The Temples of Angkor- Cambodia cont'd

Saturday afternoon my boss left to go back to Ha Noi from Phnom Penh and I made my big break. Hopped on a bus and 6 hours later was in Siem Reap, the gateway town to the temples of Angkor.

Angkor, meaning "city", served as the capital of the Khmer empire which lasted from about AD800 - 1431. Angkor was the largest preindustrial society in the world and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site with over 1000 temples. The most famous is Angkor Wat (literally meaning 'temple city'), which I tried to capture in the artsy photo below. Alas, the giant blue tarp while the temple is undergoing renovations, takes away from the godliness and intrigue of the place.

One of the 54 giant stone heads of the Bayon temple

It took me a full day to explore as much of the temples as I could (including Ta Prom, where parts of Lara Croft Tomb Raider were filmed- that's right, I took some awkward action shots of myself in front of ancient ruins).

The day concluded by watching the sunset from the highest temple in the area. Not an original idea, seeing as every tourist within a 50mile radius had flocked to the same perch, but still pretty magical.

When I got to my hotel the receptionist showed me to my room and told me to look out the window. This is what I saw. No chance of escape in the event of an emergency.

Kampuchea aka Cambodia

A few weeks ago my boss approached me with the following question: "How would you feel about going to Cambodia?" HELLZ YEAH!!! Ok, I didn't say it quite like that, but I was excited for a chance to travel outside of Viet Nam.

My boss and I got an obnoxiously early flight and jetsetted off to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We were going for a final wrap-up meeting of a Sustainable Collection of Wild Medicinal Plants project. Successful meeting and successful trip.

The national monument at night. I didn't realize I was trespassing until the guard started yelling at me in Khmer. Oops!

We stayed in Phnom Penh for four days and I did some sightseeing while, ahem, "working" from the hotel. I took a visit to the royal palace and national museum. I also went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which is a school in the middle of the city that the Khmer Rouge turned into a torture prison from 1976-79 (now a museum), before taking victims out to the Killing Fields (an equally popular tourist destination) to be bludgeoned and buried in mass graves. It's strange that these places have become the big tourist draw in Phnom Penh. Literally every tuk-tuk driver that sees a foreigner will say something like "Hi lady. I take you to killing field." Creepy.

One of the temples in the royal palace.

Exploitation of the human obsession with disaster aside, these places do bring to light the horrendous truth of the reign of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. Equally sickening is that the UN supported the Khmer Rouge during and after all of this was happening. Needless to say, my visit to the former prison was a profound and disgusting experience. But as someone I met in PP advised me, "Go to the Genocide Museum, and then afterwards go sit in local cafe, drink a cup of coffee, and watch daily Phnom Penh life. The contrast is astounding and inspiring"

At the prison

So I did, and he was right. Like in Viet Nam, another country with a war-torn and bloody past, Cambodians have reestablished themselves and moved forward with their lives and country.

Two things

1) The other day at the Ha Noi International airport I walked through the metal detector at the security checkpoint at the same time as a worker carrying a metal ladder.

The alarm went off.

Security waved me through.

2) In case you haven't heard me talk about Gaelic football enough- one of our players is a journalist and wrote up this story about the team. Check it out- I'm on the BBC!

Update from the BKK

A quick update: I am alive! Slightly bruised and battered from my foray into the world of international sports competitions. But Bangkok was a blast!

To recap, I went to Bangkok the weekend of the Oct 17-18 to play in the Southeast Asia Gaelic Football Tournament. Our team of 12 ladies, dubbed the DuraCelts (like Duracell baterries), hail from France, Germany, England, America (me), and Viet Nam. Zero Irish players, and almost zero previous experience playing the game. After about 1 month of intensive training 3xweek and a 1-hour rule-learning session 4 days before we left for BKK, we decided we were ready to take on the giant players from teams around Asia. And I have to say I'm really proud of us. Despite the torrential downpours. Our team played 7 games (7 more than all but 1 player had ever played before): won 2 games and lost by 1 point in two others. We were even the runners-up in the Bowl championship and lost by one point in an epic battle to the end, with Marion, our captain spraining her ankle in the final few minutes and another girl playing with a broken nose. We all came home with a medal. And very smelly uniforms.

Definition of surreal: watching a traditional Thai song and dance performance and moments later an Irish step dancer, then eating spring rolls with Guinness beer and signing traditional Irish songs with a bunch of drunk Gaels

Afterwards, I did 2 days of sightseeing in Bangkok with a friend and really enjoyed the trip. Bangkok is surprisingly modern, which was a nice respite from the craziness of Ha Noi. We visited the Grand Palace and eased our aching muscles with an AMAZING massage at Wat Pho, which is a temple that has been training masseuses for centuries. I got back early Wednesday morning and went straight to work and was so exhausted I had to take an afternoon cat nap so I wouldn't start drooling on my computer. Naps are actually pretty common here- another coworker who was on travel has been consistently napping this past week until the jet-lag wears off. And if you go into any cafe or shop after lunch, chances are you'll have to tread carefully around the snoozing shopowner on the floor as your peruse the wares.At the Grand Palace in Bangkok

Internet Snafu

For the diligent few of you who are actually following this blog, my apologies. I haven't posted in a while, and I'll tell you why. Ok, laziness and neglect aside, I came back from Bangkok to discover that the internet at our house was no longer working. A perplexing situation. We got the landlord to help, and turns out the internet company had turned off our internet because we hadn't paid the bill for September. INSERT SAD TROMBONE HERE.
Just to reassure the parental types reading this, I swear, I'm not that broke. The thing with bills here is that you never know when they will be collected. What happens is some late Sunday or equally random night there will be an aggressive ringing of the doorbell. Then you will step outside to find a little old lady on a bicycle or motorbike with a stack of papers. She will hand you one of those papers, written entirely in Vietnamese, and demand money for something that you're not quite sure what it is. You will give up trying to decipher the bill and hand over the 100,000 or 1 million dong she demands. And then, voila! You have just paid that month's electricity or water bill. Given the completely erratic nature of bills here, I guess it's not so unreasonable that we would miss a month.
But thankfully we got things sorted out (mostly thanks to Big J) and now I can post this message to you from the comfort of my bedroom. This also means I can stop trying to sneak some quality Facebook time while at the office.