Mosque

There’s actually not much to see in Bandar Seri Begawan and I saw the most interesting part yesterday afternoon. I spent the morning in a cafe reading up about Sabah where I’m going next as I hadn’t made any plans and thought it might be good to have a vague idea of what I want to do!

After lunch I went to the Royal Regalia Museum – essentially a display of all the very expensive but useless stuff people (mostly officials from other governments) have given to the Sultan of Brunei over the years. It made me think about the amount of money that must be wasted (in my opinion) by monarchs, and other heads of state, or senior officials who have to give expensive presents to other monarchs or heads of state of the countries they visit. There’s got to be a better use of resouces.

There were lots of sculptures, many of animals, many of mosques, lots of gold and other sparkly stuff, but my favourite for weirdness was a sculpture (that doesn’t seem the right word since it might have been stone or plastic) given by an official from Thailand. It was of 13 babies, each about 3cm high, with blue eyes, wearing nappies and with a small round cap on their heads. They were arranged in formation and each playing a traditional Thai musical instrument. I tried but couldn’t sneak a photo!

Later I visited the mosque. I went prepared – wearing loose trousers, I had a long sleeved shirt in to put on and a scarf to cover my head. This has always been fine for visiting mosques before but they wanted me to wear an abaya (a long black cloak) too. Fine if I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, I’d expect it, but I was just as covered as any Muslim Brunei woman and there weren’t enough abayas on the rack for all Muslim women who go to pray to be given one. I’m happy to wear long clothes and cover my hair for as long as I’m in the mosque, just as I’m happy to wear sleeves and take my shoes of in a Hindu temple and won’t shout across a church to someone. But I don’t want to be unnecessarily subjected to a stricter dress code than local women and I decided not to go in. The mosque looks better at night anyway!