The King of Cambodia and Angkor Wat

Hello dear readers- sorry for the long delay in posting. LanguageCorps has basically turned into slave drivers and I haven’t had much free time this entire week.

So I didn’t do that much exciting stuff in the past week.

Though I saw the king of Cambodia.

And went to Angkor Wat.

Okay so I guess I have a few things to report.

I’ll start at the King of Cambodia. We were in a restaurant and happened to have a good view of the riverfront and were on the second floor sitting outside. The entire street was empty of cars and tuk tuks and motos, which was really strange because it was rush hour and there are usually too many vehicles to fit on the road. We were trying to figure out what was going on when one of the restaurant employees said, “The king.”

And sure enough, a caravan of really expensive cars, most of them of the Lexus variety, drove through. The second one had Cambodian flags on the front of it and the king was just leaning out the window and waving. We shouted and waved, and he looked right up at us and laughed and waved back. That’s right- the king of Cambodia waved at me. My life is now complete.

Nothing else happened last week that can even compare to the king of Cambodia until we drove out to Siem Reap on Friday. Now I know this is my second time blogging about this so I’ll try to stick to the stuff that was new. Bus ride- long, stuffy, and old news. Hotel- extremely nice and a swimming pool that we took advantage of the second night. Siem Reap- still awesome. We got to the hotel at about 8:30, met for dinner and got pizza, and then crashed. Everyone just went straight to bed except for a few of the die hard guys- don’t know how they made it through the temples the next day.

We saw so many temples on Saturday my mind was blown. I mean when I was in Siem Reap this summer, we saw a good deal of temples, but we only went for like four hours. Ten hours straight on Saturday. Ten hours. I love temples, don’t get me wrong, but when my guide started talking about the intricate artwork on this one tiny wall of this huge temple called Bayon, I walked off and started exploring on my own.

I will say this about the temples in Siem Reap- they’re definitely unique. One because many of them are crumbling and the foundations are starting to come down. Two because despite that tourists are still allowed to walk around and touch everything. We walked straight through rocks that were basically about ready to come tumbling down on top of us, and thought nothing of it. We touched stone and gravel that was hundreds of years old. We climbed steps that were climbed by kings. And let me tell you we climbed. These people must have had tiny feet in the early centuries of A.D. because we had to basically mountain climb up the side of some of these things. I took a picture of some people coming down one of the temples- it’s pretty intense.

We went through the same basic temples I saw before with a lot of little ones thrown in. My favorite new temple was the last temple we went to. We hiked up a hill for fifteen minutes at sunset with about a thousand other tourists, mountain climbed our way up several steps and level s to the very top, and jockeyed for position to watch as the sky turned into molten reds, oranges, and purples. It was a glorious sight, one of my favorites in Cambodia. Watching the sun set and being able to see all around, to see Angkor Wat and the Mekong River and so much of the countryside was absolutely amazing.

Getting down was not so easy. It probably took me ten minutes to get down the steps. Granted I was wearing sandals. But let me back up a second and explain my shame because not everyone took ten minutes to get down. Our babysitter from LanguageCorps was Sophia, a Khmer woman who is really friendly and nice. Her mother decided to come along on the trip. Guess where this is going. That’s right. Her mother basically carried me down the side of this temple. She told me where to put my feet, held my hand, guided me down as much as possible, and did it all barefoot. She is my idol. When I’m her age, I want to be able to climb up and down temples. And as if that wasn’t enough of a kick in the face, once I finally made my way down to the bottom of the steps, I turned around and a Khmer woman with a cane was coming down. And she was making impressive progress.

Anyway I’m sure I’ll continue embarrassing myself throughout Cambodia and all of Southeast Asia as this trip continues. We went back to the hotel, showered because we were covered in dirt from scrambling all over temples all day, and went out for Mexican food for dinner. That’s right. Mexican food. And it was amazing. We visited a few of the bars, but called it an early night because of the bus ride the next morning.

Sunday we got to see the best temple ever. Okay maybe besides Angkor Wat, but it’s a close second. It was a temple grown over by trees like Ta Prohm, which is another temple close to Angkor Wat, but there were pathways built in everywhere. We got to walk through pathways in the trees to see this temple, down pathways beneath hidden tunnels, through woods and undergrowth and forest, and we felt like real explorers. The temple is very out of the way and not many tourists know about it, so we were the only ones there, which added to the exclusivity and the idea that we were discovering something entirely new. One of my favorites, though another terrible place to wear sandals. You’d think I would learn.

We endured the bus ride home and went straight to bed. At least I did. I hope no one tried to go out because we were all dead on our feet.

The next morning it was up early and off to class. We all had homework due, of course even though we had a LanguageCorps sponsored field trip, so we begrudgingly worked on that (most of us during lunch right before it was due). The whole week we’ve been doing teaching assignments. We’ve put together different lessons, like communicative or listening, etc. and had to split into groups and perform them for each other and be graded. It hasn’t been too intense, but it’s been difficult enough that I’ve been spending lots of time preparing.

I’m starting to get a little nervous because I start student teaching on Monday. Kindergarten. Lord save me. LanguageCorps has mostly been preparing us to work with older students so I feel like working with little ones will be interesting. We have no idea what they’re learning and no way to know before we go into class on the first day, so it’s basically sink or swim. I’m going to bring a few games and hope that I’m well prepared. It’s not as easy to prepare lessons here- it’s hard to find resources. Kids books and classroom materials do exist but not in massive quantities and they’re hidden throughout the city. Plus my Khmer is limited to “How are you?” and “Bathroom” so I’m kind of at a loss. I have lesson plans due throughout my teaching, and we have yet to talk about how to prepare lessons for LanguageCorps so I’m not sure that I’m going to have much help on that. I have a feeling my lessons will revolve around the alphabet anyway so it shouldn’t be too difficult, but we’re getting observed and graded so that will be nerve-wracking.

To get back on track and report the rest of my week… I visited the orphanage this week! Twice. I showed up on Monday and four kids were there. Everyone else had gone to a restaurant. Which happens once a month. And I happened to pick the day it happened. So I talked to Srey Mom, whom I love, for awhile and then left and came back on Tuesday. Everyone was there on Tuesday. I was about knocked over. I didn’t expect the kids to recognize me, let alone remember my name, but wow they really did. They were so excited. I also got to see Mike, who I volunteered with this summer, and Jen, the volunteer coordinator for Palm Tree, so that was pretty awesome. Then I got stolen away to help with homework. Let me tell you, these kids have some homework that is impossible for a native English speaker to do. Can someone please tell me what part of speech the word ‘likewise’ is? I’d appreciate it. Srey Mom’s class had to find words they didn’t know in an article, define them four times, give them synonyms, tell the part of speech, find prefixes, roots, and suffixes, and use them in sentences. I was ready to give up halfway through. It also didn’t help that I was recruited to help the little kids with alphabet flashcards at the same time. It was a pretty crazy night but it was exciting to see everyone again. It’s amazing how much the orphanage became a home to me. It felt so right going back.

Anyway that has been my week so far. I’m leaving for Thailand on Friday, and we’re stopping at a beach on the way till Sunday (my life is so difficult right?) and then heading to Pattaya. And then it’s student teaching on Monday with the kindergarteners, so you will all hear about that. I hope everyone back home is doing well and I miss you all!

Love from Cambodia,

Monica