Monday, January 5, 2015 The New Year Starts in Chiang Mai

With the end of the long holiday weekend comes a return to a more normal business flow. Traffic on the streets is crowded early in the morning as people return to work and school. Some tourists here for the New Year’s celebrations are leaving, and the tourists on holiday for Chinese New Year are arriving. Chinese new year is not until February 19, but it seems that many Chinese people take a holiday before the New Year. February 19 starts the Year of the Goat, and this will be a special year of celebration at Wat Chedi Luan, as this temple is associated with the Year of the Goat. (You can make out a goat statue on the lower left in the picture below.)

The Happy New Year sign is still up at Wat Chedi Luang (Happy New Year is pronounced saw-wat-de-bpee-mai). The year 2558 is the Buddhist year, based on the year the Buddha died, which is the international year plus 543. The Thai people use the Buddhist year for everything except when interacting with non-Thai people.

During recent walks around the old city, I noticed many construction projects at local temples. As I showed earlier, there are new statues at Wat Chedi Luang being installed.

Those two statues are now boxed in with a fairly crude corrugated metal structures, most likely to protect them from the construction of a building around them.

The statues were only visible for about two days, and it may be months before the construction completes and they are seen again. I feel lucky to have seen them.

As an example of other construction projects, here are some photos of projects at Wat Them, just down the street from the 3-Sis Guest House:

 This is taken to the right of the main viharn (worship hall) at Wat Them.

And here is the main viharn of Wat Them, to the left of the picture above.

And then scanning further to the left is another and fairly large building taking place. From the structure, my guess is that this is to be a school or monk’s dormitory. Not yet clear.

What is clear is that there are many construction projects underway at many temples in and around the old city.

Next: Outside the moat to Wat Mahawan and Wat Chettawan