The Ritual of the Monks

Chiang Mai, Thailand
06/02/23

Though the monks are beyond plentiful here in Chiang Mai, every time I see one, walking barefoot and gazing forward in a meditative state, I behave as if it’s a rare animal sighting. Like when you see a deer in your backyard in the city. You’re standing at the sink, washing the dishes after dinner like normal, and then you see something move, or you see the shine of his eyes. And you freeze. Maybe you whisper to your partner, “Honey! There’s a deer,” and you both creep closer to the window, like burglars in a movie, to get a closer look.

That's me every single time I see a monk here in Thailand.

The first few days here, I got a kick out of seeing them doing everyday things that we all do. The stuff that you could caption “Monks – They’re just like us!”

I saw a monk riding on the back of a motor scooter, his bare feet on the foot rests, his burgundy robe tucked up under him, his hands gripping the seat behind him.

I saw one paying for a basket full of toiletries at the cosmetics store where I, too, was filling a basket with toiletries.

Walking back to my place a few weeks ago, I managed to steal a few shots of these novice monks (pictured right), four boys who’d just gotten out of school, ordering cold drinks at the coffee shop next door.

One afternoon, while exploring a temple I especially like, I saw several teenage monks pruning and watering the shrubs when a garden hose fight broke out. One sprayed another relentlessly until finally, the victim’s robe was soaked from the waste down. He hiked it up almost to his hips and carried the wet drape as he walked back towards the living quarters with his legs a couple extra feet apart.

After having seen all of this "normal human behavior," a week or so into my time in Thailand, I saw monks engaged in a ritual that was not at all “just like us.” It was 6:30 a.m., and I was on the little dead-end street of food stalls where I get my coffee every morning. I was a little later than usual (yes, thanks to the rooster outside my window, who starts up at 4:30am, and the lingering jet lag, I am a very early riser here in Thailand – early even for me!), which may explain why I hadn’t witnessed this ritual before.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sonya Collins (@sonyaleac)

Two young monks, probably teenagers, came down the street towards the food stalls, each carrying a large empty silver bowl. Like the other monks I'd seen, they looked forward intently and not all around them as they walked. They went stall to stall and waited until someone emerged with food and placed it in one of the bowls. When those were full, the food went into the cloth bags they carried on their shoulders. At some of the stalls, the food vendor knelt at the feet of the monks, who chanted over the food for a moment and then moved on to the next stall. I stood and watched for a few minutes as they repeated this process.

Heading back to my place, I turned back onto the main road, where I saw several pairs of young monks making rounds with empty silver bowls.

When I got back inside, I Googled and found that Buddhist monks in Thailand and much of Southeast Asia only eat what is given to them. They can’t engage in the labor of growing or preparing food. Alms gathering allows for this. It also aligns with their practice of not having any possessions. And it allows laypeople the opportunity to improve their karma – a practice called “making merit.”

Now, nearly four weeks into my stint here, the alms-gathering monks are a part of the landscape on my morning walk, and I am a little less prone to act like I’ve seen a unicorn when I pass one. I’ve also come to see that not all the monks are stoics who stare straight ahead when they pass another person on the street.

Some break the fourth wall and let me in – the thing that I relish the most about foreign travel. When I nod at them with a small smile, they nod back. They respond sawasdee khap (how a man say’s hello) to my sawasdee kha. And one morning, during his alms gathering with a much older monk, a little boy monk – he couldn’t have been more than 8 years old – caught my eye and grinned at me all the way down the block. He turned his head as far as he could to keep me in his sight. And I held his gaze with my own smiling eyes for as long as we were able.

Why I Slow Travel

Chiang Mai, Thailand
05/29/23

On my long solo trips abroad, I pick a base in one spot and take side trips from there. I leave my stuff behind and go back after every trip. I did it this way in Catania (Sicily), Mexico City, and now in Chiang Mai, a medium-sized city of about 1.2 million people in the northern mountains of Thailand.

I stay at a “coliving” (pictured right) – a dwelling that includes living and working spaces for solo travelers doing their jobs remotely (aka “digital nomads"). Colivings have not only everything you need to live and work comfortably but they also come with an instant community (See below).

Since I’ve been here, I’ve done side trips to Mae Kampong, a small village about a 2-hour drive north of here; to Koh Samui, an island in the southern Gulf of Thailand about a 2-hour flight from here; and to Singapore, a 3-hour flight. After each trip, I’ve come back to Chiang Mai. This weekend, I’ll leave for the last time and head to Bangkok.

Some people ask, "Why would you go all the way to Thailand to spend so much time in that one place? Why wouldn’t you see everything you possibly can?"

I do it for practical reasons and also for some more abstract ones that explain why I love this style of travel so much.

Packing up and moving every single week for several months; carrying all of my things with me; getting settled into a new place and getting the lay of the land; finding a suitable place to work that is comfortable, quiet, has reliable wifi and is not a stuffy hotel room – all of that is a total time suck and will completely burn you out.

It may sound more efficient to just move from point A to Z in a linear fashion across all the ground you want to cover, but when you consider the lost productivity on the days you need to work, it’s much less efficient.

With a home base, I take only the things I need on my side trips. I enjoy seeing the new place without any need to scout out a cafe to work from that week or the need to do any other chores related to my weekly routine. Back at my base, I already have a reliable place to work; I know which coffee shops open early enough for me to get some fuel before I start my day; and I know just where to grab lunch.

I can take trips to new and exciting places every weekend and enjoy a slower pace in an increasingly familiar place during the week.

But there’s so much more to it than this.

Today, I came back to Chiang Mai after a 3-night trip to Singapore. It was mid-afternoon and the co-working space, which you have to walk through to get to the bedrooms upstairs, was at peak capacity. As soon as I dragged my carry-on through the door, AP (below) – a cool, young Thai woman who works at the front desk – jumped out of her seat and rushed over to hug me.

“You’re back!” she said. “I missed you!”

What a gift to be “all by myself” nearly halfway around the globe and to have just one person to welcome me back when I walk through the front door; just one person to notice I’m gone, miss me and care that I'm back. That wouldn’t happen if I just kept traveling from A to B to C. Every departure would be a goodbye.

And it’s not just one person – There's the lady I buy my coffee from every morning (below with her husband). When I showed back up at her shop after 4 days away earlier this month, she clapped her hands together in front of her face and said, “Susan! I thought you left!” (Sure, that’s not my name, but for a welcome like that, I'll lean in.)

When you have a base, you can have a routine, and through routine, people know your face and notice when they haven’t seen it.

One part of my routine has been daily tai chi and qigong classes at a studio about a 10-minute walk from where I’m staying. On the way to class one day, I stopped into a pharmacy for sunscreen and shampoo. The pharmacist has greeted me every time I've passed since then.

In the second week of class, I met Neta, a solo traveler from Israel. We hit it off as soon as we started chatting that first day. Sure, we might have had a nice conversation if I had just seen her once and then never again. But we ended up having lunch together every day after class. She had just come from Vietnam, where I am headed next. She gave me all kinds of intel that prompted me to make major changes to my itinerary. And she’s joining me on a 3-day trip to Cambodia early next month!

I connected with Priya, a solo traveler from India, through a Facebook group for female digital nomads where we learned we’d be in Chiang Mai at the same time. She was diligent about meeting up once we got here. Together, we agreed the nearby jazz club was going to be our spot during our time here. For the two weeks that we overlapped, she was the friend that I could text to say, “Want to get dinner tomorrow?” – the kind of friend you really miss having when you’re traveling on your own, never stopping for more than a few days in each place.

Claire, an Atlanta native, has taught at an international school here in Chiang Mai for about five years. A mutual friend in Atlanta connected us. I thought she might just get together with me once to be nice, but after that first dinner, she mentioned other places she wanted to show me the next time we got together. She’s been the friend that I can text with questions about Chiang Mai. And, because I also taught abroad for a few years after college and, like her, picked up the language in my chosen country with relative ease, we have so much in common and so much to talk about.

Brayden moved into the coliving about a week after I did. I saw him come in, but he didn’t see me. Later that night, I was sitting by myself at a restaurant nearby and he walked in by himself. I said, “Are you Brayden? I’m staying at the same place as you.” A New Yorker, he reminds me of so many of my friends from college. He feels familiar.

These relationships came from three weeks in Chiang Mai. And none came at the cost of seeing new places or experiencing new things. I’m not experiencing less because I’ve decided to stay longer in one place. Sure, if I were to plan a perfectly linear trip, and spend each week in a different place as I propel myself forward across SE Asia, I would see a greater number of new places. But living in one place in Thailand (and then another next month in Vietnam) for several weeks is pretty new, too. When, on a week’s vacation, do you get the opportunity to learn what it might be like to live there? To learn the rhythms and routines of the place?

I see all the main attractions in every place I visit, but I also get to see the monks in orange robes set out with giant silver bowls every morning to collect food donations from local shops; teenage girls in school uniforms race home on motor scooters every afternoon; the old folks at the bodega next door sit down for dinner together at a table on the sidewalk every night.

And I get to see people who are happy to see me.

Slow travel offers a different kind of sightseeing

LaBar - Laundry Bar, Barcelona. 07/01/22

There’s one thing I particularly love about slow travel (and by that, I mean staying a while in one place, and working from there or at least having some kind of routine in that place that isn’t exclusively about hitting as many tourist sites as I can in as short a time as possible -- though I have done my fair share of that style of travel, too). What I like about the slow style is I get to see the local characters and local life.

I’ve been working from a laundromat café called LaBar in Barcelona this week. Every day, an elderly man in a wheelchair comes in at least twice. I’m not sure that he even buys anything. He wheels himself in, sometimes rolling in backwards, and up to the counter, where he sits parked for a few minutes and makes conversation with whoever is on duty at the time. He’s thin, his skin wrinkled and tan from what I imagine must have been a whole life spent in this oceanside city, and he wears a mesh trucker hat with a logo I can't make out. A few minutes later, he rolls out, and a few hours after that, he rolls back in for more chit-chat.

There’s an older woman who frequents the cafe, too. She’s probably in her late 70s. She may be 80. Yesterday, around 2:45 pm, she sat at a table with a glass of cava and laughed out loud (very loud) at YouTube videos she watched on her phone. One video in particular was so funny that after she watched it, she turned around in her seat looking for anyone she could share it with. I can’t be sure what was going through her mind, but I got the impression that when she looked around and saw that she was surrounded by people who, like me, appear to be non-Spanish-speaking foreigners (this city in general and this café in particular are very international), she thought she didn’t have much of an audience for this video. She then flagged over the young woman from behind the counter.

“Mira este video,” she said to her. Watch this video.

The woman obliged and laughed, and as the elder one watched along with her, she laughed as if she were seeing it again for the first time. The barista went back to her post, and the elder watched the video one last time, laughing no less heartily.