When I Got Lost in a Temple

Here is one of my posts in Friendster Blogs, where I write about a visit to a temple in Bangkok, Thailand:

It was nearly dusk and I thought our friends have left me in a corner of Bangkok. We were inside the complex of the 16th century old Wat Pho (sometimes also called Wat Po), Bangkok’s oldest and largest Buddhist temple complex. An oriental circus is practicing their routine in the middle of the complex and schoolchildren from the temple’s elementary school are playing ping-pong. Earlier, against all pre-departure advise, we took a ten-minute ride in a tuk-tuk to peek at the temple’s 151-foot-long, gold-plated Reclining Buddha. Well, with a temple name like that, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t about to leave the city without setting foot on the place.

The group I was looking for didn’t bring their cellphones, or one of them did, but I didn’t have the number. Fortunately, I saw one of them a few minutes later. It turns out she was also lost. We walked around to look for the others, and when we got tired, we walked some more, hoping that that extra few steps will mean finding our other friends.

After almost memorizing the layout of the temple complex, after minutes and minutes of looking for the other group, we found them sitting under a tree in the middle of the compound, relaxing and chatting the minutes away. Chura neto! It turns out that while we were frantically looking for them, they were up there in one of the stupas, or whatever you call that, and someone suggested that they all go inside one of the chambers. They all felt adventurous and explored the chamber.

I’m torn on how to conclude this. Sometimes, we need to walk a little bit farther, look a little bit harder. There are also times when we need to just sit down, relax and not worry so much. You never know, they may be just up there in one of the stupas feeling like a modern-day Indiana Jones.