The Monastry

I feel as though I have finally come home, somehow I have always known that it was my destiny to come here. I have decided to to ordain as a full monk and stay here indefinitely. haha, I'm kidding, I'm pretty sure some of you were afraid this might really happen.

So seriously: 'm welcomed by a very nice Scottish guy who proceeds to show me around the monastry. It's quite a nice place! It's kind of a community thing, the community makes use of the big hall and people from the Town (Fang) regularly pass over the temple grounds (just as a short cut). After all it is the community that sustains the monks and that has ultimately paid for the temple (in order to get good merrit). I get taught things like, to take your shoes off when entering buildings, to never show your foot soles at people and how to show your respect to the the Buddha image (by bowing three times).

I meet the other people staying at the monastry which are one guy from Switzerland, a guy from Australia and a girl from Brazil. As expected, they're all really nice. What I notice in my conversations with them is that there really is an air of calm. Like when someone can't think of a word, that usually turns into an awkward situation with people becoming nervous etc, whilst here it happens that someone will sit and think of the word for 30 seconds, while the others just wait and there's no stress at all.

My bed is quite hard, the toilet you have to flush by pooring water in it yourself and the shower is cold. During the day it is quite hot here, but at night it gets down to 5 degrees or so. So in the morning you're still cold and taking a cold shower sucks quite seriously. The food is actually not as austere as I thought. We get rise, with pork and sauce and fried chicken as well.

This morning I received my first Dhamma (teaching's of the Buddha) lesson. It was just me and the swiss guy, since the others have already taken all the lessons. My teacher is an old English army vetran (which undoubtely will appeal to my father :)). He was even stationed at Kemberly for a while (where I was born). He's been studying Buddhism for 30 years and lives here now. It's really interesting to finally interact with someone that knows far more about this stuff than I do. We've only covered the basics till now, which were mainly about Tai culture actually, the more interesting stuff will come later.

At this monastry there's mainly novice monks (young monks) and only 4 full monks, so it's mainly a Buddhist 'school'. The boys actually do get a proper education besides getting educated in Dhamma. One of them came up to me today and asked for my name and how I was doing. His English sounded really good, so I then commented on the weather, he then said "yes" and ran off haha, so I'm quite sure he hadn't covered that topic yet. There's also a lot of dogs here, which all seem to love me, whilst they run after and bark at all the villagers. Someone explain to me that they've already accepted me as part of the pack here :) So I don't have to be afraid of anymore mamals biting me :)

Tomorrow we might go to some Burmese refugee camp to pass out blankets since it's really cold at nights now, which sounds like an adventure. My Ayn Rand side is still somewhat sceptical about charity, but I also know that it all depends on the place (mindset) the charity is coming from and that's what I'm here to learn about.

Oh and I have wireless internet here, so it won't be hard to update my blog, even though I do not intend to be online much obviously. There's tons of things to do here, which include: going on day trips, meditating, attending the chanting, go to lunch with the other visitors, helping to teach the novice monks English and there's a ton of really interesting stuff to read.