Please Happy

That’s Burma.

This is probably about as close as I’ll get to it and this is shot with the 200mm. So, I’m still pretty far away. After I shot this, the guards starting yelling. I waved. The monks I was with said they were shouting “NO PHOTO! NO PHOTO!” in Burmese from their porch. Scary.

The fence demarks the border between Thailand and Burma. We were standing in the courtyard of a monastery on the Thai side.

Even monks get bored in class.

He’s a first year, though, in a 43-monk English class at the Buddhist University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. His teacher, the Swedish-American Hanna Klausner, is brilliantly patient. She has each of them ask her a question in English at the beginning of class. They like asking about sports, food and childhood.

Monks in Thailand aren’t in it for life, like the ones in Vietnam. Men are usually required to try out the lifestyle for at least three months, if not a full year. Some try it out only for an event, like a funeral. I’ve seen “monks” smoking, watching boxing matches, texting their friends. Today, I saw one at a coffee shop on a laptop and cell phone simultaneously. I think he was also drinking coffee, which he bought. I walked into a temple once to sit and saw two young monks watching Thai boxing on TV. These were not common activities in Vietnam, where the monks don’t have individual things. They own nothing and have no money. Needless to say, I have been a bit shocked at the electronics, the consumption and just the differences in general.

An ongoing debate in Thailand: Lots of men experiencing a small taste of monastic life, but with a more cavalier approach to the practice or better for there to be fewer monks who are completely devout?

Women say former monks make better husbands.

Either way, it’s a great practice for me in non-attachment. Thich Nhat Hanh recommends that we don’t get attached to any belief or way of life, including Buddhism and his teachings. This is a good reminder for me to be open to anything, including monks with stuff and huge golden statues of Buddha, a man who left a life of gold to be with the people of the world.

I clearly have a lot to learn.

(This photo is taken in front of the mall in Bangkok: Buddhists and Buyers.)

I was lucky enough to spend my final evening in the big city with one of Newsweek’s foreign correspondents – a man who spends two months in Baghdad to every one month in Bangkok and who knows how to show an American girl a good time. This is just a small taste of Thailand’s (other) decorated royalty.

Happy first day toward Winter!

With the summer solstice behind us, we can now start concentrating on the best season of the year again, and all those things last winter that eluded us!

The one on my right makes pancakes – thin crepes and filled with banana and chocolate and coconut if you know to ask for it – for drunk westerners. The other one just hangs out and keeps the pancake man company. They set up in front of the bank of Rambuttri Road, which is just down the block from Bangkok’s Khoa San Road, the famous backpacking district where you can get tshirts, pad thai or a ticket to a ‘ping pong’ show any time of day. The pancake man doesn’t eat his own pancakes. He says it’s not real food. He acts disgusted by his own scrumptious buttery creations.

This photo was taken around 2 a.m. after I saw the drag show. Two dumbasses were fighting in the street, then a group of orange shirted Dutch football fans stumbled by toward an orange Taxi to take a photo. The pancake men pulled me into their shop (two stools and cart) and we ended up hanging out for about an hour.