First Days in Siem Reap

We arrived in Siem Reap after a nice five hour bus ride, and immediately took three tuk tuk's to the village we will be working with for the remainder of our time in Siem Reap. When we arrived we were met by a horde of children who never leave our sides. We then met all of the musicions of the village in the ""Friendship Hut" which Cambodia travelers helped build two years ago. They played two or three songs for us on tradational Khmer instruments, some of which were made by people in the village. After this we wrapped up and went to dinner at a Khmer place, which was very good. The next day we all went out to breakfast and ate our fill before going back to the village to teach English. A few hours into teaching we learned that a new vollyball net had been put up which gave the English lessons a rather abrupt end. Vollyball was lots of fun and Ryan, Rebecca, Patrick and myself all played. Unfortinuatly for us what the Khmer people lack in height they make up in the ability to spike the vollyball...hard. After we finished the game everyone went back to the hotel to shower and get ready to go out to Angkor Tom, a massive ancient temple complex, where we saw one of the many temples there, which happened to be where the movie Tomb Raider was shot. We moved on from the temple to the smallest of the massive reservoirs built around the 13th century by hand. The size of these reservoirs is absud even by todays standards, some of them are over four miles long! Our tuk tuk drivers then took us to the market where we had dinner at a place called "Temple". After ordering our food Rebecca and I played Ryan and Riege in pool, where we were all impressed by Riege's ability to quit a game of pool with highschool students. The next day was most likely my favorite day so far. It started out with going out to the village to teach English for a few hours while Mrs. Bovard and Mr. Riege discussed many different topics with the adults of the village, including the value of equity in a community. We came back to the hotel for a bit, and then headed out to see the very famous Angkor Wat. Upon arrival via tuk tuk we were immediantly surrounded by a mass of young people selling different trinkets and books. We quickly moved to the other side of the road and walked down part of the causeway across Angkor Wat's massive moat (over two miles long!) Here I made a quick presentation with some interesting facts about Angkor Wat and then we moved on to the temple itself where Patrick shared some information with us about the bas-relief of Angkor Wat, the longest bas-relief in the world. We explored the temple a bit and I ended up next to a very angry monkey, and proceded to get out of the way, very quickly, before I got my face ripped off. When we crossed the road to get back in our Tuk Tuk's we were again surrounded by the mob of people trying to sell us things. We all got in our tuk tuk's while Lauren bargned for a book. Riege decided he wanted to buy some postcards, and the tuk tuk with Ms. Bovard, Riege, Lauren and myself was promptly surrounded by two dozen screaming kids. He bought a few postcards from one young girl, and in the process the kids learned that his name was Steve and yelled "STEVE STEVE BUY THIS" for the next few minutes. He got fed up and yelled "LIFE IS NOT FAIR" One girl who Mr. Riege didn't buy anything from seemed to agree with this and proceded to tell him that he in fact was not a fair man. One of us kids on the tuk tuk agreed with this and told her that he was not only an unfair man but was also a bad man. I won't mention names. She agreed with this, and Mr. Riege told the tuk tuk driver to get him away from here, I think he was scared of the 13 year old Khmer girl. One of the young kids took a liking to "STEVE"and hung onto our tuk tuk to everyone suprise and told Mr. Riege that he was in face a good man, and then jumped off while we were going about 10 miles per hour. Luckly Lauren got a decent ammount of this on video, and if we are lucky it will be posted in the blog at some point. Hopefully some of you will have some comments on this matter, and I would love to know how many people agree with the little Khmer girl. I sure do.

Dan