Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action

Last week we celebrated the start of Buddhist Lent. For the next 3 months all monks will have to sleep in the temple and in the past they could not leave the temple at all. In town many of the schools participate in parades to the temples to be blessed and taught by the monks. Our students made offerings of food and medicine and brought a huge candle to the temple. The older students at the nearby high school wore traditional Thai dress and sported very festive hair styles. It was pretty cool to watch everything. It’s also been really interesting seeing how this eastern religion permeates life here. When you see the extreme respect that everyone gives to monks and to statues of Buddha, it makes sense that students bow to teachers and that I’m supposed to hold my glass below the glass of someone older than me. The title of this blog is a Buddhist understanding of life and the path to rightness. I included it because I think it’s beautifully simple and that it encompasses my appreciation of Buddhism.

The monks and our students during the Lent celebration

In celebration of Buddhist Lent, we did not have school on Thursday or Friday. We went to Chiang Mai for the holiday. We took a 5 hour bus ride (that costs the equivalent of $10 for first class!!) to the second largest city in Thailand (Chiang Mai). We took the night bus so we arrived around 3:30 am. We called our hotel about 2 weeks before to confirm our reservation and to make sure it was ok that we were arriving so early in the morning. All was set in advance. However, when we arrived the hotel manager informed us that the hotel was full as of the previous night. After a lot of conversation and complete expression of our exasperation she offered us the hotel restaurant for the remainder of the night/morning (until a room became free). Because it was 4 am and we were just coming off a 5 hour bus ride, we were too tired to search for a new hotel, so we reluctantly accepted. We then slept on the booths in the restaurant until about 7 am. It was undoubtedly the worst “night” of “sleep” that I’ve ever had. Around 9 (after we had eaten breakfast in the restaurant we just slept in) she told us there was a non air conditioned room available for us, which we gladly slept in until our rooms were ready at 11. It was a pretty strange experience. Suffice it to say that we won’t be staying there again and we won’t be taking the night bus again. “Mai ben lai” was the theme of the night. Mai ben lai (or mai pen rai, Thais switch L’s and R’s and B’s and P’s all the time) just means don’t stress over it or don’t worry about it. It kinda puts things back into perspective.

How we slept that first night, in our restaurant booths.

Anyway our weekend in Chiang Mai was pretty great. Because it is such a large city (that is still extremely cheap by western standards) it has a great deal of tourism and a lot of western amenities that you can’t find in Nan. To start, in the area where our hotel is, it took us a solid 5 hours to see anyone who was Thai who was not either working or dating a foreigner. We did not have to use Thai at all. We felt like we were forcing some merchants and restaurant owners to talk to us in Thai. It was very strange coming from Nan where most people speak no English. But we were still able to enjoy ourselves. In Chiang Mai there are like 5 Starbucks and a few Burger Kings and a McDonalds. We even saw a Subway and a Haagen Daz. There are a lot of English bookstores so we got to buy some books. There is a huge mall with a movie theater and we got to see the new Batman movie in English (with Thai subtitles)!!!! It was nice to feel a bit western again but the Thai part of Chiang Mai was not lost on us. We visited the Doi Suthep temple which is a large temple on the top of a mountain overlooking the city. It is a beautiful place and the views of the city were really nice. We also took a tour of the national park and we stopped at three amazing waterfalls and visited the highest point in Thailand. We stopped at this research station that had recently been developed to farm flowers and vegetables and research sustainable processes for the area. The whole region used to be filled with opium fields. We visited the king and queen pagodas, two very large temples made on the King and Queen’s 60^th birthdays to…umm…. celebrate them. We also visited the weekend markets where I bought farmer and fisherman’s pants which are these adorable and really comfortable pants that perhaps at one point in time fisherman and farmers wore. We went to a traditional khantoke dinner where we saw several kinds of Thai dance and performances. There was fire dancing and a dance with candles and swords. There was definitely a lot to see and do in Chiang Mai and we most definitely want to go back in the near future.

Me below a Buddha statue at the Doi Suthep temple

The pagoda at the temple. People would walk around this holding candles and praying

The sword dance at the khantoke dinner

The candle dance. It was painful to watch this because you could see the hot wax dripping onto their hands.

I think thing that struck me most about the city were the black people I saw. Because it’s so touristy I saw other black folks from a lot of different parts of the world; Europe, the US, North Africa. But when I say black people I don’t just mean individuals, there was a black presence in Chiang Mai. We walked into one store with woven blankets and wall hangings and were immediately struck by how African the patterns were. I took a few more steps and saw the picture below showing “Women from the African Ark.”

In a fabric store in Chiang Mai

We passed a bar called Rasta-bar in bright red, yellow, and green colors. We saw another restaurant called the Freedom Bar with pictures of Bob Marley on the front and a mural of a guy with an Afro. It was really cool.

At the freedom bar

Bob Marley collage, also at the Freedom bar