angkor day 4, evening 5 by amy

Today in Asia it is Tuesday night jan 29 and Craig and I just went for an elegant experience which seemed far away from reality; we went to have drinks at the Grand Hotel dÁngkor which is where Jacquie Onassis stayed in 1967 and Charlie Chaplin at some time. The hotel must have taken damage during Pol Pot, but still seems to have the original elegant hand operated lift where you get to see the weight going down as the 2-person wooden stage goes up. It is a pleasant place reminiscent of grand hotels like the Royal hawaiian, the Moana, but kinda plain; the nice qualities were the large swimming pool which made bathers seem like they were in a lake and the really nice old photographs blow up large on the walls.

This morning we got up predawn and went out with our very kind softspoke tuktuk driver to Preah kahn one of the nicer more jumbly temples for the sunrise and then to a temple in a (dry) lake named after a çoiled serpent and then to my current favorite, Ta Sohm. I like the temples which have an aged character the best. Since they are all almost a thousand years old who is kidding who? but I like them.
On the way back from temple-land, we went to visit one of the contemporary buddhist temples in town, Wat Bo. Like many Thai and Lao temples it has maybe five or six buildings, the largest has multi-eaved scrolled eaved peaked roofs and inside is a temple with fairly polished floors, a very large golden buddha in the center, with older buddhas behind, and on the walls are stucco paintings from the 1800s showing many hinduesque scenes delicately painted in blues and golds. It has many tall shuttered windows with old wooden carvings of dragons, buffalos and mythical animals in pairs. You look out from the cool dark temple interior onto fields of stupas and many fragrant frangipani trees. Since fragrant trees are missing from Angkor, this is a really nice treat. A few monks are around and one gave us a blessing in exchange for our donation which we could not understand and they were taking very good care of temple cats so we got a nice feeling about this. The buddhist life in Cambodia took a terrible beating under pol pot in the 70s, and apparently 95% of monks were killed; so some of the training of monks had to be sort of reinvented and nowadays, I read, young men don't routinely spend much time as a monk; a family only has to have their son be a monk for a week or two in order to gain merit.

The longer time I have in Cambodia the more I pick up on the scars of the last thirty years of civil war and the more I learn. Many people helping us are in their thirties or younger; but our driver who we sort of know as Johann but his real name is something more like Sobahn tells me he speaks Thai and he has 4 kids, so maybe he is in his late 30s or 40s and maybe he was one of the folks who spent time in the dreadfully crowded Thai refugee camps. We see many people injured by land mines, but since even this year a landmine exploded in a "cleared"area when they were roadbuilding, it's hard to saw how recently or distantly they were hurt. Life is obviously quite hard. Due to shortages of school buildings and teachers and money, kids seem to go to school in 4 hours shifts as they do in Indonesia, so when you visit a temple in the morning you get one set of postcard/tshirt/puppet sellers, and in the evening a different set of kids who have never seen you. At midday, many kids in the school uniform of white top, blue sarong or blue pants are biking home, doubled or tripled up on the same bike. Then they change into their western handmedown tshirts which say 'happy kitty'or 'sexý one' or whatever, to start selling you cards. Amazing how many languages the kids speak, I will watch the same girls show the english speakers how they count to 15 and list all the cities in Canada, and then try to charm a Korean group and then an italian group. I enjoyed listening to them make fun of the Koreans after they left but of course did not get to hear them joking about us. There are several types of sellers, the charmers and a number are very anxious to tell you how unfair you are for buying from their fellow seller and not them, and can follow you for twenty minutes breaking into tears at how hard hearted you are. The charmers do sell more; whining is wearing. The tribe of kid sellers always seems to have a kind of inner hierarchy and there are little areas of influence and some for sure have better wares and some are wealthy enough to bribe the police to be able to come right up to the tour group buses and others must stay behind a little rope on the sand and only approach tourists who cross the line coming over to buy a coke, or something. Bargaining is very interesting also, the same object like a puppet can be quoted you for $25, $20, $15 and sold for $10, $6, or 2-for-11, depending on the time of day and how much they want your biz. It is very interesting to see wares sold for outrageous prices at the tourist mall shops, a better price at the óld market' and a much better price at the çentral market'. I'd love to have a better ability to bargain in Khmer, and go out to the 'new market'which is probably a lot like Sukawati, in Bali. I do feel it is much harder to bargain here, than in Bali, because in Bali it's much more pleasant seeming for both buyer,and seller. There is more laughter and óh no, you'll make me broke' jokes with the Balinese. Prices are higher here, the markup surely is more. Yet people seem to come down pretty quickly to 50% of the original price. Disconcerting for sure.