The Ruins

I feel so bad about not posting for awhile. I was so gung ho about blogging about our trip, but the time change really has been a beast. For this last week we were all on completely different sleep cycles, but I think that we're very close to being back to normal. So I hope to catch up on the trip now.

My first post is going to be pictures of the ruins that we went and saw there. We drove two hours to the old capitol of Thailand. I can't remember anything about the names or history, which is bad. But I guess if you're interested you can look it up online. But the palaces, structures and Buddhas we saw were really incredible.

Here we are standing in front of a picture of the king. There are pictures, posters, and billboards with his picture everywhere. The people really love their king, and he is a very good man. I loved him, too, because he just looks so sweet. Because he was born on a Monday - and Monday is assigned the color yellow - yellow is the official color of the king. People wear yellow shirts all the time, but on Monday there is a tidal wave of yellow clothes everywhere. My brother, Rob, is a big supporter of the king and wore his yellow shirt at least twice a week. :)

These pictures are of an old palace of a past king that we went to visit. The grounds and palaces were just beautiful.This statue is obviously more European than Thai, but I thought it was so cute how Jude held his hand!

Here is a huge lounging Buddha which was the official Buddha for awhile, before the current one was assigned. Super cool.

Just wanted to give a 'shout-out' to my brother, Will, for his awesome photography skills. He's studied it a little bit and really knows his stuff. Good job!

We thought this sign was funny. So many of the signs there written in English were hilariously wrong and painfully misspelled (I love that spellcheck just told me I misspelled 'misspelled'. Classic.). I just wanted to go home and print off new signs for all these people trying so hard to advertise to English speaking tourists.

This is us in front of one of the biggest Buddha statues we saw. It was huge! I guess in some temples you have to crawl in to see the Buddha because you can't be taller than the statue, but that was no problem here. We got to see a ceremony where a group of people were kneeling and worshipping and buying towels to throw up onto the big Buddha. There were men standing on top of the Buddha to catch the towels. Then they draped down a bunch of colored scarfs that covered the Buddha and the crowd tented them over themselves and said a chant.

At first we didn't know if we could take pictures inside their temples, but when we went in, they had a booth near the Buddha selling lottery tickets, so we figured pictures were okay.

The whole fam!

The boys were so good this day. We did a lot of driving and a lot of sight seeing and they were great! And they even had to go to the bathroom is some very icky places, but they were brave. Thailand really was an incredible experience.