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The first day we went to some temple in Phnom Penh. I can’t really remember much about it except that it was all yellow and red and it was really pretty, plus the gardens were incredibly green. So the whole thing was really pretty. I think the emperor used to use the main building for receptions and would live in another building, but I’m not really sure. The coolest thing about the whole place was that the Khmer Rouge left it totally alone so it was basically still like new.
I was bored pretty quickly, so I went off on my own. I found a cat wandering around and chased it toward the end of one of the buildings, and it crawled in through a fence that I couldn’t go through, and then it fell asleep on the ground. I was a little bit jealous. Also, it was a total cutie. I also remember seeing some guy working on the grounds spraying the grass with whatever so there wouldn’t just be scorched earth everywhere and thinking, “Man, this guy must have the best job in Cambodia,” because he gets to spray himself with water. I think they’re actually not allowed to, which makes it possibly the worst job in Cambodia…
Myself, Nick, and Jen got some ice cream and sat under an umbrella for shade. There was live music playing from somewhere else in the complex, and we kept wondering exactly where it was, exactly where the exit was, and exactly when the bus would leave without us. After we got up a bit more, we found some huge standing pots of flowers that had sprinklers going, so I just stepped right it and enjoyed the water coming from the sprinklers, and felt kind of like I did in Japan when I kept turning my face up to the sun. Jen took pictures of me. As I was walking away, Jen noticed that there was a mother and two very young naked Cambodian boys rolling around in some fountains. I think you have to pay to get in to this place…. But I guess if you’re there you might as well take a shower, right?
Getting back on the bus was pretty rough… that was the first time that we noticed how pesky people were going to be to us. They would always just sit around the bus’s door and wait for us to come back, and then give their pitch to everyone as they went back on to the bus, and then continue schpieling through the bus windows when we were waiting to go. It was pretty rough to see, although all of them looked like at the very least they weren’t starving…
Later we went to a cruise on a little ferry boat on the Mekong River, which was pretty cool. The sunset was definitely incredibly pretty. We crossed to the other side and I was laying off the front of the boat and we came near this little town on the other bank. It was basically built into the bank, and some houses just went right out over the water. There was a woman who looked maybe twenty or thirty hanging out on her dock washing clothes in the river. All the houses were really more like shacks, I should say. Very poor. And just to the right of them was some HUGE party, probably for Western tourists, with loud music.
When we got back to our shore, there were kids and young adults all over the place playing that shuttlecock game that we had seen in Vietnam and China again. They weren’t quite as good as the kids we saw in the HCMC park, but they were still much better than I was, for instance. Pretty much the entire group crowded around some of them and took pictures and video. They didn’t seem to mind. Some little kids seemed excited about how many cameras there were around them and took pictures with some of us, or just had their pictures taken.
Our bus rolled away eventually, I forget where to (dinner?), and I remember that a little bit down the road we saw a dirt pile against a shack building (not a house) with little kids rolling around naked in it. That was pretty new.
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