It’s Sunday, and I’m continuing my spring-green obsession at my favorite place in the world, Wat Pho. The raised, gilded threshold? To keep the slithering spirits out.
Sexy yet comfy wedges: Nurture, baby
Too little
has been said
of the door, its one
face turned to the night’s
downpour and its other
to the shift and glisten of firelight.
The Tao of Bangkok is that Soi Cowboy and centuries-old spirituality coexist in the same gracious/salacious city. In Bangkok, even Ronald McDonald offers a respectful wai — the Thai greeting of placing one’s palms together in a gesture of prayer. And the signage on public transportation reminds us to give it up to the monks among us who renounce all this seductive claptrap I love to yack about. I’m talking to you: Le Big Mac!
Ronald, meet Pedro.
Blouse: BCBG Max Azria
Purse: Ipa-nima (fabulous up-and-coming Vietnamese designer — check her out!)
There are many things I will never understand about Wat Pho, including this sign. Nevertheless, when I spy a shaved-head Israeli in Rayban aviators, I quickly cross to the other side of the spirit threshold. Whether it’s marketing collateral or Iranian bomb collateral, I get my full threat at work.
Wat Pho, Bangkok’s oldest and largest temple, is a Thai wunderkammer – a cabinet of curios filled with medical and religious marvels, as well as a curious collection of 19th-century Chinese statuary and scrappy, somnolent temple cats.
How Gollum got here is anybody’s guess. Since we were well into the 20th c. before he sprung from Tolkien’s brow, this statue goes to show that past, present, and future exist simultaneously — that we experience their separation is only an illusion, Einstein wrote, although a convincing one.
Necklace: Lapis and gold. A gift from my father to my mother. I still have the receipt: January 16th, 1989; Uthai’s Gems off Ploenchit Road
Green-and-white onsie: Ett Twa for Anthropologie
Terra cotta cotton cardigan: J.Crew
Leather bag: Dooney & Burke
Foo dog in need of red-eye reduction: Wat Pho
In Southeast Asia they don’t give a toss about ‘what’s your sign?’ What matters is the day of the week you were born. The teal green oxen symbolize Thursday. I may be Tuesday’s blogger, but I am Thursday’s child.
Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.
Definitely a Sunday’s child — both of them!
It’s peaceful on the other side, and there’s a lot of green, including Pedro’s jade and gold ring (my mother bought this ring in Bangkok in the 1970s), and the mirrored base of one of Wat Pho’s myriad sitting Buddhas.
Gold-leafed jingle-jangle earrings: morning street stall near Lumphini MRT, exit 1. Cost: 20 baht (less than $1).
For me, an afternoon at Wat Pho always ends with watching the sunset off Tha Thien pier. Waiting on the express boat. Sipping on coconut juice and soda water.
The planking craze has hit the Chao Phraya.
For doors
are both frame and monument
to our spent time,
and too little
has been said
or our coming through and leaving by them.
—Charles Tomlinson
Photos by Vanessa Boots
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