By Way of Asia

Bangkok, Thailand: Our next stop on the temple circuit was Wat Pho, which houses the famous Reclining Buddha. The Buddha is known for its size - coming in at a whopping 150 feet long and 50 feet high. Now that’s a big Buddha.

Bangkok, Thailand: Our second day in Bangkok happened to be a Saturday, which was very lucky (for Ash at least) because Saturday is the best day for the Chatuchak Weekend Market, one of the largest outdoor markets in the world and the largest in Asia. The market spreads out over more than 35 acres and contains an estimated 5,000 stalls. With that many stalls, you can buy almost anything (and we mean almost anything) - clothes, accessories, food, handicrafts, motorcycle parts, fine art, even baby bunnies and squirrels. A portion of the market is even dedicated to young Thai designers and artists, who decorate their small booths so they look more like miniature trendy boutiques than your typical market stall. Given that there was no way we could cover the entire market in a full day even with our early start, we resigned ourself to throwing aside the map and just wandering through the small alleyways wherever our feet happened to take us until - suffering from total shopping exhaustion - we gave up in the late afternoon. Unfortunately we have no good pictures to share, as we decided that any we took simply did not do justice to the enormity that is Chatuchak. But Ash has plenty of new shoes and dresses as proof.

On Sunday, we took in the sights as tourists should. First was the Grand Palace (which is sort of a confusing name because it houses not only the actual Grand Palace, but lots of other things too).

Chiang Rai, Thailand: When we asked the owner of our guesthouse what we should do in Chiang Rai, she said “see the White Temple, of course.” This struck us as odd, because we hadn’t heard of the White Temple - turns out that’s because it’s brand new.

Brand new isn’t something you think of when you’re thinking of temples in Thailand, but this one is a contemporary work of art that is still under construction by the eccentric Chalermchai Kositpipat. The temple was beautiful, and looked almost like it was covered in snow, but it was also very odd; many of the images were not beautiful and serene, as they are in most Buddhist temples, but scary and horrible, representing the world that must be escaped to achieve Nirvana. Inside the temple there was an unbelievable mural that showed the evils of the world, represented by a giant demon with the Twin Towers in his mouth, Osama Bin Laden in one eye, and George W. Bush in the other. Unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures inside the temple, but check out the shots we got of the outside - beautiful and bizarre.