Zoo Adventures

First of all, a huge THANK YOU to my readers for helping me reach over 1000 pageviews! Wowie wow wow! I never thought that so many people would be reading. A special thanks to Uncle C., too, for leaving my second-ever comment. Love you all.

Okay, so it has been a crazy busy week already and it's going to get even busier tomorrow and Saturday. On Tuesday my art class took a trip to Wat Phra Singh to look at the restoration work being done on the murals there. The Fine Arts Department in Thailand simply doesn't have the resources to lead any huge restoration projects, so they can only devote a few months to each project at a time. The mural painting techniques historically used at wats such as Phra Singh don't hold up well to the Thai heat and humidity, so efforts are mostly focused on salvaging what can be found and protecting it against further damage. They won't repaint anything unless they know for sure what was there in the first place.

This is definitely some of the better-preserved artwork from this wat. The mural work is spectacular in its detail and scope of story in and of itself, but what I though was also impressive was the gold-on-red work that decorated the temple as well. In order to create this intricate designs, black paint is stenciled onto the red and then gold leaf in meticulously applied over the paint to make the patterns. I can't even to begin to imagine how much work was put into this one beautiful temple, let alone the fact there are nearly countless temples spread out all over Thailand!

Two of my classmates (representing our class) and Ajan Chatcha are receiving a blessing for visiting and learning about the preservation efforts. Our next art assignment is to be inspired by an environment with people interacting - to observe, take pictures, and then make a piece of artwork about it. Should be fun!

Maybe one of the environments I could do art about is the Chiang Mai Zoo, which we visited on Wednesday! It's just a short song taew (red truck) ride from our apartments - right near the front gate of the university. It's only 100 baht to get in (a little more than $3.00) and so we headed over around noon and saw basically everything by 4:00 pm or so.

Although it is situated on hill so you get plenty of exercise, the zoo itself was pretty basic. A few of the exhibits were close because it is the rainy season and so there aren't as many tourists, and some of the attractions cost more once you were inside (like seeing the aquarium or going into a "Snow Dome"). We had a nice time checking out the big cats, lots of exotic deer, reptiles, and birds. My favorite part was a bird park you could walk into - everything was surrounded by fencing (even the ceiling) so the birds stayed in, but it was full of such thick tropical foliage and footpaths where you could see some pretty awesome birds.

My camera batteries were dying so I don't have many good photographs from the zoo, but tomorrow I am going to the elephant camp to play with and care for elephants up close so I will have plenty of awesome pictures from that (after changing the batteries, of course)!