The Reclining Buddha

I made it home early this morning and slept for a few more hours than I should have...woke up at 2:00 and I'm sure I'll be a little sorry for not getting up earlier when I want to go to bed tonight...
After the second temple, we thought we would walk back to the Royal Palace. A few more people stopped us on the way to tell us that the palace was closed, but these people said it was closed until 3! We were starting to give up on getting to the Grand Palace, but we still walked in that direction. We walked to where many people were going, and realized it was another Temple. Since we were told the Grand Palace was closed, we went in and found it was the Temple of the Reclining Buddha! The Temple is Wat Pho, and is one of the most famous temples in Thailand, partially because it has the giant Reclining Buddha (15 meters high, 46 meters long), and partially because it is the largest Wat (Temple) in Bangkok and has the largest number of Buddha images inside it's walls of any Temple in Thailand. It was built 200 years before Bangkok became the capital of Thailand, so while I could not find a date, I think that puts it around 1400 or possibly 1500 AD.
To see this Buddha is just incredible, First the length makes it very difficult to photograph it in it's entirety. Add to that the massive numbers of people and vying for a good spot to photograph it from is also difficult. And finally, because it's so raised up above the people, if you are really truly trying to capture the Buddha, you lose the people and you lose perspective to how enormous this Buddha really is.
I was so surprised upon looking at the photos afterwards to find that depending on where you viewed the Buddha from, he seemed to hold different expressions. If you look at the first photo in the last post, he appears to be smiling. In the photo above he does not seem at all amused!
His feet were just enormous. It's difficult to see just how large, until you realize the little dot in the bottom right corner of this photo is a person...
The Buddha from the other direction...
The bottom of his feet were covered with intricately detailed mother of pearl inlay- images at the front of his feet (between the big circle and his toes) represented images of the current life, and the images between the big circle and his heels represented images of the future life. The mother of pearl and the windows and direct sunlight bouncing off the very shiny mother of pearl made it very difficult to photograph his feet, so I took some close up photos as an alternative.
It's truly amazing to realize these were all done by hand, over 500 years old.

I really loved the alligator and the very intricate water details...
This was one of the squares from the afterlife
And another one of the afterlife...
In all the temples we went to the walls were covered in beautiful paintings. I wished I had a tour guide with me who knew the stories of the paintings, as I imagine they are plentiful and interesting. The painting style is different from what you see in Chinese Temples- slightly more delicate with much more gold used- it seems to be a "half way point" between what I've seen in chinese temples and the style of painting from India- which is also quite beautiful.
There are still more photos of Wat Pho coming- it is home to 91 chedis, and I photographed them well!