National Lamphun

Here’s another chedi I modelled in SketchUp, this one from Wat Haripunjaya in the sleepy old town of Lamphun. I was going to post a shot of this one standing up in Google Earth, but the satellite map of that area is so unfocused that I can’t even find the town center, much less the temple. This model went much faster than the first one, mainly because I figured out how to match the perspective in my source pictures more accurately and so my guesses as to where things went weren’t quite as wild.
While it had the huge disadvantage of not being on a mountaintop, I thought this chedi (and its surrounding temple) was in itself a lot more evocative than the more well-maintained one at Doi Suthep which I posted about yesterday - this chedi was much taller, and was wearing a couple huge silk sarongs, and had bells and electric lights and things dangling off it and birds perching on it and so on. Overall it seemed older, and was clearly revered but had aged in a slightly grungy way.

I had a really peaceful, dusty afternoon strolling around Lamphun, and a fine lunch afterwards in the dimmest restaurant I’ve ever been in. It was a cave. There were lights, but they must have been like 4 1/2 watt bulbs. The food cost maybe a third of what it would have in Bangkok, which is already pretty damn cheap. And that was the tourist restaurant written up in Lonely Planet.

As a kid I had always wondered how all those billions of Earth’s people you hear about live on $1 a week or whatever. It always seemed odd to me that they didn’t just starve. I guess the answer is that no matter how wretchedly destitute some average third-world schmuck might be, there are almost always other equally poor people just feet away selling him large and filling meals for just pennies. At least that’s how it seems to work in Thailand. And now you know, thanks to that observation, why it’s probably best for everyone that I didn’t go into economics. Or social work.

A Jay kan clepen “Wat” as wel as kan the Pope

Just something I made in SketchUp today. It’s the central... Stupa? Or chedi. I think this is called a chedi. Anyway, the shiny gold thing in the center of Wat Phra Doi Suthep temple, overlooking Chiang Mai. I wanted to do something small and completable, after all my half-finished cathedrals. So I just spent a couple of sometimes-frustrating but overall satisfying hours on this bad boy. I didn’t have any blueprints or anything to go by, just a couple photos from very weird angles that I tried to match as best I could.
Of course, the model captures nothing about what makes the real thing so moving: the brilliant gold plate glinting in the sun, the smell of incense, the people making their orisons circling the base, the feel of the courtyard’s cool marble under your bare feet, the breezy mountaintop, the sound of ringing gongs. None of that’s in the model. But I still felt something vaguely... therapeutic in calling into existence even a pale shadow of the thing.

The best Zelda level ever

Meet Yeto. He is a yeti who wears a horse’s saddle for a hat. I don’t know why he thinks that is an appropriate hat, but that’s Yeto for you. He lives in the mountainous northern province of Hyrule, and when he’s not foraging for reekfish, he’s hanging out inside my favorite Zelda level ever, so far: Snowpeak Ruins from Twilight Princess.

I’ve been playing Zelda games for something like 23 years now, and slogging through standard dungeons like, for example, the water dungeon where you pull levers to turn on the water to different levels to make things happen, or the fire dungeon where you leap from rock to rock above a pool of lava, has gotten quite tedious. Even playing from inside a giant fish or tree doesn’t quite do it for me any more. A level I recently played involving magnetic boots and enormous swivelling electromagnetic cranes, which probably would have made my jaw drop as a kid, scarcely evoked an arched eyebrow of mild interest. I mean, that’s not even the first time that Link has walked on the ceiling, for Pete’s sake. I felt like I’d seen it all.

Then the other day I played this level, and my heart surged with game-playing joy.
I’ve always been partial to snowy levels, but what I particularly like about this one is that unlike most Zelda dungeons, it’s a “real” building: an above-ground building on a recognizably human scale, i.e., with furniture and walls, rather than a collection of vast polyhedral underground caverns. This real-building feel was also more or less the case with my previous favorite level, the Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time.

Snowpeak Ruins is a European-style chateau that’s fallen into disrepair, inhabited by two friendly abominable snowpeople who hang out making tasty soup in the kitchen and warming themselves on a divan in the foyer.
While Mario for some reason visits haunted houses, hotels and asteroids all the time, I don’t think there’s been a major level of a Zelda game before that was just a haunted house rather than an abandoned temple/dungeon/cave, and it’s quite charming to see the two yetis hanging out in their dilapidated home.

The atmospheric details of the level are terrific - almost every room’s rafters have holes in them that snow’s drifting through, and the snowy stone courtyard reminded me of being in the Festung Hohensalzburg. I also like the way that you approach it, which is after a fun but not too difficult snowboarding ride across a snowy mountain.
The whole thing - the restrainedly realistic (for a Zelda game) architectural design of the chateau, the fact that the level is not an evil ancient ruin but a friendly couple’s house, the snowy setting, the very cool weapon you get halfway through - I love it all.

I’m not done with the game yet, but I doubt that the upcoming levels will be as charming or memorable. I’m already kind of ticked off by the Temple of Time level, which combines three of the most tedious and frustrating Zelda level design chestnuts: The remote-controlled stone statue, the escort mission, and the time-worn technique of “backtracking through the exact same rooms all over again only with a new item so that some things are slightly different”. Bah. Snowpeak Ruins has very little cliché about it, except for an icy sliding-block puzzle and the fact that the enormous swivelling cannons you see mounted at several points throughout the castle are not, as it turns out, entirely decorative.

While I have great warmth in my heart for Yeto, I should mention that his beloved matryoshka-shaped wife, Yeta, is also a congenial host, although she has some issues with memory loss and susceptibility to evil magic. But I forgive her.