Grand Palace

Here are a handful of pictures from our visit to the Grand Palace. I would honestly love to explain every single one of the pictures, but there were so many different things to see, and our tour guide breezed through everything pretty quickly. As I think I mentioned in my last post, Thailand is really big on taking in and adapting artistic and architectural styles from other countries. So we’d be looking at one temple based on Sri Lankan design, then immediately be looking at a Cambodian influenced temple. 

If I remember correctly, the wall paintings tell an adapted story, taken from Hinduism, of a deity/prince battling a demon who had kidnapped his girlfriend. There were a couple hundred sections of the story illustrated on the walls and I probably could have happily spent the entire day just looking at and studying the details on the walls. Sadly, we only spent a couple minutes looking at a few of the sections so I wasn’t able to get too many pics or even learn too much about the source material. It’ll definitely be worth a trip back at some point in the next year.

So yeah, the Grand Palace was super awesome. I pretty much spent the entire morning geekin’ out super hard art history style. The fact that there was so much to see, and the massive amount of stylistic inspiration from other cultures, was almost too overwhelming. 

In other news, I’m still in the process of obtaining pics from the elephant camp we went to. It was super rainy when we arrived, and we also did a river rafting thing, so I figured that leaving my camera on the bus was probably the best plan. There’s definitely some pics floating around out there somewhere though, and, as soon as I get my hands on a few, I’ll throw em up on here.