Spent the weekend in Angkor, the home of Angkor Wat which is an ancient temple that makes a lot of Wonders of the Worlds list, and as well it should. It's gorgeous. We took a six hour bus ride from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. On the way we stopped at a market famous for it's fried tarantulas. I am a big proponent of 'if it's fried, it's probably good' so instead of biting off more than I could chew I just ate a leg. If it was deep fried like it should have been it would have been indistinguishable and I probably could have ate more, however it was a very apparent leg with the little hairs on it clearly visible. It was seasoned well and really it just tasted like any crunchy fried thing, but I wouldn't go back for seconds. They also had live tarantulas there that they throw on willing or unwilling tourists. I was lucky enough to dodge that bullet. When we got to Siem Reap, our guide/ not at all a guide in any way took us to the hotel and then had the bus driver take us to dinner at a place called "Happy Pizza." I'm sure you can imagine that secret ingredient. The next day we toured Angkor Wat and Angkor Phom for eight hours. After dinner we took to the streets to go to the night markets. When I came to Cambodia on Semester at Sea lots of people got the fish pedicure which involved putting your feet in a tank where little fish eat the dead skin off your feet. This time around natives warned us that people had contracted AIDs but putting their feet with exposed injuries in the water. Gross and terrifying. I was haggling back and forth with a vendor when I told him to give me a good teacher price. He stopped and told me how he was only fourteen when the Khmer rouge took over and how he lost his brother. He said they had closed all the schools so he never learned to speak English in school. Because of this he said it was so important that his daughters get an education and learn to speak English. He then introduced me to one of his daughters who was standing in the stall with us, who spoke perfect English. When I told him he spoke very good English, he shook his head and said he would never speak well because he had never finished school.
The next day we went to a temple that has had no preservation, so it involved a lot of climbing and I'm embedding a video of the action below. After exploring we went to a restaurant across the street, where halfway through my noodles I found some insect resembling a small ant crawling over my vegetables. Then after getting on the bus to come back to Siem Reap, the non guide guide offered some mini- muffin cake like thing. Upon ripping off a piece I realized there was a spider cooked inside. Not a tarantula or a daddy long legs, but a spider that was probably the size of my finger nail (ring finger). I didn't eat it because the cake wasn't that good to begin with, but it got me wondering as to whether the spider was intentional or not. A lot of food in SE Asia includes bugs. This muffin thing could have easily just been rolled up on the spider and it got stuck and they said fuck it or it could have been intentionally put in there. For now I feel satisfied with my tarantula leg and I will incorporate bugs into my diet later...maybe. I had a lot more to say, but I never actually wrote it down so now I forget all the important and enlightening things I wanted to say to you. But that's okay. Oh and in case you were wondering which you weren't I passed my phonetics and grammar exam for the course.
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