Place: Golden Rock

A pagoda up on a mountain, you take an hour bus ride to get to it. Supposedly the rock is on top of a hair of Buddha’s, and the pagoda was built around that. Then again, basically every pagoda we visited had some sort of story about containing something related to Buddha.

The gold on the rock is painted on, but also from gold leaves stuck onto it. It’s a tradition to stick gold leaves onto statues and such in pagodas as offerings to the Buddha. One pagoda we visited had so many leaves stuck on the statue, it looked like a ball of gold, with no visible signs of the person underneath anymore. Women aren’t allowed to touch the rock. Many pagodas had signs advertising things along those lines :/

Food: Crickets

The food of the future! To eat, just remove the stinger then pop them into your mouth. A great source of protein and very sustainable for the environment. Unfortunately I didn’t like it very much. I wasn’t even grossed out by it being bugs or anything, it just didn’t taste very good… They have a nice crunch, but there’s an after taste that lingers in your mouth that isn’t great.