two steps behind

C’mon, I’m serious! These are flying foxes.

A one day family trip (about 120 of us!) last week was truly exhausting from simply eating, taking nasp on the bus and taking photos from time to time. For this trip, we went to Chaochoengsao, a city about an hours drive east of Bangkok.

We went to so many places in the city that by the end of the day I thought it was a 5 day trip! As for today’s post, one of the most interesting places that our family visit is at the Temple, Wat Pho because it is where theses flying foxes have resided for years.

I vaguely remember some of this information provided by our tour guide.

Full grown flying foxes can weight up to 800 grams and will fly for miles to find food, particularly fruit.  The legend goes that these flying foxes are really intelligent and sensitive (or so they say that these flying foxes can understand human language) as there was one time that the temple were trying to hold a 9 days festival. The villager kept saying that who would come to this temple with all these flying foxes since their smell is unbearable! For some unexplainable reason, these flying foxes flew away a day before the festival began, allowing the temple to clean up the place and returned to the temple a day after the festival ended. Not one of them was present during the festival time.

Another story is that, the flying foxes are very emotionally sensitive and attached to the abbot of the temple. During and after the funeral of the abbot, these flying foxes start to drop dead without cause. The story was told that the abbot invited these flying foxes to reside here in the temple years ago. So they believe that the cause of death could be… grieving to death.

When I heard that we are going to see the flying foxes, I thought of just a few of them hanging around the tree. But I couldn’t be more wrong, there were hundreds of them! Another interesting phenomena is that, these flying foxes will only reside within the walls of the temple. This place is just so cool!

More info about the city, please visit http://www.chachoengsao.go.th/th/

The picture was taken on May 13, 2010 just days before the civil unrest evolved into a full force military crash between the Thai government and the anti-government protesters. I don’t want to get into much detail about the issue. Please search online for more information regarding the event or you can try to check it out at http://www.nationmultimedia.com, a website that I often check for updates about the situation to know if it is safe or not to travel to certain parts of the city.

Oh well, I do believe that PEACE will prosper in Thailand once again.

photo by: PaHn
processed by: Natt

In Bangkok, people don’t really get to drive their car because of the tremendous amount of traffic. Sitting behind the steering wheel and pressing – releasing the break paddle can’t be considered as “driving”. It’s rare that we would go above 20 km/h in the city. Ironically, without traffic, people don’t know how to drive their car and often cause accidents; hence, more traffic occurs. That is simply the cycle of the Bangkok’s traffic.

This photo was taken while I was “not driving” but stuck in traffic on a hot day here in Bangkok. Having air conditioning on in the car helps mitigate the irritating and unbearable heat. However, this doesn’t seem to affect that maintenance man in the city’s service truck. I envy him, to be able to endure the heat, the sun, the traffic and the air/noise pollution. He should get a medal of honor or something.

One amazing man, indeed!