The National Museum

Ok. Next lesson for the new blogger: when writing seperate blogs in order of how they occurred, one must publish in reverse order as that is how they show up. I guess you will all just have to figure the order out on your own!!
OK. Sunday (we had a big weekend!) we headed off to the National Museum. This is up by the Royal Palace (probably our next tourist destination - not to be confused with where the king currently resides) and involves a lot of travelling. So up the river we went and after a short walk we arrived at the museum. Unfortunately, they did not let us take pictures, so we only have a couple (before we knew the rules . . . oops!). The National Museum has one of the largest collections in Southeast Asia, and while the exhibits were a bit . . . different, it was really quite impressive.





This last picture is a diaramma - there were lots of these at the museum, which was a little . . . shall we say . . . different . . . but we did see a lot of really neat things as well.
My favourite room was the Royal Funeral Chariots Gallery which held several lavishly decorated teak chariots used in royal funeral processions. They were absolutely beautiful and absolutely huge! Apparently one of the is still in use, but I am not sure how they intend on getting it out of that room.
Ryan's favourite was the war room. It featured an array of weapons used throughout Thai history. It was pretty neat, as the Thai's used to use elephants in warfare - riding on top of them with spears and clubs, although we weren't too sure how effective the clubs were . . . or the elephants either for that matter. It seemed that the men didn't get close enough to do any real damage from on top and we are quite sure that the poor elephants took the brunt of it all.
The museum also had lots of art, tools, pottery, etc dating back to pre-historic times. It was neat to see the different styles in Buddha statues and art, but it made us glad we were not art-history majors as there is no way we could learn all the names for the different styles!
We also got to see the Dvaravati Wheel of Law, an 8th century stone wheel and deer that smbolizes the Buddha's first sermon in a deer park in Sarnath, India. While this feature is in all of the tourist books of 'must see,' it did not make it on my highlight reel.
The museum also featured The Red House, which was originally one of the old private residences of King Pinklao, and Issaretrachanusorn Hall, which provided another example of the Royal Thai life back in the day. The Hall only got a quick scan from us though as it was near the end of our day and we were roasting - the National Museum needs to work on its air conditioning!