Sunday, July 18th: bumpy bus rides,tarantulas and fish foot massages

Chelsea:
The day started with a tuktuk drive to the Royal Palace. We spent an hour or two perusing the various temples inside and walking around the immaculate grounds. The temples are incredibily ornate- I can't even imagine how long it took for them to build and carve out every single little detail. The temples were filled with artifacts and Buddha's of course, as well as some other interesting things. We walked in to one and it had typical pieces of clothing worn by the people who worked and lived there in the past. This was not unusual as most have a sort of display like this but one thing in particular caught our eye here- there were 7 female mannequins lined up across the front of the room all wearing the same dress but in a different color- come to find out, the days of the week were actually color coded and people had to wear certain colors on each particular day! Interesting- at least it would have been easy to keep track of the days. :) After that we headed to the National Museum. It was a pretty impressive structure from the outside but the tour inside itself was a little underwhelmling, especially since we had a guide who spoke like a robot and we could only make out every 4th or 5th word. We could have read the plaques and done just fine on our own.

Later that afternoon, we took off from Phnom Penh and headed northwest to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat. The drive was expected to take about 6hrs. which at the time seemed fine, then we actually started down the road. I'm not sure what kind of road work they do in Cambodia but there certainly hasn't been any in the last 10-15 years. That ride had to have been the most bumpy ride I have EVER taken- we were bouncing up and down in our seats the entire time! We even caught some air a few times!! We stopped along the way for bathroom and snack breaks which included an extra bonus stop where you could eat and buy tarantula. Some of the boys had them crawling on their shirts and Paul even bought a few fried ones for later. Nick brought a live one on the bus and took him to Siem Reap with us- his name was Snake Eyes.... note I said "was"... Snake Eyes didn't make it too long and has since moved on to spider heaven. His friends met their match at dinner that evening acting as a post meal snack for Paul, Nick and Kevin. Erin and Michelle had a leg which apparently wasn't too bad but the boys ate the whole thing (fried and well done) which turns out is not such a great idea as it left quite the after taste as I understand. Oh well, when in Cambodia, do as the locals do, right? Luckily for them they could easily wash it down with as much beer as they wanted as a bottle of draught costs 50 cents and a pitcher is $2.00 here on Pub Street.

Siem Reap is a touristy town with markets and stands on the downtown streets, does not seem to be quite as poor and rundown as some parts of Phnom Penh and still has massage places on many corners. It also had Dr. Fish, an outside tank where you can stick your feet in the water that have hundreds of tiny little fish which will basically come and "attack" your feet to clean them...well,Susanne, Nick, Kevin, Brian and Nancy were brave enough to try this ticklish feat. Nancy had to pull her feet out every so often. One thing, though: Nick seemed to attract all fish with his questionable feet, only leaving a few for the rest of the people who apparently had cleaner feet. So he was asked to take his feet out every so often to "share".

Heading out to see the sunrise tomorrow morning at 4am at Angkor Wat- should be exciting!