onetenchelsea

I'm now in the awkward position of not having written in such a long time that I have far to much to say. Each time I thought about sitting down and writing I was overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that we've done so I wrote nothing at all. So, I think for the time being I'm going to pass over the Lao PDR and write about what we've been doing most recently. Hopefully I'll remember to go back and write about Laos later. For now I'll just say that I really enjoyed it. Especially Luang Prabang.

Needless to say, J was able to get pages added to her passport. It's was rather painless in fact. No money and very little time. So now she's got the passport equivalent of a double-wide, which is pretty cool.

We've been in Cambodia for about 5 days now. We were supposed to fly into Siem Reap, but the flight was cancelled for 2 days, so we took a flight to Phnom Phen instead.

We've been spending so much time in fairly uncorrupt socialist countries it's been interesting to contrast Cambodia. For example, we needed to get J another visa for Vietnam because hers had expired. It wasn't until the second trip to the embassy that we even got the guard to let us in. He kept trying to convince us to leave our passports and come back tomorrow. Once inside, the conversation went something like this:

us - how much is visa and how long does it take?
him - $30 and two days.
us - there is no way to do it faster?
him - give me $5 and sit down.
us - uh, ok.

So anyways, we got the visa right there and then. There are also a lot more beggars and con-artists here.

All of that said, I do like it here. The first day here, we were in a restaurant and we had finished eating so I asked to "pay." I think they thought I said "play" so they brought us a deck of cards.

The last three days, we've been at Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. Angkor was probably one of the biggest cities in the world in the 13th century, but only the religious buildings were allowed to be made of stone, so everything else is long gone. Imagine if the monuments of New York (the statue of liberty, the Chrysler building, the empire state building) were the only things left and everything else were just swallowed by the jungle and that will give you an idea. It was absolutely amazing. I've always wanted to visit something like that (the pyramids, Machu Pichu, ect) and I'm so glad that I've finally gotten the opportunity.

Since Scrubs is on TV now and skinny dorky guys who daydream are in fashion I have no problem admitting that I was pretending to be Indiana Jones most of the time. uh... yeah...