Some More Plain Stuff

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We went to lunch after that, it was for western people again and I guess it was pretty good.  After that we could walk around and most of the people went to the main market in town but we weren’t interested so we just walked on our own and eventually found a guitar shop by accident.  Nick found a guitar for $18 which was TOTALLY A DEAL because it was a Yamaha, but he said the action was too high, and he’d have to buy a case for another $15, and he didn’t want to have to transport it back into Vietnam and then onto the ship, so he didn’t get it.  I played a little bit, including singing Disloyal Order of Water Buffalo, and the shopowner’s husband had come out at that point and clapped when I was done.

 

Some dude from the UN stopped by and talked to us because he was American too but he was weird and thankfully left quickly.  None of the pianos worked.  I think Nick bought a couple of picks and I got one too – so now I have a red one from Vietnam and a green one from Cambodia, which I think is a little bit backward.

 

Oh, we went to a museum too, but it was boring and they had a really impressive collection of hand-crafts and a nice garden in the middle, but it was very far from “art” in any meaningful sense so I wasn’t really interested.  We sat in the middle on a bench in the shade and noticed a big lizard in the garden in front of us.  It looked like a shiny snake with legs but a little shorter than usual.  A guy walked by it and it scurried away.

 

A lot of people in Cambodia will just put their drinks into little plastic bags, hold the handles, put a straw in there and drink straight from the bag.  Sometimes they also put the cups into bags as well.  I don’t really know why they do that.  It’s not very sustainable though…

 

Later that night we went to dinner at a huge western place that had a buffet.  The food was good, but we had to pay for ALL our drinks and the chocolate milk was hot and not very good so I was sad and felt kind of cheated.  They had a cultural dance show, which was well produced and whatnot but not terribly interesting except for one that involved a little bit of a secret romance (!).  Nick had escaped and just went walking by himself.  I was not so lucky.  But it was okay.

 

We were pretty tired and we were getting up the next morning at 5am to go see Angkor Wat before sunrise, so we didn’t want to go out.  Besides, Siem Reap is kind of a tourist city… although the hotel was actually in the middle of a pretty poor area… maybe I should have gone out.  It’s okay.  I think I’ll go back.  Anyway, we spent the night lounging on this enormous couch at the hotel and three of my friends split a bottle of wine and a bowl of peanuts covered in salt and sugar.  It was still super hot, but it was nice.