Cambodia

We spent most of our day Saturday touring the city of Phu My, Vietnam.  It was a day full of a bus ride through the city with several stops along the way.  Similar to our first day in Vietnam were the needy people and under priced goods, only this time it was in the city center rather than the country.  The city was full of exposed masses of black telephone wire and fast paced, wreckless moped drivers. Of the 8 million who live in the city, four million drive mopeds, and I’m guessing the other 3 drive bikes or walk because there were very few cars.  It was a quick glimpse into their lives for the day.  We headed off to the airport in the afternoon for our overland 2 night stay in Cambodia. 

 

We arrived late that night and had a full day ahead of us at walking around the ancient temples.  I have to admit that I was not that excited because of the excess amount of temples I have seen while on this trip, but to my surprise this was very different than anything I have ever seen.  The temples were absolutely incredible.  Amongst the jungle are about 70 different temples that are beautiful stone rock carved with so much detail that you could spend days looking at each.  A lot of them have fallen rock and stones in them but the overall structure is still in tact so you can see what it once looked like.  I honestly can’t describe them only pictures, if that, will do them justice.  One of the tombs we saw was where Angelina Jolie shot her movie Tomb Raider.  After bringing their country publicity through the movie and also adopting her ten kids from there, they were proud to tell us that they have made her a citizen of their country.  Lucky her.

 

The people here were just as incredible to me as the temple.  It was hard because whenever I go to these places I want to sit and talk with the kids and play with them for at least the small time I have with them even if it be in passing while walking to the next place.  But, the kids here are different.  They live in small dirt floored huts along the road.  Picture a camping sight but instead of nice tents and sleeping bags, they have straw roofs and mats.  The kids have been trained and are literally human machines.  Just like the people in Vietnam they follow you until you hand over the money but here, they have about three recorded phrases that continue to repeat themselves throughout the day.  “Lady, you like to buy bracelet from me, 10 for one dollar.”  “Please I need money for school, for food, please.”  “You very pretty please buy bracelet from me, only one dollar.” It’s the largest dollar store I have ever seen.  The kids know no different, they were raised to know these few English sentences and have them on repeat all day long. It is so annoying that by the end of the day I had about 30 bracelets, 8 scarves and 2 packs of postcards….I hope you all will enjoy your souvenirs because I’m a sucker for these poor children’s faces and gave them a dollar because I felt bad.  I guess they are doing their jobs right.  Honestly the only things I could think was that a dollar means a lot more to them than it does to me. At the end of the day when we were leaving, I finally talked to some kids who I think were tired of selling and actually managed a sentence without one of the pre arranged phrases being included.  They were just like any other happy kids who wanted to talk to us yet because of their culture and dire needs, they often come across as annoying.  I asked one of the girls if she learned English at school and she said no, I learned it from the tourists.  Good to know we are teaching them the robot language that has become an annoyance upon ourselves.