Monks in the toy stores.  Monks in tuk tuks smoking cigarettes.  Monks at the counter in Starbucks (the best photo I missed of the trip).  Monks on cellphones.  There are monks everywhere, doing everything.  It was so strange at first, but eventually we got used to it.

This novice glued to his cellphone cracked me up.  When he looked up and caught me staring at him, he gave me that universal teenager face I know so well.

I went to a “Monk Chat” in Chiang Mai, an open forum at a monastery during which monks are available for conversation. Tourists ask questions, and they practice their English.  I sat with a few monks in their early 20s, all practicing as monks on a temporary basis in order to get an education–they all planned to leave the monastery once they graduated.  I got into quite a debate with one when he told me that he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to get married because women were so much weaker than men and he didn’t really want to take care of a wife.  I guess it’s a lack of context and maybe undeveloped social experience that would contribute to his feelings about marriage, but it was interesting that he was so confident in his opinion that he didn’t think twice about sharing these thoughts with me!

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Our first tuk tuk ride in Bangkok

We LOVED tuk tuks!!  On our first ride in Bangkok we were sure we would die, but we soon became addicted to the thrill of speeding through Bangkok traffic, careening around corners, the tropical city air whipping our hair around…..  In the smaller cities they we were not nearly as scary, and a wonderful way to get around.

Nong Khai style tuk tuk

On an outing with Openmind friends

We discovered in Chiang Mai that tuk tuks were the only form of transportation that didn’t make Jackson carsick, so Korn, who worked at our guesthouse, rented a tuk tuk for a day to take us to craft villages outside of the city.  (The “craft villages” turned out to be tourist shops, but we had a nice day anyway, and got to see the outskirts of the city.)

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Baan Baat is what is left of a village in Bangkok that handcrafted monks’ bowls.  The city swallowed it up, and monks start buying the cheaper, mass produced bowls, so all that is left is 5 families, still making the bowls the traditional way. Their biggest customers now?  Tourists.  (Although we were the only visitors there, and it took 5 hotel staff and 2 taxi drivers who had never heard of it to figure out where it was and how to get there.)

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