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This Saturday we had an outing to a series of ruins at Ayutthaya which was the old capital of Thailand around 1350. There are a lot of temples and shrines out this way today and it's not too far from Bangkok to go see it in a day. More on the history of Ayutthaya.
This particular trip was planned by ThaiREU students and not by the grad students. It went very well and we were able to keep on schedule and get back at a reasonable time.
You can find a lot of Buddha statues in this area:
There's also a lot of monks at all these sites. At one place they took pictures with some of the REU students. A group of Thai students stopped to take pictures with all of us hanging out at the ruins.
In some areas of Ayutthaya, raiders from long ago cut off the heads of some of these statues. Later in the day we found one place which had rows of these statues all along the main wall. They were missing heads and limbs or were even completely cut in half.
People who go to these sites will often leave little statues which have also had their heads broken off. There area also a lot of warning signs that tell people to not climb on the statues.
Some of these places were hit or miss as far as being interesting. The last stop of the day was probably the best. We got to climb this giant set of stairs up to a very narrow and high up landing within one of the stone ruins. Just inside the entryway were tons of bats up above.
It's neat to see how long these places have lasted. It was a very good day for sight-seeing and the next day it ended up raining a lot. As the sun started to go down the last place we visited looked pretty cool:
Along the way, I bought two coconut drinks which were all good. I bought a couple snack food items but they weren't really that tasty to me. The markets that develop around these religious sites are pretty diverse. You'll see all sorts of cool stuff and there's tons of food. However some of the food is only suited to people with particular tastes.
Outside one of the temple places I bought a pretty sweet sword. It was half the price of the ones at Chatuchak and has pretty solid construction. It can just barely fit in my luggage. The table I bought it at also had a wide assortment of really sharp things. I've always wanted to get a sword so I bought it and it was pretty cheap.
So that was pretty much Saturday's trip. The pics are publicly up on Facebook here (part 1) and here (part 2). At one place, there were tons of bells outside the temple (which had a huge golden Buddha) and I was able to get some video of them ringing:
On Sunday we woke up early to go the Bai Pai Thai Cooking School in order to learn how to prepare several dishes. This was a lot of fun and we got to make things like pad thai, soup, and everything for a full course dinner. The instructors were very interesting and they had their presentation down.
The lessons alternated between watching the instructors prepare the dish first, getting to sample it, and then making it for ourselves. Overall, we were able to make everything edible. While still in Thailand we could certainly make these dishes again but in the US it might be rather difficult to find all the right ingredients. There is usually a more common substitute, however. Aside from making pad thai, the fish cakes were my favorite. The lessons were 1800 baht, but the ThaiREU program is going to refund us.
Pad Thai I made:
Pad thai is simple to make but it has a lot of ingredients and throwing them all together in the right order and at the right time can be a bit overwhelming.
All in all, this weekend was pretty sweet. Next weekend is a graduate student planned trip on the river. We'll be sleeping on rafts I hear.
Picture of our motley crew:
View from climbing to the top of one of the ruins (click to enhance):
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