I decided to see what red tastes like at a juice stand is probably not something I really need to experience either.

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Bonus Shot: Red. Again.

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Photography

Yeah, I don’t do it often. But occasionally instead of stopping and smelling the roses, I sstop and nap a shot of a flower. Coming from a horticultural background, you’d think I’d photograph flowers and plants more often. Or that it’d bug me to have not bothered to identify what this one is. But then this shot is from a trip to Bangkok when my theme for taking pictures was ‘red’. So it wasn’t the flower, but the color that caught my eye.

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Tags

Chiang Mai, Photography, Wats

When you visit Chiang Rai’s famous white temple, Wat Rong Khun, you don’t expect to see the typical naga guarding the temple’s stairways. And architect/artist Chalermchai Kositpipat doesn’t disappoint. Elsewhere you know it’ll be naga, even when it is really markara or mom instead. That’s cool. I think I’ve got them down now. At least 90% of the time. Except for at Wat Lok Molee in Chiang Mai.

Out front of the wiharn there are naga. And a pair of mom show up at a smaller building off to the side of the compound. But out back of the wiharn they’ve gone with a motif I’ve yet to see in use at any other temple. A pair of snail shells, possibly stylized nautilus shells, flank the stairs there. There’s a smaller set hidden at a unused set of stairs on the building’s side too. That theme may or may not have a meaning. But rather than hunt it down I’m just gonna go with that the wat decided to screw with touri who thought they were now experts on the mythical creatures employed at Buddhist temples to decorate staircases.

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Bonus Shot: Wet Blessings

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Cambodia, Photography

The nice thing about digital cameras is there is no longer a need to conserve film, so you can shoot off dozens of shots of one scene. The downside is you may end up with several perfect photos. This shot is from one of my visits to Angkor Thom, just outside of Siem Reap in Cambodia. I posted a similar one in my article about that trip, but with Songkran as an excuse I’m getting to post another now. I took this photo at the beginning of the year and assume the basic idea of the bowl of water being dumped on this guy’s head served the same purpose as it does during Songkran. Even if it was more similar to one of the major water fights than the traditional sprinkling of water over an elder’s head. One of the reasons I managed to take so many shots was that the monk kept dumping bowlful after bowlful, totally drenching this man. He must have had lots of bad luck needing to be washed away.

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Monk Shot! #59

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Monks, Photography

Another Monk Shot! thanks to Wen, typical of those you easily run across when using the express boats in Bangkok. You don’t see novice monks out on their own much, they usually travel in pairs. Maybe it is the monotony of a regular commute, but they seldom exhibit the typical chatty behavior of teenage friends, opting for the serene thousand yard stare instead. Not that I’m complaining. That’s what makes shots like this work.

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Bonus Shot: And We Cooked The Bunny Too

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Bangkok, Photography

Easter is not one of the western holidays celebrated in Thailand much. Songkran is just a few weeks away, so some odd holiday that has to do with bunnies and hiding eggs just doesn’t make a blip on the locals’ radar. It’s not like it is much of a gift getting holiday anyway. But I will have to mention it to Noom sometime, just to watch his face as he works through our tradition of coloring eggs, that’s business as usual in Thailand. I expect unsuspecting first time visitors this week assumed it was about Easter when spotting a bowl of multi-hued eggs at the local street market, but I doubt they ever spotted any Peeps. They’d melt in Bangkok’s heat and humidity. Which, come to think about it, might not be that bad of a thing.

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Bonus Shot: Cambodian Shutters

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Cambodia, Photography

Shutters on windows and doors are important in Cambodian architecture. Clean buildings, not so much. The monsoon waters of the rainy season coupled with year round high humidity encourage lush growth in local vegetation, even when it is the lesser flora growing on buildings and walls. I suspect some of that coloring is thanks to the exhaust from cars and trucks too. The heat of the tropical sun does it share of damage too, so buildings painted in vivid colors soon fade to grungy pastels. I don’t know if the wood shutters over doors and windows get an extra coat of paint sooner than the rest of the building, but they often are the only bright splash of color left once the elements have had their way.

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Ubiquitous Plastic Stool Shot! #31

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Photography

This is my favorite Ubiquitous Plastic Stool Shot! that Wen sent in from his visit to Vietnam. The Ubiquitous Plastic Stool in the photo qualifies it as an Ubiquitous Plastic Stool Shot! but its appeal is that it is so evocative of the country’s sidewalk culture. And I love the lighting. It almost looks like a painting. At first, I thought it a shame that motorcycle tire photo-bombed the picture, but then if you are summing up Vietnam’s street scene in a photograph, it almost has to have a motorcycle in it now doesn’t it?

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