bangkok!

sawasdee-ka!

arrived in bangkok the day before yesterday, after my last night of partying in HK, which i spent at a small hidden bar called pruple six, talking and drinking with friends.

stella and i are staying at a guesthouse called "sawasdee house" on a street behind the monasery next to kao san road. it's well-decorated, full of chill young travelers, surprisingly clean, and our room has a balcony looking out onto the street.

it has been drizzling lightly for a good amount of the time we have been here, which is a good thing because it's less hot.

yesterday was our first full day, and we started it by eating breakfast at a small roadside stand. then, we headed to chakuchat, or something like that--the weekend market. it was the mother of all swap meets, so big we got lost numerous times, and impossible to exit from without buying a few (incredibly cheap!) items of clothing.

today, we went to the royal palace, and two temples, one housing the seated buddha and another called the temple of the dawn.

sitting inside the temple in the royal palace, gazing at the jade buddha, i felt a very different energy than when i felt at the various magnificent christian cathedrals of europe. today i felt a heat rising from inside me and radiating out to my fingers. in both christian and other churches, i always feel--how can i describe it--a pressure, like a pressing down, on my soul. and i am always overcome with awe. these are the houses that love built. whatever tyrannical and misguided methods led to the completion of these buildings, they are filled today with peaceful monks and priests, and visited by pilgrims who stand humbled before the reflection of the divine in what human hands have built.

the story of the jade buddha moved me. nobody knows who carved this huge 66-inch buddha from a single piece of jade. it was found in the 1400's when an abbott that had rescued a cement buddha from the ruins of a temple in chang mai noticed that some of the plaster had chipped off the nose, revealing a luminous green stone underneath. the priceless jade buddha had been disguised under a layer of cement. made me think inarticulable thoughts about the metaphorical diamond-in-the-rough that exists in all of us.

many of the temples around bangkok are covered with breathtaking mosaics made from the discarded remnants of chinese porcelainware. how poetic that one can literally build a temple out of broken teacups. it reminds me of stephen hawking's arrow of time, where he ponders at why we can remember the past but not the future, why teacups that have broken on the floor do not pick themselves up and become whole again. hawking's answer to this quandary came in the form of increasing entropy in the universe. but today i thought: some have taken broken teacups and made them, not just whole, but transcendent.

tomorrow at seven in the morning i head out on a 12-hour bus ride to angkor wat. i have been dreaming of this day for years, and i can't wait!