Thailand trip

I just came back from my holiday trip to Thailand with my parents. We visited a female relative who lived in Pattaya. It was the first time that I was meeting that relative and her family. She had married a Thai citizen while working there in Thailand, and has two children. I couldn’t really interact with the children though. They couldn’t really speak English nor Chinese, even though they look distinctively Chinese to me. If I didn’t know that they were my relatives, and saw them on the streets of Singapore, I could have easily pass them off as a Singaporean Chinese citizen. They seem quite assimilated into the Thai society that they have been raised in. They spoke Thai to their parents, and their rooms were filled with comic books featuring the Thai language. But I did try to bring up some conversation with the son, who shared with me an interest in computer games. He did manage some English to talk about the computer games he liked such as Heroes of Newerth, Crysis, and Dead Space. They seemed to be from the middle upper class of Thai society, the father being a physics engineer graduate, and they lived in a landed property that has a sizable garden area where they keep a small pond, a log swing set, and a Spirit Pagoda house.

My parents and I went to Bangkok after that. We took a cruise across a certain Thai River that passed by various historical sites of Thailand. And we also went to the Maddam Tussauds wax museum to take photos of life-size wax figures of famous personalities. And we took their public train to sight-see Thailand. I wanted to visit the Chulalongkorn university and interact with some of their university undergraduates, but it was raining that day, and we had to cut short our trip to make it back to our hotel.

One thing that caught my attention while I was in Bangkok was their public religious practice. They had shrines and altars of various Buddhist, Hindu, and Chinese gods in their public square, some located amongst the area where their shopping districts are. And Thai citizens passing by would stop to burn incence and pray to these gods. Next to the Thai King, whose portrait features in almost every public square and to whom the Thai people hold a deep reverence for, religion holds a deep significance to the Thai people and their way of life. It is a melting pot of the diversity of religions in Asia that characterizes Thailand’s religious practice. There is Buddha, Hindu gods like Ganesh the elephant god, and I even saw one shrine with a giant statue of the Chinese Fortune god whose image resembles Guan Yu, the deeply revered Chinese warrior of the Three Kingdom Dynasty in China who has been deified by the Chinese people. A small street food shop I entered had pictures of the Thai King paying homage to a Buddhist monk shrouded in Buddhist saffron robes. The Thai King was bowing down to the Buddhist monk. And there was a picture of the Thai King in Buddhist robes and with head shaven bald, which I believe, is part of his partaking of the Buddhist rites of passage of monkhood that is practiced in Thai society. I did see on the map I took from the hotel that there were quite some churches in Bangkok as well, and I did spot one in the landscape while peering out the window when I was taking the train. I would have been interested to visit the churches and to check out the state of Christianity in Thailand if I had more time.