We're leaving on a (jet???) plane

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Hello people at home.

I JUST wrote this entry. In full. I clicked save. Bam! It was gone.
I'm quite annoyed, and I don't think I can write the whole thing again as eloquently as I did just now. Believe me, what I wrote before was a masterpiece, a veritable cornucopia of excellence. It would have won awards for prose. And now it is gone, lost in the ether.

We are currently at Phnom Penh International Airport, waiting for our plane. I'm using the downtime wisely by telling y'all, the folks at home, about our day so far, because that is the sort of kind person I am; always thinking of others :P

So, this morning we got up super early in order to rectify the Royal Palace/Silver Pagoda debacle of yesterday (which Mike is, as I type, detailing in a blog entry). We were praying that the Cambodian King hadn't decided to have an impromptu breakfast with the Dalai Lama, or whomever. So, I jumped out of bed at 7:54, and Mike followed suit (albeit in a much more sluggish fashion after much cajoling on my part). We walked the short distance from our hotel to the Royal Palace, sans breakfast (this is how dedicated I was to seeing these buildings). We got there, and it was, yet again, closed. How disappointed we were!

Just kiddding; it was finally open. We paid admission (very expensive compared to the other things we had seen in Phnom Penh), and in we went. The facades of the building were beautiful, with the triangular roofs, and the walls all in yellow (I, myself, wouldn't have gone for yellow, but the Cambodians must love yellow a lot). We shuffled round the Throne Room (shoes had to be left to the mercy of the elements outside all the buildings), which confusingly did not seem to contain a throne, only many chandeliers, one of them made of material. I liked that one.

Then we went into the Silver Pagoda. I must say, this was an ENORMOUS let-down, since the silver floor that gives the pagoda its name was barely visible; only a small patch was displayed in a corner of the room, the rest covered by a drab temporary carpet. And even the silver tiles we did see were very underwhelming; they were so dull they might just as well have been made of scrap metal. However, the statues of buddha inside were nice; I particularly liked the marble one from Burma, and the emerald one sitting upon a huge dais, but the lifesize gold buddha was not as impressive as I imagined; the 25-carat diamond in the crown did not look to be that big, and I couldn't even locate the other 9000+ diamonds that supposedly decorate the statue. Lots of chinese people seemed to be praying to it though, so at least they liked it!

We did see other buildings in the complex too, but only the outside; we saw the library (Magoda?) and various shrines to Cambodian kings of old, and one for a princess (girl power!).

Then we made our way back to the hotel, finished the last bits of packing, and had another enormous breakfast. Well, I did; Mike wimped out and had the substantially smaller English breakfast, though he did supplement this with a croissant. Then we waited for our tuktuk man. We went with the boy who had taken us to the kickboxing, and we were suprised to find that our cases did fit into his teeny tuktuk. The drive to the airport was rather long, and we had a bit of a kerfuffle upon arrival over the price, because Mike hadn't confirmed this when we left (I did tell him to do this!).

Then we checked in, and within 5 mins were past security and passport control. And now we are waiting. This was going well, but, in a move that could only be described as UNBELIEVABLY STUPID, the TV at the gate was showing a Discovery Channel program about a crashed, exploded plane, which was then on fire, which freaked Mike out once he noticed (I failed to prevent this). I can only hope that he has forgotten this by now.

Hopefully we won't be waiting too long though. We have another 20 minutes or so until boarding officially commences, but there seems to be another set-back involving my happiness through the flight; worryingly, lots of passengers seem to be disembarking through our gate, and Mike might not be happy if he thinks that anything less than a 700 hour, 2000 man check of the plane has been carried out! Oh well.

Ching chang wallah!
xxx

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