::A Geek in Korea::

After refreshing ourselves for an hour at our guest house, we got back in the tuk tuk and took a ride back to Angkor Wat. Every cultural site closed at 5:30 promptly, so we wanted to get in some more sights before the sun set. We also wanted to go to Phnom Bakheng before the sunset since we had missed it the previous day.

Armed with our new tour book from the previous day, we went around the walls of the temple, reading the various stories laid our by the bas-relief artwork. One of the stories, the battle of Ravana versus Rama that explains the origins of Diwali, was something I had taught previously in one of my classes last year. It was really cool to see it on the wall and be able to follow the story as it was explained by a nearby Korean guide. We might have had the book, but we continued listening in on tours. Yay, free information!

Once we had done a tour around the bas-reliefs, we left Angkor Wat for the last time to head to Phnom Bakheng. This place was absolutely swarming with tourists. There were elephant rides to the top, and a separate walking path for people going to the top of the mountain temple by foot.

It wasn’t a tough climb by Korean standards. It was a nice, wide, gravel path with the occasional stair for crossing streams. It reminded me of walking in a national park in the United States, except Chinese women in high heels were walking around instead of my family.

Who goes to Cambodian temple ruins in HIGH HEELS? We saw Japanese, Chinese and Koreans wearing high heels. We were wearing Crocs and as comfortable as they were, trying to climb the steep steps was still a dangerous experience.

Anyway, improperly dressed tourists aside, we made it to the top and got a perfect seat for the sunset. There were hundreds of tourists gathered at the top of the temple with extremely steep for sunset that weren’t familiar with their surroundings. Sound like a perfect place for pickpockets to you?

This was the only time in the entire trip where we felt that we needed to watch ourselves as tourists. There was a woman seated next to us that we warned about watching her bag a little more carefully. A Cambodian man was sitting behind her and was taking a little too much interest in her camera. He hadn’t done anything, but the way he kept peering over made him look like he was up to something.

We took a few pictures of the sky, then decided to leave before the crush of tourists made the stairs more dangerous. Soon it would get too dark to find our tuk tuk driver when everyone tried to leave anyway. We saw that the woman we warned left at the same time too. She had everything with her. She told us she had thought the same thing about pickpockets, and that she decided she’d rather be safe than sorry. Pickpocketing wasn’t common enough to be a constant concern, so people were lulled into a false sense of security.

We got down from the mountain without incident. We then tuk tuk’ed over to the Old Market once again. This time we walked around the corner to see some more tourist shops selling souvenirs. We marked that as a place to return to on our last day to pick up gifts for everyone we knew.

Following our previous routine, we returned to the guest house to clean up for the night. Since the next day would be exceptionally long, we tried to explain to our tuk tuk driver that he’d need to take us to the airport. We were willing to pay more money for him to spend the entire day with us, but we couldn’t explain the terms correctly. We got two or three other people to help us translate. Eventually he settled on $17 dollars for taking us to the airport. That was a huge relief, as we hadn’t dealt with anyone else for transportation since we had gotten into the city and we really didn’t want to struggle finding another driver.

We went to a Thai restaurant.I had Pad Thai that was easily the best Thai food I had ever had, and I had been to Thailand. After differ, we headed back to the guest house. I wrote up my journal, while my wife devoured more mangoes bought at the Old Market. Despite not having a knife, she was able to peel them with her teeth and we had a delicious snack before bed. Fresh, ripe, 3 for a dollar mangoes are certainly not a luxury you see in Korea or the United States very often.

We decided to get up a little later for our last day, since we had already burned through all the major sights we had wanted to see in the first two days. We had arranged to meet the tuk tuk driver an hour later, which let us rest a little more. We were still eager for our last day of adventure in Cambodia however.

We traveled to Tonlé Sap after touring temples instead of eating lunch. We didn’t know how far away this place happened to be when we told the tuk tuk driver, but he just smiled and got ready to go. We headed south, and kept going. He refilled his tank once, and then pulled over at a government building about a boating tax.

We asked a few questions about the tour. It was a 90 minutes. We wouldn’t have to wait for a boat. We’d get our own boat, with an English speaking guide and someone to steer the boat. We paid $15 dollars apiece to go on the tour, got back in the tuk tuk, and continued on the paved road.

Tonlé Sap is 11 km to the south of Siem Reap. Currently in Cambodia, they are nearing the end of the dry period when the lake is only a meter deep. During the rainy season, the river swells to four times the size we saw, and was ten times deeper. The small boats move near a mountain during the wet season, but were currently enjoying the best period of time for fishing.

As we approached to the lake area, the road went from paved to rough packed ground. The people on the outskirts of Siem Reap were poor. The people on the unpaved area of this road were much worse off. There were stray dogs and chickens roaming around under the small bamboo “houses” The “houses” weren’t much more that shelters from the sun with a few cooking utensils and some clothes drying on the bamboo ladders leading up to them out front. This was the squalor of extreme poverty like I had never seen. I’ve been to South Africa and seen some ghettos, and some of the poorer areas of South Korea, but nothing was close to this.

These people lived lives in the boiling hot heat, literally surviving on the fish they caught from day to day. Naked children sat outside on the “porch” to escape the sun, while the elderly rested in hammocks in the shade. However, they smiled to us as we drove past them. Even with the hardships they faced from day to day, the children still waved.

We left out tuk tuk driver behind and went out on a long boat like the one we took in Thailand to tour Bangkok. The guide, Reyal, was a really interesting person. He spoke English he learned from being on the boat and meeting tourist with an accent, but he knew what to say to get his point across. He was very friendly, and asked us about our “story” as two independent travelers.

(They are moving the school.)

He explained about life in the village as he took us to Tonlé Sap lake. On the way to the lake, we passed various buildings donated and built with foreign investment. There was a Korean school and church. There was a Japanese school barge that had an fenced in soccer field and classes downstairs. There was a floating hospital and a market. We trolled through this area slowly, as school was in session, and we didn’t want to disturb the classes with the waves.

The lake itself, while low, was still tremendously large. We visited an alligator and fish farm that operates for tourists to visit and eat on in the middle of the lake. We went to their aquarium to see the different kinds of fish in the lake. Reyal told us about the dangerous, the most delicious, and the most expensive fish. It was interesting, but since we weren’t going fishing ourselves, and had already been to an alligator farm in Thailand, it wasn’t very earth shattering.

Instead of touring the poor “areas” where Vietnamese and Cambodians huddled their boats together to make communities, he pulled up a few chairs and suggested we sit down and talk for a few minutes to get out of the hot sun. This was one of the highlights of our trip, as it turned out.

Reyal was a very interesting person. He was orphaned at age 4 when his family was killed by people loyal to Pol Pot. He worked as a garment maker, then later got a job working in a market hauling things to different vendors. He used to live near Battambang, but moved to the floating village to be an unlicensed tour guide and survive on tips.

He went to school in Siem Reap, which was a 25 km journey each day. He would walk three hours to school because he didn’t have money for a bicycle or tuk tuk. He would study for six hours, then walk back home. He wanted to continue to get a high school education, but he didn’t have enough money. He only got six years of formal education, and scrapped the rest of his English from listening to tourists on the boat. He said that he loved studying English, but that he couldn’t afford the $80 dollar a month lessons.

He said his salary was enough that he could live on two or three dollars a day for food, but otherwise had very little. He slept in the tour boat, but we didn’t even see a place for his things, if he owned anything other than the clothes on his back.

He wanted to know two things about Korea.

1. Why did young children know more English than their parents?

2. Why were Korean tour guides such dicks?

We told him the answer to the first question. We were involved in the industry to educate those children. He was completely amazed that Korean high school students only sleep 3 or 4 hours to study for a single test. He also was jealous that children not only attended school, but also went to three or four other expensive private academies as well.

He thought Korean tour guides were rude and very impatient. He said that the tour guides wanted the boat to go as fast as possible at all times, even if it disrupted the local schools and hospitals, but he couldn’t understand why. He also resented the fact that tour companies visited Korean restaurants in towns, and stayed at Korean owned hotels.

(We talked about this with him for a while, but I’ll split it off into another post for later to maintain the flow of this post better.)

Reyal was an unlicensed tour guide because of the cost involved. He said that being a tour guide in Cambodia was probably one of the best jobs available, but for someone without a family it was basically an unreachable goal. He said that if you went to a university and studied two languages, you could get the fee for becoming a tour guide cut in half. Without a college education, it would cost him $4,000 dollars to become a guide. Being licensed meant he would get a salary every week of $30-40 dollars, and basic medical benefits.Reyal said if he saved for 20 years, he might be able to afford to get a license. He said that this was his dream, and that he’d work hard until he could do it. He was really a positive person, talking about how people that traveled independently in Cambodia had a direct impact on the poor people’s lives in the neighborhoods they touched.

He said that he loved the Cambodian government because they improved the road leading to the floating village. The road to the floating village before government intervention was simply an impassable mud pass, but now people can visit much more easily. The road still isn’t paved, and it was till rough, but it didn’t wash away when it rained anymore. This has brought more tourists visits. More tourists means more taxes paid to the locals in charge of the boats, which means more improvements for the poor in the area.

This sort of “direct action” was easy to witness. There were buildings all over the countryside that said, “Donated by this party” and then showed the Cambodian political party responsible for this improvement. This lets the poor have a stake in the governmental process and lets them see the benefits directly.

There was optimism as he spoke. Even though his country had a horrible past, things were getting better. Things were improving and affecting everyone’s life in a positive way, even down to the very poor that lived on a remote lake.

We said goodbye to Reyal after our tour and slipped him a nice tip for his insights into Cambodian culture. We hope he continues on his way to realizing his dream of being a guide as he was very entertaining. We got back into the tuk tuk and rode back to Siem Reap to eat lunch, and to take another mid-afternoon heat break nap.

We had to be up and out of the guest house to meet out tuk tuk driver at 6:00 for our second day of touring temples around Siem Reap. We had some fruit and granola bars for breakfast and were back in the tuk tuk as quickly as we could. We were on our way without any difficulties.

We arrived first at Banteay Kdei, and had the entire complex to ourselves. It has a rather simple layout, and you can walk straight through the temple. We did a quick looping tour to see the sights, then went on to the highlight of the day.

Walking around Ta Prohm is a very unique experience. The people that help preserve and maintain Cambodian historical sites have decided to keep it in a more “natural” state than most of the other temples. This means that while work to stabilize and prevent further collapse of the temple is happening, their goal isn’t to alter the state of the temple significantly from it’s period of “rediscovery”. This means it’s easy to walk around imagining you’ve discovered this long forgotten “lost” temple in the jungle, as long as you ignore the walkways and some railing they’ve installed for some moderate safety and access concerns, that is.

Ta Prohm is by far my favorite temple, simply because of the gigantic strangler figs and silk-cotton trees that have grown into the temple structure. Seed deposited by birds will grow roots that push out the blocks of the temple as they grow. Gradually the tree will envelop and “support” the walls, but upon the death of the tree cause the collapse of the entire structure. These trees were enormous, and they had brought down mighty walls. It was incredible to see these giant trees rising out of the walls of the temple from ruins.

Ta Keo, the next temple on the list, had incredibly steep stairs. All the temples had extremely steep, deeply weather worn steps, but this was fairly ridiculous. We climbed to the top and managed to not fall to our deaths. When we got to the top of the temple, we sat down and ate a snack. As we were eating, a small boy no older than six climbed up the steps to try to see us some postcards. He was working really hard for his money. We didn’t buy the postcards.

“Do you like candy?” The boy’s lights lit up.

“YES!” he said with enthusiasm.

We gave him the candy we had been giving to everyone. He went into the inner hall of the temple and quickly unwrapped his prize. The next time I travel in a country with poor children, I’ll bring a lot more candy with me. Seeing children’s faces light up was a really good memory.

The next two  temples, Thommanon and Chao Say Tevoda were literally across the road from each other. They wouldn’t have been worth visiting by themselves, but together they were easy enough to see that it wasn’t a big deal to see them both. We happened to land at these sights when they were being hit heavy by Chinese tour groups. Thommanon was undergoing serious restoration by a Chinese group.

Each of the sites gets maintained by different countries with international teams of experts. I saw flags for the French, Japanese, and Chinese groups, as well as a group that relied on International donors. I don’t recall seeing an American or Korean flag heading up any of the restorations.

After we finished up these temples, we told our tuk tuk driver our next destination. It wasn’t on any of our maps, and we didn’t know how far it was, but we had gotten some advice about seeing it on the blog, and found out how to get there with the help of the tour guide on the plane. We should have known it was far when the tuk tuk driver sighed, then smiled for us to get in. Our next adventure in Cambodia was Tonlé Sap, the floating village.

We had to shower after we got to the guest house. The dust on Cambodian roads loved to stick to our sun tan lotion, so we needed to wash our hands and legs before we took a nap. We slept off the hottest part of the day, like many Cambodians do. After that we were refreshed enough to keep up our pace.

We ended up going at least 40 kilometers outside of Siem Reap to a temple complex called Banteay Srei. The tuk tuk driver sighed when we told him the destination for the afternoon. It was a really far drive through rural Cambodia.

Along the roads people would have arranged plastic bottles filled with a yellow liquid. It turns out that these are the local “gas stations”. Bigger places in the country might have an entire 55 gallon drum of fuel, and possibly diesel fuel, but the majority were simply a rack of plastic cola bottles filled with gasoline. The tuk tuk driver stopped at one of these places to refill the tank along the way. My wife handed out candy to the children that came up to greet us. They were so excited and ate it immediately. We rode for over an hour to arrive at the temple. We hadn’t really planned to go out from the city right away, but we didn’t have a guide book, only a list of locations from the tour guide at the time.

Upon arriving at our destination, we were greeted by a group of children selling guide books. We needed a guide book, because we were simply walking through the different locations without any sense of what they were about, or what they represented to the culture. I talked a boy down to half his initial price, which was the highest percentage haggling we accomplished, but I still ended up paying the same amount for my guide book as I did for the guest room for a night. $14 for a map and some history and some great pictures? I’m fine with it.

We also bought a fresh coconut for our driver and ourselves. 2 coconuts for a dollar. It’s the first time I drank from a coconut. At least I can say I’ve done it, so I won’t need to every do it again. It tasted like stale water, not like a coconut that I can remember. Banteay Srei temple is unique in that it is sort of “miniature” in scale compared to the others we had visited. It was still elaborately decorated and had lots to see, it’s just that everything was half as tall.

We went during the late afternoon, which was good because the sun made the red stone glow. We walked around with the guide book, and listened to some of the Korean tours that were nearby as well. I think Korean tour guides can make up pretty much anything, as people completely lack any context to what they are seeing. I didn’t see any tour patron with anything other than a camera, so they trusted their guides word.

After we left Banteay Srei, we rode back the hour into town. Every tourist attraction closes around 5:30, so we were rushing back to try to make it to Phnom Bakheng, a mountain top temple. We wanted to watch the sunset over the jungle. We missed the entry to the mountain pass to see the temple by 15 minutes. We vowed to return the next day.

We remounted the tuk tuk and went for the Old Market area of town. We wanted some fruit for breakfast the next day. My wife adores mangoes, and I am a fan of mangosteen ever since Thailand introduced me to the fruit. We walked around the market, which was much like a Korean market, except with more people, more noise, and 100x more motorcycles parked everywhere. We found some fruit for breakfast, then went back to the guest house via tuk tuk. We agreed to hire the tuk tuk for another day, and paid him the $13 dollars he was owed for the day of driving.

He left, and we walked to a tourist friendly restaurant around the corner right as a series of tuk tuks dropped off their tour. We drank 1.5 liters of water with our meal and still couldn’t feel like we had drank our fill. We were sweating all day, but it wasn’t that humid compared to Korea in August. We expected much worse from what the tours had told us.

We had a decent dinner for the $10.20 dollar price.They added a Value Added Tax that we never saw on any other purchase in the country. I think this was the “tourist” tax. We ended up getting change in Cambodian Riel. The exchange rate was close to 4000 riel to the US dollar. We never saw anything smaller than 100 riel, and no coins.

We went to a local gas station convenience store to pick up some snacks and more bottled water for our second day. We found Korean Pop Sensation “Rain” was a spokesperson for yogurt, and you can get Vanilla Coke, and Root Beer in Cambodia which is still not available in Korea. After showering to get the accumulated dirt and sun tan lotion off our skin for the second time in the day, we crashed in the guest house in anticipation of another day in Cambodia exploring the ruins.

Written on: May 23rd, Siem Reap, Cambodia, Australia Guest House, 8:45 PM

Our Morning routine: Get up early, apply copious amounts of SPF 50+ sunscreen and mosquito repellent, and prepare for hot, hellish weather. [Edit Note: It was never that bad weather wise actually.]

We ate breakfast, talked about our plans for the day, checked our bags, and prepared for an adventure. The hotel staff had decent enough English, so we were able to set up a luggage check with no difficulties. Next was to obtain transportation.

No sooner had we reached the road than a tuk tuk driver stopped and we began negotiations. As we were talking, a rival driver appeared and tried to get us to go with him. The first driver couldn’t speak English as well, but wasn’t pushy like this second man. The second person wanted us to pay fifty dollars initially for three days, which was eye roll worthy.

We decided we’d stick with the first driver, even if he might not be able to speak as much English, because he seemed more honest. He was also significantly cheaper day to day. We had decided on $13 dollars a day, but weren’t sure if we had lucked out, or had agreed to $30 dollars with someone with bad pronunciation. We should have made sure immediately, as for the rest of the day we were worrying to ourselves, “Will it be $13 or $30 dollars? Will we offend him if we only offer $13 when we try to pay him?”

First on our list of things to visit was Angkor Wat. This was about a 20 minute drive from the hotel. Roads in Cambodia are simply asphalt strips where people generally drive in one direction or another. There are ABSOLUTELY no rules. We would charge headlong into traffic going in the opposite direction when trying to turn, people would overtake and pass on a whim. 90% of traffic was either motorcycle, bicycle, or tuk tuk. The remaining cars, buses, and trucks would speed by and pass at any time.

It was fairly awesome to watch, but the tuk tuk’s open air experience and our oily, sunscreen coated bodies meant we were coated in a fine layer of dust very quickly. People on the side of the road swept the dust off the roads, but there was always a layer in the air and on the ground coating everything.

Angkor Wat is truly an experience. It’s extremely impressive. I recommend checking out the Cambodia pictures I took. On every rock you’d see there would be carvings, details you’d miss at first glance, but were fascinating the more you looked. The temple was huge, and there was so much to see. We lacked a tour guide, and we also had no books explaining the details when we first went. This was more of a raw “discovery” sort of initial experience. [We went back with the guide book I bought later in the day.]

From Angkor Wat, we went to nearby Angkor Thom. Bayon is filled with these gigantic smiling faces on the walls. It’s very complicated to look at, with smiles, different scenery, and lots of tourists. It’s a very iconic location. It had a maze like feeling. This is probably one of my favorite places I’ve visited ever.

From there we stumbled across several places. There were steep stair temples, The Elephant Terrace, and lots of other sights. We’d run across Korean tours constantly and would casually rest within earshot to hear their explanations of the ruins we were visiting.

Everywhere you went, when you stepped out of the tuk tuk, people would call to you to come over to their stores. “Want a cold drink? How about some t-shirts? Some beads? They’re only a dolla~.” You tried your best to ignore them, since showing interest only brought more people over to wade through. The most difficult thing to deal with were the small children selling things. They were really good at trying to make you pity them into a purchase.

“Want a cold drink?”

“No thanks, I have one.”

“Buy a cold drink for your driver. One dollar. By postcard? Book?”

Always. While it’s sad to turn away young children, their parents teach them very early to use pity as a sales tool. We saw a man holding an infant. He was teaching the infant how to properly hold the item so that we could see what it was as we walked past him. A lot of these people are poor, but by depriving things children of education, it’s not helping their future.

We went back to town, picked up our bags from the hotel, and made our way to the excellent “Australia Guest House”. If you are looking for a cheap, functional place with beds, a refrigerator, and a working air conditioner for around $15 dollars a night, I’d recommend it. It’s got a couple of great restaurants nearby in walking distance as well. The manager spoke decent English and they were very helpful. The rooms were simple, but for the price, very reasonable and clean.

Contact Information for Australia Guest House:

Address: No. 0551, National Rd 6, Phoum Bountay Chass, Khom Slor Kram, Siem Reap City, Cambodia.

Phone: 012442285, 011554448, Fax: (855) 63963593 )

May, 23rd Princess Angkor Hotel, Cambodia, 12:00 AM

We habe just arrived and have showered after our five hour, thirty minute flight from Incheon, South Korea to Siem Reap. As luck would have it, we happened to end up being seated next to a Korean tour guide. My wife got a lot of helpful information about building itineraries for the days of our stay. They chatted for about three hours total while I tried to sleep.

When departing the plane, a quick check of our belongings made us realize my wife had forgotten her hat. We had made elaborate  plans to hide our money from officials requiring bribes at the airport, but the first step off the plane and she had already lost something. She went back up and got her hat and we were back on our way.

The literal first transaction in Cambodia was a government official asking for a dollar bribe to get the visa form filled out “Bal-ly Bal-ly“, using the Korean word for “quick”. They wanted 21 US dollars for the visa. There were 12 people that worked at this visa station sitting in a long chain. Each person must have been responsible for checking a single box on the form from their boredom. They passed each passport down the line, and the man at the end announced your name. You picked up the visa and went to immigration.

My wife mentioned about how odd “$21 dollars” was for a visa fee. Then she said, “Hey wait a minute, that dollar was a bribe!” I think it was the uniform and the lack of posted prices that made her trust the person at the front asking for that dollar on top of everything. I made no comment at the time, because if people got wind of what was going on their might have been a scene.

The nice tour guide gave us a ride to our hotel, sparing us from having to haggle with anyone about a trip to town in the middle of the night. We set our wake up call for 6:00 AM. We’ll tour until noon, then go find a cheaper guest house tomorrow.

Just a little word before I get to updating properly. I’ll be updating my blog about my trip proper shortly.

I’ve found a FANTASTIC Flickr 3rd party application that has streamlined how I do picture uploading with Flickr from now on. Juploadr blows the standard upload tools I’ve used with Flickr out of the water. It’s Java based and multi-platform. Save yourself from other uploading tools and just use this wonderful program instead. It saved me hours preparing my Cambodian Picture set. Check it out!

Just a peek:

My wife woke up in the middle of the night last night and said, “We need your multiple entry visa! Yours has expired! We need to go to Immigration tomorrow!”

This is not a situation that aids people in a relaxing night of sleep. We both tossed and turned, worried about various things we might be forgetting. I wasn’t too worried about Immigration since my last visit. They seem much more on top of their game now that I’ve got a marriage visa.

We got up, skipped breakfast, and went to get my paperwork updated. We were some of the first people in the door, so we didn’t have much of a wait at all. We were there and back in under 90 minutes, and that’s including the time waiting for the bus. That’s a new record.

We had to clean up Yoshi and his things, then drop him off with a coworker too. We’ve got a bus to catch in an hour to the airport, then we’ll be flying out later tonight for a nice, hot vacation in the jungle.

I’ve got my Cowon D2 loaded with podcasts and various other media for the flight. My camera is empty and ready for lots of pictures. I’m ready for an adventure. Now all I’ve got to do is decide which shoe to wear and we’re out the door! Later!

(Expect a post, possibly Sunday or Monday at the latest, about the first part of our trip to Cambodia!)

I went to work today after buying the airport express bus ticket for my upcoming trip. We’re leaving in the afternoon tomorrow, so I won’t be going to work for a change. This had me in a cheerful mood even as I walked from the bus stop all the way to work. This is the first real vacation I’ve taken since last summer when I went to the United States with my wife to visit my relatives.

I had started packing my bags earlier in the day, which my wife said made me “excited like a little child.” While I can’t fold clothes or actually fit anything in my suitcase as well as my wife. Regardless, I get a lot of satisfaction in packing and preparing for a trip. I’ll get out a suitcase extra early and simply ponder about all the things I want to bring with me as it sits in the corner.

I walked to work with the ticket sitting in my pocket, which made the trip more of a reality.  I got to work early enough that I could write down three days of guidelines for teachings covering my classes. This isn’t a huge deal since we have a lot of teachers and most of them have breaks in their schedule that would let them take a class a day.

I knew the easiest way to get everyone on the same page would be just to write down everything in my schedule as if I would teach it. Before the other teachers had even returned from their classes they were teaching when I had arrived, I had finished my list. I imagine someone will screw up and finish a book I’ve been trying to go slowly on, but I’ll worry about that later.

Since I had already taken care of the schedule, there wasn’t anything more to do than sit through my three classes for the day and do my standard lessons. I had a fairly high tolerance for some of the idiots in my class today, because I knew I wasn’t going to be seeing them the rest of the week.

One student told me his dream was, “To start World War III by dropping nuclear weapons everywhere.” He then proceeded to draw pictures of people stabbed with a knife through their head.

I smiled and thought to myself, “There is a student I don’t need to worry about any more this week.” What a great feeling that is to know you’ll be able to break out of a rut that is slowly wearing you down. I’ll worry about the psychopath later, because frankly, I’ve earned this time off.

I haven’t had a single weekday off since the first of March. Even that was a Thursday, meaning we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything special. Even the longer Lunar New Year holiday this year fell on a weekend, shortening our vacation and leaving us at home for the day. This nearly week long trip was a vacation a long time in the making. We’ve been attempting to visit Angkor Wat for nearly an entire year, but got shut out because of tours, lack of tickets, and excessive prices during holiday peek travel times. We got lucky even getting the tickets after putting in reservations a month in advance.
Now that we are going I’m relieved because it acts as a break for me to recharge and refocus my energies on teaching and the future. The long time between holidays will get better in the coming months. There are weekday holidays in each of the following six months that mean I get time off work to relax much more often.

Apart from setting up new forums, planning for a Cambodia vacation later in the week, and getting Skype for Linux working (Microphone YES! Webcam NO!), I’ve been pretty busy.

Yesterday, by now you’ve heard, was the announcement of Starcraft 2. I’ll be looking forward to seeing my students reactions, and what happens as this game is released. The reaction from people so far has been positive. I don’t plan on playing it any time soon, if ever. I’ve learned my lesson from Warcraft III, namely, I suck at Blizzard RTS games. I’ll enjoy watching it on television when the first leagues start.

The forums are still very much a work in progress at the moment. I’ve got to learn a lot more things to get them whipped into shape. However, initial reaction is positive. I’d like to see more content, of course.

Today will be another busy day. We’ve got to pack and get ready for Cambodia. We’re leaving Tuesday. We don’t have a Lonely Planet guide, but we are trying to gather information and resources the best we can. Last night I was using Google Earth to try to get a sense of scale. I’m a little scared about how much there will be to see. I found out that Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples are much larger than The Forbidden City in Beijing. The Forbidden City blew my mind, and this is so much more huge. We’ve got three days to explore, so it should be a good adventure with lots of pictures.

I’ve had problems using a microphone in Linux. The standard “Sound Recorder” doesn’t work at all. I didn’t even know if it could detect my headset. However, after installing Skype for Linux, I fired it up and made a test call. It worked perfectly right out of the box. Sweet. Skype for Linux doesn’t support webcams, so I won’t be able to see my parents or friends when I call them, but at least I can call them again. With time, eventually it’ll do webcams (I hope), meaning another reason for Windows bites the dust.