The morning started with a small american breakfast at the hotel. The standard bacon, ham, toast, fried rice.. We could choose to have eggs, poached, scrambled, sunnny side up, half boiled, hard boiled.. So cool.. Never guessed you ate eggs in that many ways right?
The main purpose of our trip was to return our wishes.. So the first stop of the day was to Erawan Shrine, next to gaysorn plaza..
We made our donations, thanked the four faced buddha for his blessings… When we pray to the four face buddha, we have to start at one side, and we pray in a clockwise direction (I think) to each of the other three sides.. We have to buy the basic set of candles and flowers to worship the four face buddha..
Some people may buy the caged up birds to release for good luck… Next stop was the
Poh Teck Tung Foundation temple.. I had an entry on Poh Teck Tung last year.. You can read about it
here.
A small explanation in short:
There is a foundation in Thailand called Poh Tech Tung Foundation and it is founded and supported by Thai Chinese living in Thailand. They do rescue work and charity. There are many dead bodies in Thailand that are left unclaimed because they have no family or friends to claim them. These bodies can't be burried since no one is going to pay for their funeral. So these bodies are frozen in a large freezer room. What next? The Poh Teck Tung Foundation collects donations from people like me who donate coffins to them and they kind of 'queue' to be burried. It is really not expensive and we can really help someone rest in peace with just a bit of money. Each coffin is
550 Baht 650 Baht.. (I made a mistake, exact price in a picture with a yellow signboard below). That is like about S$23 or US$16.50. So if you are interested to help please do print out this map:
Pass to the taxi driver. They will take you there. Its near Bangkok Chinatown and when the taxi driver makes the turn at the roundabout, you're just 3 mins away. Oh, the entire thing is in Thai. The location is the little square in the top left corner. You can try telling the taxi driver "Poh1 Teck3 Tung2" (HYPY pronounciation)
The number of bodies the foundation helped is 7000 according to the website:
http://65.55.177.205/BV.aspx?ref=Internal&from=en&to=fr#http://pohtecktung.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=1
You can see pictures of how they help these people. So if you are flying to bangkok, make a trip there and help a fellow human rest in peace. Oh, I forgot to mention that this foundation is of Buddhist origins, so if non-buddhists who are uncomfortable with this, I'm sorry about it. I have no intention to make any religion feel uncomfortable about this.
So here are the vans which the foundation use for rescue work..
HEre is the counter of donations where people can make donations for things like clothes, coffins, etc..
As you can see, you can even donate rice as you see above, either the small bag of rice or the large bag of rice..
I donated 4 sets of coffins and I got a receipt for it!
We ran into my Mother’s cousin at the Poh Teck Tung! Who would believe the world is so small?
