It is Monday, which is yellow shirt day in Thailand, which means that we all need to wear yellow shirts, in order to make a sort of united prayer for the King's health because he was born on a Monday. Long live the King!So, in my yellow shirt, I went to the Jim Thompson house while Laurie was at the bank. The JT house is a wonderful place, as you would expect from a man with such great taste. Everyone would aspire to live in this cluster of interconnected Thai houses surrounded by tropical gardens with urns of water lilies and goldfish.
I then met Laurie at the Erawan Tea Room overlooking the Erawan Shrine. The view of the shrine is limited, but the tea room is a real find, another one of Nicholas Song's excellent recommendations. We had barbecued pork skewers and fluffy catfish and mango salad for lunch, and bought teas, jams, and other delicacies there, all of which are delicious. It is essential to go to the Erawan tea room when you are visiting the Shrine. Like balancing hot and cold, or sweet and sour, the shrine and the tea room form a sort of cosmic balance to one another: weird and sublime.
The shrine was built out of desperation on the construction site of the Erawan hotel and shopping centre, because things had been going wrong, and angry spirits were clearly to blame. They were mollified by the shrine, however, and now everything that happens in the hotel and shopping centre is perfect, as evidenced by the Erawan Tea Room. This is why the good citizens of Krung Thep ('City of Angels' -- the real name for Bangkok) come here to make offerings, and indeed why Thais from all over the world ask for good fortune here.
If you forget to bring something to offer the spirits, you can buy a cage of sparrows:
Be prepared though, when you release the sparrows, they are trained to fly back to their cages so that they can be used over and over again.
I don't know what's been going on at the Taiko Supermarket in Canada, but with all of these elephant offerings, I am sure that everything is going to be okay now!:
If you are really in big trouble, you can pay for up to eight dancers to entertain the spirits who will then in theory pay attention to your problem and fix it. This group of young people, for example, had clearly had a party while their parents were out of town and were hoping that the dancers could fix it with the spirits so that they won't be grounded for the rest of their lives:
This ploy is not going to work, however, because Thai mothers are every bit as smart as their counterparts from Tennessee. So, don't have a party at your parents' house when they are out of town, no matter what part of the planet you are living on!!
We took a short stroll up Th. Ratchaprarop to Narayana Phand, which is a Government-run crafts store (about to move to a different location). This is arguably a better place to buy Thai crafts and souvenirs than Chatuchak because it is calm, air conditioned, empty of other people, and the crafts are reliable and priced fairly. We also saw a much wider range of things, from laquer to textiles, and a lot of Thai-inspired clothes there.
