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Grand Palace, Wat Arun, and the Chao Phraya River at night

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is another view from the patio of our hotel when we were in Thailand. I’m nearing the end of the posts from that trip .

Obviously, this one is at night, and again, we were lucky to get one of the nights we were in Bangkok with a lit Wat Arun (rising structure on the right). The Grand Palace is on the left, also very lit up.

While Bangkok had its up and downs in turns of fun, experience and…atmosphere, the hotel we were at was terrific, and the view could not be beat.

roman influences in Thailand

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is from the Summer Palace at Bang Pa-In. It’s quite a strange place. It was built to entertain visiting diplomats and emissaries, and the architecture was designed primarily to make them feel at home. So you have roman statues, a “Chinese House,” and a primarily receiving building/residence that could be out of Victorian England.

Then again, you also have the building visible behind the statue, in the middle of the pond, that is classic Thai, and is also adherent to Buddhist and Thai royal philosophies. It is separated from any other building by the pond itself, and only the king and his wife is allowed to take the small boat across to it. It is a mini-temple just for the king, separated from the “foreign” influences (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) seen around the rest of the palace.

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Originally uploaded by kaiyen

Around the late 1700′s, Ayutthaya, at the time the capital of what is now Thailand, was sacked after the second of two vigorous attacks by the Burmese. Following, the city was basically burned to the ground, many of the Wats and palaces were destroyed, and raping and pillaging was rampant. The Thai are quite sore at the Burmese about this to this day. To rub it in, the Burmese prince that was leading the army had a big Wat built outside the city to commemorate his victory.

Very little of the original grand palaces and temples still stand. Those that do are either restorations or badly in need of them. This particular mass of bricks – you can’t even tell what it is anymore. It now looks like a combination of a transformer made of bricks or some kind of rock monster.

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Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is Memorial Church, or MemChu, at Stanford University. My wife and I had hoped to renew our vows there this year. It’s only been 5 years, but for a lot of reasons we felt it was a pretty big deal and wanted to do something special. We actually haven’t even celebrated our anniversaries yet.

One can get married or renew vows at MemChu only if one is a student or an alum (I’m the latter). When I first got married, I have to admit that I was torn between MemChu and the outdoor venues we were considering. MemChu really has a special place in my heart. When I was stressed, even though I am not at all religious, I used to go to MemChu, sit down in a pew, and reflect on things. I used to laugh out loud as I rode my bike or walked past the church, not believing that I could go to a school so wonderful and beautiful.

But MemChu doesn’t have many wedding-level reception venues near it, and between that and the church’s fees as-is, we couldn’t afford it. So we were hoping to celebrate entering this next phase of our lives together at the church. It would be a bookend, in many ways, to things, moving from a trouble freshman dealing with all the issues of…being a freshman to celebrating 5 years into my wonderful life with my wife.

Well. The church has an opening the morning the day after our anniversary (a Saturday). The coordinator was incredibly friendly and energetic and seemed to be someone with whom I would want to work. But they usually only allow renewals of vows after 20 years, and the Dean of Religious Life understandably turned down our request for an exception.

15 years is a long time, and my feelings about Stanford (having left there after 12 years as a student and employee) and the church make the situation just a bit more disappointing.

Oh well.

Wat Arun at night, from upper Thon Buri

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is a photo that I’m not sure is possible from many locations.

If you look at a map of Bangkok, there is a part to the west, across the Chao Phraya River, that is called Thon Buri. It’s curved, and is actually the original site chosen for the new capitol after Ayutthaya was sacked and basically destroyed by the Burmese. However, as the current Chakri dynasty took over, they moved across the river to build the big temples, etc, including the Grand Palace and the major temples, or Wats.

Wat Arun, however, is this magnificent, Khmer-style temple rising high above the ground on the Thon Buri side, and is one of the oldest in the city.

Because the river curves as one heads south right around where we were staying down towards Wat Arun, we could see the temple very well from our patio. If one had a nice, extended view out over the river (as the two restaurants next to us did, but none of the other houses, as far as we could tell), you could get this great view of the temple at night. But only with a long lens, and a tripod or some other stabilizing mechanism. Exposures were quite long, considering we were using a point-n-shoot.

This was also the only night Wat Arun was lit, which is apparently the iconic view of the temple. It really is magnificent, and should not be missed.

I have geo-tagged our hotel, the Ibrik resort, from where this photo was taken.

fallen sign

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This was taken a few blocks from Bourbon Street in New Orleans, while I was there for a conference. I always try to book a few extra hours at the beginning and/or end of a business trip to do some photography in the area.

The interest in this photo, to me, is pretty obvious. Sign that is supposed to be vertical. Detailed, multi-colored but flat cement wall. Brick ground. Interesting contrast of this and that plus the sign that is out of place and out of order.

The whole area around Bourbon street is pretty interesting. The street itself is surreal. It truly is a bunch of drunken, partying, crazy people just wandering around being…drunk, partying, etc. I guess it’s like being around Vegas today mixed in with Times Square before it was cleaned up.

But as one walks away from Bourbon street, the houses and buildings start to go back and forth between nice and run down or even shuttered. Things get run down and a lot less touristy very fast. This is much more true as one heads away from the river.

Wat lit at night

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

Just outside of Ayutthaya, the former capitol of Thailand, Wat Na Phranem was essentially untouched when the Burmese sacked and basically destroyed the city in the late 1700′s. The Burmese empire actually attempted to destroy the city at least one time before, but they were defeated when the Thai prince killed the Burmese general in an elephant joust.

Yes, an elephant joust. Where they had big spears and rode on elephants at full speed. And I thought it would be hard to do on a horse…

This photo was taken while on a night tour of the various temples around Ayutthaya set up by the friendly proprietor of Baan Lotus, a quasi-backpacker, just the basic place to stay in town. It’s the kind of place where they ask you to look at the room first, and offer to bug bomb it right off the bat. Still, it was good enough for a night, and the price couldn’t be beat.

The woman that runs Baan Lotus kind of owns the town, it seems. The little tuk-tuk taxis that take one around on the night time, sunset tour all say “Baan Lotus” on them (so they aren’t the generic ones one usually sees everywhere) and even when we did take a regular one to the train station there was a Baan Lotus advertisement in it. I kind of wonder if she has a racket going on.

One thing I’d like to point out of the photo, which I’m rather happy with is the dark structure on the left. At first it might seem like just a strange dark area on the left. But it’s actually part of the temple that was receiving just a bit of light from another source. So look at the image full size and please make me feel better about myself

monks around Wat Arun

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

While basically atop Wat Arun (you can go up about 2/3 of the way, which is up some extremely steep and tall stairs (maybe 1′ tall, 6″ deep), I saw this group of monks walking out of a building, down the street and away from the wat.

Because of all the temples around Thailand, one runs into monks all the time. Proper behavior around the wats and around the monks is very important. One never steps on the threshold of the door of a wat, as it is believed that a spirit lives there. Women must not speak to monks nor can they touch them. If they wish to hand something to a monk, they must first give the item to a man, who will in turn give it to the monk. Religion is taken very seriously in Thailand, though one would not know it from the look of bustling, modern Bangkok.

Monks tend to catch one’s eye because of their bright robes, which are a rich orange color. However, I chose to convert this to black and white because of the patterns and textures. I was fortunate to have a camera with me with a serious zoom lens on it or I would never have been able to get in close enough. Other than cropping into a narrower shot vertically, this is the full frame.

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Originally uploaded by kaiyen

Photographically, I really like this photography and am very satisfied with it on a number of fronts. At the same time, it was an…emotionally conflicted evening for me.

At first, because I forgot my cable release for my digital SLR, I wasn’t going to even bring it along. I was going to just shoot with my medium format and film. However, someone convinced me to bring it to the NASA station and I basically just set the camera to 25-30 seconds and fired away. This is the best of the bunch. The clouds were apparently moving a lot more than I thought and the distortion from the ultra-wide angle lens actually enhances that effect. The “daytime”-ish feel of the photo is just a basic color correction from what was a very yellow & brown image (the types of lights there produced that).

So in terms of the good luck of bringing the camera in and the carefree way I took the photos, it was very satisfying. I just let myself go from the technical side of things and just composed photographs I liked.

On the other hand, for some reason, I didn’t enjoy myself as much as usual while I was out shooting. Usually, I am excited to get out of the house, especially since I am in school and so busy all the time. This time, after just a couple of hours of shooting, I was ready to pack it up and get out of there. Just tired.

I admit that I am a bit worried that I found myself less motivated about something that has been my passion for years now. But this is just one evening, and one time out. We’ll see.

clouds ablaze over Bangkok Old City

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This will be the first of several, several posts of photos from my Thailand trip. This blog will likely turn into 75% photos for the next few weeks, with sprinklings or links to articles like I often do and then a few actual, personal, original posts.

We had this terrific hotel right on the river, on the Thon Buri (west) side of the Chao Praya river that runs along side the main part of Bangkok. It is called the Ibrik (eye-breek) Resort on the River. 3 rooms, 2 with patios with incredible views. Highly recommended.

With the time change, we had no problem waking up really early and often caught tremendous sunrises. This one just blew us away, and it’s difficult not to post about 50 photos from it and the following days. This is the very first morning we were there, right from our patio.

The skyline is of Old City in Bangkok – where the temples (wats) and the Grand Palace is. We were facing that from our side of the river. Storms were always just about to reach us so there were always clouds to help with the magnificent reds and oranges and yellows. The river made for a nice foreground, of course.