Arrived in Chiang Mai after about 3 hours sleep on the train. Arrived at our hostel (which I highly recommend) and got ourselves sorted before heading to the central area.
Chiang Mai is less hectic than Bangkok and easier to navigate. We had some fried fish at a local eatery and bought a few bits and bobs. One of our favourite things in Thailand is the large number of 7-Eleven stores – there appears to be one on every corner and it’s super convenient for getting bottled water, toiletries, and ice cream.
Late afternoon we went to Wat Sri Suphan to attend ‘Monk Chat’ followed by the introduction to meditation. We assumed it would be a group of tourists chatting to several monks before sitting in a class with a teacher talking through meditation. It was actually just Beth and I put with one monk in a room. The first hour was chat, asking questions and learning about life as a monk. It was very interesting to hear about his life – he had come over from Tibet and is now practicing here in Chiang Mai. He told us that boys can become monks at age 20, and anyone younger than 20 is always called a ‘novice’. He has 227 rules to follow, and is in his first year of four before he can be ordained.
We then began the meditation. He banged a gong as we shut our eyes and continued to hit the gong for 10 minutes. As we were so tired from the train, closing our eyes meant falling asleep for a few seconds before the gong woke us up! We also did standing meditation, which involved walking REALLY slow and thinking about your every movement. I think that if we weren’t hangry and tired we would have benefited more from it, but we actually didn’t have the energy to focus on slow walking for such a long time. An experience!
