Ramble
Quest - Starting the Temple Tour (Ayutthaya).
I decide to spend the next month looking at ancient temples. It started with my deciding that it was finally time to have a look at the Angkor temples. However, I didn't want to just jump right into them. Just as a gourmet meal demands some hors d'oeuvre, I figured a trip to Angkor deserved a few weeks of preliminary temple viewing. My primary appetizers are the Khmer temples of the Thai northeast, but on the way I stop at Ayutthaya for awhile to view a later destroyed empire.
I've already seen the many impressive temple ruins of Lopburi and Sukhothai, but had skipped Ayutthaya because it was so easy to get to, saving it for just such a swing. I wound up spending nearly a week there, slowly viewing the many ruins in the area. I found them to be far less crowded than I'd expected. Indeed, most of them were completely deserted, enhancing their effect.
I still get blown away by these ancient ruins. I keep imagining the societies that once thrived here, what their culture was like and how it must have been to live back then. It's not an idealistic picture. I imagine that most of them must have worked like slaves to build these grand momuments for the glory of a few despots. Still, there was quite a lot going on here for a very long time and it must have been very impressive to see.
On two days I bicycle out along narrow country roads, past fields and brush that often gets burned to make into a field. I find villages with too many dogs and too much plastic trash to get rid of. I also see the incredible beauty of the rural countryside, sandwiched between the ugliness of too much human carelessness.
Leaving on the train, I make the mistake of taking an empty seat when the car is full to the point where many people are standing. If I was back in Chicago I would immediately have recognized the crazy person sitting there whom everyone is trying to avoid. He's a gangster, with gang tatoos on both thighs and multiple stab and bullet wounds. He's also drunk at 9:30 in the morning.
At first he wants to talk with me, but he as he doesn't speak any English this is difficult. He wants to trade hats, but then he sees that his hat is better than mine so he quickly calls this off. Eventually he gets used to me and settles down to spitting out the window and trying to get a young woman to sit next to him. People here react to him exactly the way they do everywhere else in the world, they just try to get as far away as possible and pretend he's not there. Often I do the same, but sometimes, like today, I don't mind being next to him. "He may have his faults," I think, "but at least he's different." I start to wonder about what the gangsters were like back in Ayutthaya's glory days.