See 'em Rip

This past weekend Matt and I and my parents went to Siem Reap, Cambodia. It's a city that's in the middle of the country on a big lake (that they said is the second biggest in the world, but I have to google this...).

We had an excellent long weekend, though at first we weren't sure we were going to share it with Sandy and Sue. They were meeting us there from Bangkok, but their flight was canceled. Somehow they showed up at the hotel. That was good news.

We went to a floating village on the lake. It's just the beginning of the dry season, so the homes were still pretty close to the land, but apparently when the lake dries up, they float their houses far away towards the middle of the lake. The greens that are sticking their heads up on the lake become mangroves - real trees, and roads appear. Pretty crazy. We saw many floating houses, two floating churches, a few floating markets, a floating school, and some other floating things. Overall, it was cool.

We found a bar in town that had draft beers (Angkor, which was actually quite good) for $0.50. We drank a lot of beers there. We also had excellent Cambodian food including curries, noodles and vegetables, and fish amok, which is their national dish.

Friday we templed. We went to four temples total, and they were all outstanding. We saw Ta Prom, Banteay Srei, (Angkor Thom) Bayon, and Angkor Wat. Ta Prom had lots of cool trees growing out of it, Banteay Srei was pink, Bayon had amazing faces and carvings, and Angkor Wat's size was just unbelievable.

These temples were built by kings between the 800s and the 1200s. They were a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist, and their size was just amazing. All of the artwork that survived was also pretty unbelievable.

Saturday we went to a temple called Beng Melea. It's basically how it was when it was discovered, so it hasn't been rebuilt or restored. My dad and I crawled all over the temple, and we all basically took a tour through the craziness. I can't imagine how cool it would be to discover something like that - like what if you were walking down the street, chasing after your pig or something, and then you ran into a 100 meter long serpent. How cool would that be?

We also had a chance to visit a market, and stop in some of the villages to explore a bit. Wow. Serious poverty. These people do not have clean drinking water. The lucky ones had wells, and others just caught rain water. Kids were super dirty (but really cute), and they had very few things.

One thing that did surprise me was that many of the houses had nothing except a television inside. They have batteries that they recharge, and apparently the battery lets you watch tv for a few days (no electricity).

We drank and ate more, and that was about it. All in all, we all had a great trip. Matt and I decided that after we're through with Singapore we will move to Cambodia.

My parents left this morning (at 4:30!). I think they had a good time, though it seems like they would like to come for a shorter time next time. They were gone for more than three weeks, I believe. Pretty nuts. They did do some cool stuff in Thailand, though (check out the elephants!). I am posting a few pictures from out trip, but you can click here to see all of them (or most anyways).

Pretty bummy that Michigan lost. Pretty excellent that OSU lost.