Hello All!
Well, it has been something like a million years since I actually put something up on this, but I figure I might as well give a quick update anyways. In summary, in the past two months since I wrote on this, I went on the forests course, where we backpacked from village to village for 16 days in the mountains, and then the coasts course, which was a combo of camping out on the beach and staying with a muslim host family. All exciting, but to be written about later. Now, it is winter break. I have just arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam after having spent a few days in Ankor Wat in Cambodia. Traveling here is super easy. As in- I planned this whole trip a day before I left. I''ve been traveling back and forth between Cambodia, Bangkok, and Vietnam- and so far the trip has cost me somewhere around 400 $. Plane tickets have ranged between the price of $30 to $100.00 Bus rides have cost somewhere between 5 and 15. My hotel in Cambodia was something like 3 dollars a night- the one here is 7. All so. so. affordable.
Ankor Wat was beautiful- for those of you who don't know what it is- its a massive ancient city that has since been abandoned. A brief history: It was built around 1000 years ago, and expanded a few hundred years after that. It mainly consists of a these massive grey sandstone temples, that have been built from the stone of a nearby mountain. The area is on good farm land and near (ish) a massive lake and a good trade spot and all that jazz, so of course people have been fighting over it for centuries. Khmer (word for Cambodian People) Thais, and Chinese all fought over the area back in the way way day. Consequentally, some of the temples are hindu, some are buddist, some are a funky mixture of both. Some have Buddahs, some have hindu gods, some have buddahs that have had a third eye carved in the middle of their forheads to turn them into makeshift hindu gods. In the 1800's of course Europeans had to start taking over the world, and Ankor Wat was "discovered" by the French. I am enchanted with the daydream of what it must have been like to have been like to be one of those explorers, because at that point in time- Ankor Wat- which is pretty endless, by the way, was hard core in the middle of the jungle. No big industry (to my knoweledge) had hit the area at that point in time, so no one had cut down the trees in a very long time- dare I say, hundreds of years? I think that's right. This old ancient city, surrounded by hundred year old trees. And by god, they are some of the coolest trees I've ever seen. The ones that are left today, after industry and war (a recent war- the Khmer Rouge and its after effects. A genocide that ended in 1994.) are sparce and yet beautiful. Huge roots that look like melted wax that hang over the walls of buildings and seep through the cracks of the bricks. Towering tree trunks that cause you to crane your head back to look at them.
One of the things about the place that shocked me was the amount of construction going on there. Countries from all over the world- as in the US, France, India, even Checolslovokia (no idea how to spell that) have invested in helping "conserve" all the buildings. By that, it pretty much means completely rebuilding them as if they were brand new- which means knocking down the old trees, taking acid to clean of the black moss that grows around the moss, and recarving all the designs in the walls, replacing the missing heads of statues that got knocked off during the war. So much money, so much effort to make an ancient temple new again.
Shit. I was going to write about Hanoi, where I am right now, but I've run out of time. Briefly: a dusty city that is foggy like sanfransisco. you can tell the french once reigned here, mostly from the presence of baguets that are strangely sweet, as if they were baked with sweet and low, and the houses, which are extremely tall and city, yet adorned with very european( french?) like things. Like terraces. and white iron rod gates with curly ques every where. It is a city of alley ways that lead to beautiful things. Outside, it is like looking through a city through a plate of dusty glass- I just want to take windex to the whole thing. then you take an alley way, that looks like the scene in a murder mystery movie, until suddenly, you wind up in a resturaount, a coffee shop, a hotel, and internet cafe that is filled with warm yellow light, that is clean, and warm and elegant.
So many mysteries. so fun to exlpore. I wish I could figure out how to post pictures and movies on this damn thing. I've taken a bunch. They're coming eventually. I swear.
