We walked around the old town for a bit, and then stopped to visit Wat Phra Singh, one of many big temples in Chiang Mai.
Like so many Buddhist temples, it was very beautiful, and very rich in golden ornaments - including the golden dragons that line all the staircases that lead up to the main prayer hall:
Inside, more gold awaited, along with many flowers that devotees brought in. The huge Buddha statue at the back of the temple is allegedly removed from the temple once a year and paraded around the city - although I'm not quite sure how they manage to get it through the temple doors...
Above the prayer hall's main area, there were a few wires where people came to hang streamers of some kind:
Each of these streamers carried cards on one side where people had written wishes, and five 20 baht notes (about 5 euro each) on the other side. Apparently, people come in on their birthday to make wishes - health, money, etc. - for their next year. On the following morning, the monks pray for all the wishes that are currently hanging there, and take everything down afterwards. The donations then go towards the upkeep of the temple.
Later, we wandered around the Sunday night market for a while. The market is huge, and it sells mostly souvenirs. Since it was the market's 10-year anniversary, it was even bigger and busier than usual. I'm still not interested in buying touristy dirt collectors, and so I decided to escape the market and its crowds and go for another massage.
Compared to the traditional Lao massage that I had a while ago, the Thai massage today was almost gentle. It only really hurt in the one spot that I'm always incredibly tense in when I'm working on a computer and not doing sports (which is my shoulders) and was otherwise quite a relaxing experience. Like in Laos, massages in Thailand are incredibly cheap: about 4 to 5 euro for a sixty-minute traditional massage. Amazing, isn't it?
