Dec 18, 2012

Recursiveness on the road to Pattaya



The giant elephant temple from the gate, quite far away.
 Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a temple with a ten-story tall elephant atop an Asian pottery museum and inside the elephant there was another temple that contained the universe or at least something representing the universal mind. It's all kind of fuzzy now. Oh, and the temple inside the pottery museum inside the giant elephant was made entirely out of broken up (or completely intact) pieces of ancient pottery, ceramic, and porcelain. It was forbidden to photograph in the museum but it was fine to photograph the temple inside -- if you didn't photograph the ancient Buddha statues -- but it was fine to photograph the big golden Buddha, just not the other older multiple Buddhas surrounding the gold one. Are you getting confused? Don't worry about it.
This interesting detail is about one foot tall and was but one of many others - each unique - supporting the
temple within a museum within a massive elephant. The sparkly bits and blue bits are composed
of pottery shards. Yes, that's a teapot lid over the head of the bird-beaked entity. 

I like these temples, I really do. They are so very clean inside (usually). You can walk all over them barefooted, in fact you must. Hell, one temple I was at a few days ago had some adjacent public toilets so clean that you had to remove your shoes before going inside the restrooms.Maybe the whole point is to keep me on my toes.

Anyway, once I got outside the temple inside an elephant that was atop a museum inside a temple inside a garden... shit, forgot to mention the garden.  I absolutely LOVE these gardens. Not all the temples have nice gardens but some of the nicest ones do. This was the best garden yet.

I don't know what these four-foot tall creatures are called or quite what they are, but these gardens
had many varieties or sprites. The tall clumping palms with the bamboo like trunks are truly
rare, even here in the mythical garden surrounding the elephant containing the universal mind.

You can leave your shoes on and there are no rules about what you can photograph in the gardens, except for the ghost houses, which look a lot like miniature temples or shrines. There's a ghost house at every home, business, garden, and of course, at temples. You can't photograph these ghost houses, unless you ask the ghosts first, but it's bad form anyway because you don't want to photograph a ghost, it might piss them off, and you don't want a ghost pissed off at you, so don't photograph those either. This is actually starting to make sense to me, I'm not kidding. 

Did I forget to mention the 10-story tall elephant had three heads?
Also, there's a celestial chamber inside those heads containing the universal mind,
which looks a lot like a bunch of Buddhas, so much recursiveness, so little time.

Am I ever going to get us to Pattaya?

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