Top 10 Creepiest Dolls From The Island of the Dolls

It's the time of year people start heading south to Mexico to escape the winter blues. About two years ago I took my first trip to Mexico too, but I went to the Mexico City and Puebla instead of a beach-front destination. While preparing for my trip to Mexico I remembered that Xochimilco is just south of the Mexico City, and that this Venice-like community was home to the famous "Island of the Dolls."

I've written about my time to the island before so I won't go into too many details in this article. Instead, in honour of my almost two-year-anniversary of my trip to one of the creepiest places in the world, I put together a list of my Top 10 Creepiest Dolls From The Island of the Dolls.

(I would say "enjoy", but c'mon now, you know this is going make your skin crawl.)

With the holiday season upon us, many people have begun asking me if and how I plan to celebrate Christmas. This is a good question, and I completely understand the confusion since Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Jesus as the human embodiment of God and since Buddhists do not believe in God, Christ's birth should have very little importance.

However, surprisingly, many Buddhists still celebrate Christmas. Buddhists believe Christ's teachings not only compliment those of Buddha, but that Jesus is a "Bodhisattva", which is one who forgoes their own benefit to help others and has compassion, kindness and love for all beings. Because of these reasons, many Buddhists see Jesus as a blessing to the earth and have no problems celebrating his birth. This differs from Christian belief as Buddhists recognize the Jesus as a man and teacher, but not the Messiah.

Buddhists also have their own holiday on December 8th, which celebrates the day Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. This holiday, "Bodhi Day", is celebrated by eating cookies (preferable heart shaped – which matches the leaves of fig, or Bodhi, tree) and rice, drinking milk and decorating trees with bright lights. In Asia, Buddhists decorate fig trees, but since Western climate can be harsh and these trees cannot survive, many Western Buddhists instead decorate evergreen trees. Buddhists decorate these trees with multi-coloured lights which represent the many different paths to achieve enlightenment. 

The flight from Regina to Osaka was both incredibly boring, and incredibly interesting.

I sat with three different women from three different walks of life, on the three planes I took to get there. The first was a new mother, who was heading to Newfoundland for her sister's wedding. Her daughter was only a few months old, and didn't cry until we began to land in Toronto. The second woman was an American who was heading to meet up with her boyfriend in Kyoto during a confrence regarding heat transfer in skyscrapers and urban cities. The third was an old, tired woman, who has seen many things, and learned many more, but just longed to return home to Osaka to rest.

Besides the company, the flights themselves were very plain. I traveled from Regina to Toronto, Toronto to Tokyo and Tokyo to Osaka. We flew North from Toronto, up above Churchill, past Yellowknife, Whitehorse and Alaska. It was here I saw hundreds of miles of ice sheets covering the north Pacific Ocean -- although it was the middle of August! We then flew over the tail of Russia and down into Japan.