The Garden of Earthly Delights

On our trip to Vietnam we spent a couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. We hired a tour guide who took us to one temple that was full of these graphically illustrated pictures of all the absolutely awful things that happen to you in the afterlife if you don’t mind your p’s and q’s while in this mortal coil. It reminded me of a Hieronymus Bosch painting I saw once in Spain called “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Anyway, the tour guide was happily chatting away to the kids about grisly punishments such as having your legs chopped off by a blue guy with a cow's head or getting eaten by long-fanged snakes while you’re tied to a stake. The kids were mesmerized (and scared). It was a bit freaky for me too. Fortunately, all thoughts of eternal doom quickly vanished when a little cat walked by and the kids ran after it.