adventures in idealism

after leaving vietnam, i came back to mae sot to get some last minute work out of the way before meeting up with cathy. it also happened that a huge festival was taking place in town about 100 yards from my house, which obviously i had to check out.

about five years ago, a very well respected monk at one of the temples passed away. obviously a ceremony needed to take place to celebrate his life, and here in mae sot they decided to do it up. they saved money for five whole years in order to construct a gigantic pagoda out of brightly painted styrofoam which they would place the monk's gold-dipped body in so that they could then burn the entire thing down.

fascinating.

they've been working on building this for months now. i definitely think it's completion warranted the selling of flamingo shaped balloons.

through those palm fronds you can see a bit of the gold-dipped monk. it was literally like they had just dipped him in gold much like an ice cream cone in chocolate. i don't know about you, but i can't think of something much more buddhist than that. (!!!) you can also see a picture of him in the bottom right corner.

here's another picture of the temple, but here you can see that they've strung money together and hung it on strings attached to the temple. i got close - those were not small bills.

it was a really interesting night, not only because of the monk extravaganza, but also because it was one of the only times i've seen burmese and thai people out and openly mingling together. i didn't actually get to see the burning of the temple, but that was because i got to do something even better - go meet CATHY.