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.