This 2013 bonus material for my website supporters (newly made public) is taken on New Year’s Eve, walking along my residential street in Chiang Mai toward the temple just a few hundred feet from my apartment. It’s a little cooler here at night now and we tend to keep our balcony doors open when the sun has gone down to let the fresh air in. Tonight, carried in on the breeze was the sound of monks chanting, bringing in the New Year. They continued chanting for hours, right through the midnight fireworks. At about 8:30 PM I grabbed my camera and went down to the street in order to record their voices. At the end of the video is the nearly full moon and the stage which was erected the previous morning, with photographs of important people and a centerpiece of the “jade Buddha”, cast in green. (It’s a replica; the real jade Buddha resides, I believe, in a museum.)
