Today’s Daily Photo is the first one that isn’t a photograph I’ve taken but, I just love this photo. Called ‘Monk’s Day Off’, it shows four Thai monks in saffron robes obviously enjoying their time at the King and Queens Pagoda at Doi Inthanon in Chiang Mai, Thailand. One monk is even bent down taking a photograph of two of the others.
One thing non-Thais don’t always understand about monks in Thailand is that they’re not always as serious as we expect them to be. That is usually because of two things:
1) The Thai personality, which often puts fun or ‘sanuk‘ above anything else, and
2) A huge percentage of Thai monks only join the monkhood for a very short time. Some as short as just one day (usually due to a family member dying), a week, two weeks, a month or a year. So, when you see them out and about having fun, it’s often because they’re really the same schoolboys or young adults they always were. Just wearing the saffron robes for a few days.
This photograph, by the way, was taken at Doi Inthanon in Chiang Mai last year by Darren Johnson. You can find more of Darren’s Thailand photographs in his Flickr account.
He also runs a awesome site called ShotHotSpot, which helps you find interesting places anywhere in the world to take photographs. Here’s his link for cool places for photos in Bangkok. Now isn’t that awesome?