Trains & Monks
We boarded the train first thing this morning sitting in third class. The start of the journey was pretty none descript but then the gentleman opposite tried to talk to us. Now he didn't know English and I don't know Thai, this as you could imagine made for a very interesting 1 1/2hr train journey. He was reading some book in Thai which from what I could gather was about boxing, we managed to say each others name and work out where one another was heading, I also worked out that he had two children and his wife was very fat! I then got my little phrase book out, well what a party we had from then on, we were like old friends with him teaching us how to say all the words in the book (if you miss pronounce some words you could be wishing them bad luck instead of saying something is beautiful!!!) and us trying to put it into sentences that went something like 'that's nice, how much ..... That's expensive' if you could class this as a sentence. I think they just love the fact that you are trying to speak Thai even though it's pronounced all wrong. We also worked out that it's a bit like French in the sense that they have male and female words.
It was great speaking to this bloke (who was also called Chai) but he thought that after my few words in Thai I could speak Thai fluently and started speaking to me as if I new everything he was saying, I quickly learnt that if I just repeated the last word he said and nodded in an understanding way and say yes he would laugh and continue again about something else, well he was having fun so who was I to stop him. Sadly we had to depart from the train. I must admit I did enjoy talking to him but I'm glad it was the short train journey and not the 12hr one we are on tonight. Ayutthaya Now this place used to be the capital until they moved it to Bangkok and has some amazing ruins that we wanted to see.
As we started walking around the first ruin, three Monks were walking towards us. Now I wanted to take a sly picture of them, as they got closer they said hello and asked us where we were from. The strangest thing then happened; they wanted to take a picture of us! Now this took me a back as it had never dawned on us that we would be interesting to other people anyway snaps from both sides and a short talk we parted company. As we walked round the other side we bumped into them again, got chatting and decided that we should all walk together, so here we were walking down the streets chatting with monks much to the admiration of all the other tourists walking along, you could see them thinking 'where do you get the monk guides from, we want one'. We quizzed them about their religion and they quizzed us about ours (didn't have the heart to tell them we don't go to church) and we learnt a few things, like did you know they can't eat after midday and they can talk to women just not touch them (our guide book led us to believe that they couldn't talk to women). At the end of the walk we parted company but not before exchanging e-mail addresses, monks with e-mail and camera phones amazing. They also wanted to take us to their university but we unfortunately didn't have time, but who knows when we return to Bangkok we might go then!
I forgot to talk about the ruins, oh well you can look at the pictures instead. What will happen tomorrow??? I can't wait to find out. More thumbnails ...
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Ayutthaya Hotels
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