Oh My, Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai is the biggest northern city in Thailand with about 174,000 people.  Even though Chiang Mai is a relatively big city, it's a nice place to be and it isn't terribly busy.  Chiang Mai has a nice, relaxed feeling to it compared to Bangkok.

This picture is me at one of Chiang Mai's millions of Buddhist temples.  The temples here are mostly bright, new, and beautiful.  Most of them are plastered with gold and have these lovely dragons flanking the entrance. 

This is a pile of catfish in the little pond at one of the monasteries.  They sell fish food at the monasteries, and you can go into their pond to feed them.  The result is this squirming mess. 

 This is one of the less new temples in Chiang Mai.  This place is called Wat Chedi Luang, and one of the monks who was walking around here told me that it is the biggest stupa in Chiang Mai.  Apparently it used to be overall the tallest building in Chiang Mai a long time ago.

 These are some of the people I met at the guest house I'm staying at.  Of course, every now and then you have to take a break from temple tours to hang out in one of the nice rooftop restaurants.

This is me hanging out with some holy people at the temple.  That's what we do in Thailand.

Guess what - another Buddha!  This one is way different from the ones in Sukothai, though.  He's new and colorful (and absolutely enormous).

This is the inside of one of the temples.  Later this day, we went to another temple that looked similar to this.  I was sitting there talking to an American guy named Will about this and that, and then a monk came in to ask us for help in translating something in English.  We talked for a few hours about all sorts of things, and then he asked us to stay for the chanting that the monks do every evening.  He gave us a sheet of paper with their chants written on it, and he showed us the proper ways to bow during the chanting.  So, we stayed, chanted, and meditated.  It was fabulous.  These chanting sessions are a really great way to clear your mind and energize yourself.

This is part of one of the most famous temples in Chiang Mai.  The temple is called Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, and it's a huge temple on top of the biggest mountain in the area.  I went up here with a nice Danish guy named Hendrik that I met at my guest house.  The next few pictures are all of the same temple.

This is the Chinese Buddha.  There is a lot of him around Chiang Mai's temples.  That's probably because we're so far north and closer to China.

Hendrik and I decided to take a long walk down the road away from the temple, and this is what we found.  It was a really nice Chinese-style thing with a pretty garden, and it was sitting way up the hill with a beautiful view of the valley.  In this picture, you can see that there's also a dog there.  We started following this dog around, and he took us to some pretty nice places.

 This is Ban Doi Pui - a little mist-covered town up on the mountain.  (This is another place that the dog lead us to.)  It was a really little town, and it showed me that Thailand does have nice places where people are actually living their lives - like, not everyone is stuck in the tourism industry.

This is me in a really great garden in Ban Doi Pui.  This garden was amazing.  It was right next to a waterfall, and there were flowers all over the hill next to the waterfall.

This is a fountain at that garden.  I keep seeing this statue everywhere, and I have no idea who she is or what she stands for.  I'm guessing that she's involved in Buddhism somehow?