vaga #3/1 Kuothadaw Paya

PART I

Vaga #3 is always Myanmar, always .........

I am starting in Myanmar with the most reverent feeling that this country has left with me. Spirituality and beauty are expressed in its temples. 

I have the very difficult task of selecting photos for the blog, they are all wonderful, but I will do my best. I have put them in the order that I saw them. 

 It was my first day in Myanmar, Mandalay, I saw this pagoda   "Kuthodaw Paya ". I cannot express the enormous emotion I had when I saw it, I was speechless, I could not believe the beauty of it, one is permitted to enter it and wherever one looked there were white niches, stupas, altars in the centre giving me a 360-degree view of white niches with their golden domes, and others made with metal decorations.......

I could repeat the word "beauty or sublime" to you a thousand times, but I will not do it in case I bore you, but I felt it in every breath that I took in this place. I want you to feel my emotion, which was overwhelming. Being alone was better than being accompanied, because alone in my silence, in my amazement and without interruptions, being full of peace, admiration, and enjoying the mystical silence that surrounded me.

729 niches each with a marble slab, where the doctrines and foundations (sutras) of Theravada Buddhism are written (chiselled into the slab) on both sides in the Pali language and it is called "the largest book in the world."

Many pagodas that I saw in Myanmar did not interest me much as far as being interested in when it was built or who had made it, I just enjoyed the unique emotion. This was the first one I saw and I have learned that in tourist season it is impossible to walk into it, they even charge money to see it. I was the only tourist, there were a few Burmese and all were in acts of prayer or just being there to admire the Pagodas. The benefits of being there in the off season were huge.

 The cables you see are there because they light it up at night, it's wonderful, but I still didn't know how to take photos at night with my phone, the pictures were terrible, now I think I could manage to take photos at night. I looked for some photos of an evening picture on Wikipedia, but I could not find any.

If you look at the photo below, the central one has marble steps, you had to walk barefoot in 40 degrees of heat, I will have walked over about 150 meters on those floors and the ground was a foot burner, I can’t even tell you how hot the ground was, I had to run and stand in shadows wherever I could find them. I think that was another reason why it was empty, later I found out that the locals go at sunset because of the heat and the burning of soles...  I paid for my lack of experience......

It is a complex design, stupas (dome-shaped structures erected as Buddhist shrines) pagodas, niches and many altars, each one with different types of images of Buddha. I came across these at the end of the tour and there were many local people,  families had settled there to pray, to sell crafts related to the temple and religion ...... it was a wonderful place to be in ........

It gave me the strong urge to pray, which I did