Happy New Year!

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After a week of silence, I suppose it's time for me to join in on the blogging fun. We arrived in Siem Reap yesterday and rang in the new year at a theatre that featured traditional Cambodian dance. We were all entranced by the hand shadow puppets...not clear whether the dancers had been practicing finger yoga for years or rather if the producers simply rounded up a crew of double-jointed women.

The food has been quite delightful for all on this trip...including our vegetarians. I'm sure that I've gained at least 5 pounds which is hard to understand when the local women are as thin as can be. If I eat what they eat, shouldn't my weight start to move in the other direction? A more likely cause perhaps is our group's love of the drink and the spa.

This morning we awoke to brilliant sunshine...the first sunny day of our trip. Quite exciting...though not sure how enthused we'll be a few hours from now, when we try to hike around the temples in the 90 degree mid-day heat. Seth is starting the day with a dip in the hotel pool...hopefully since it's now daylight he'll decide to wear his suit. (It is rumored that some of our group were found skinny-dipping in the pool by hotel staff at 2 am.)

The pace here seems decidely more relaxed than that which we experienced in Vietnam. We realized this soon after our arrival when we had the first quiet taxi ride of the vacation. In Vietnam is is customary to lean on the horn each time one passes a pedestrian, bicyclist, or motorbiker. Apparently this is the polite thing to do...however we found it to be quite grating on the nerves. Our taxi-ride was also notable as we were able to speak first-hand with a local on his experiences growing up in Cambodia during the 80s. The son of a teacher, his parents felt it was safer to have him live in the capital with his uncle rather than remain with them in Siem Reap. Although his father survived the brutality of the Khmer Rouge during the mid-70s by constantly moving around, he was killed by the KR in 1999. Colin and I found this to be most surprising as we had thought that most of the killing had ceased by the mid-80s.

That's all for now.

-Melissa

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