Wat a Day – Chiang Mai, Thailand

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Chiang Mai has more than three hundred temples. That means if you want to see them all, and you’re on a standard thirty day tourist visa, you would have to go to ten temples a day, every day. I wonder if anyone has ever done that. You would have to be a really big fan of pointy buildings.

I have no interest in visiting all of Chiang Mai’s temples, but I thought I would check out a couple of the more famous ones today.
I visited Wat Phra Singh, and Wat Chedi Luang. Wat is the Thai word for temple. The original Wat Chedi Luang was built six centuries ago, so it looks a bit battered and falling down. It has big elephants on it. It’s like a giant birthday cake after the kids grabbed fistfuls of it.

It’s always a bit weird going to temples as an atheist. On the one hand, I can really appreciate and enjoy the beauty of the structures and art, but on the other hand I can’t help feeling a bit perplexed by the whole thing.
You don’t need to be a believer to see the economic blessings that temple tourism brings to the local economy, though.

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Wat Phra Singh is much more modern. Lots of concrete and fake gold.
When I visited Wat Chaiwattanarm in Ayuthaya, I learned that the reason Thai temples are painted now, instead of gold plated, is that hordes of Burmese raiders came over in the eighteenth century and stole all the Thai gold. The Thai monks learned their lesson; don’t keep your gold in plain sight where the tourists can just pinch it.
They’re not taking any chances though. If you start trying to peel off the gold bits, or stick a statue down your shorts, the monks will get the whole thing on video.

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My hostel is in the north-east corner of the old city.
I really love my neighbourhood in Chiang Mai.
When I was having dinner with my hostel-mate, Igor, last night, he observed that the area our hostel is in is like a little hippy-village.

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There is a great school down the road.

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The traffic is chilled out.

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There’s lots of places to eat good and cheap, all hours of the night and day. Sometimes I have breakfast at 1 pm and dinner at 2 am.

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There’s so much amazing street art everywhere around the old city. Thai graff has it’s own playful, ironic style. And the local authorities seem to be really cool about it, which is nice.
I think it’s a lot more fun looking at street art, than temples, in Chiang Mai.
It’s hard for Burmese hordes to steal graffiti too, so that’s an up-side.

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>> Check out some more photos from my travels in Thailand.
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