Photos!

The highly anticipated photos from last weekend at Siem Reap and Angkor Wat (I know you have been going crazy waiting for them) are up in a brand spanking new album of their own. Check it out here. Also, I have added the final touches to the Cambodia - Fall '06 album, which is full of what I consider to be the photos that best capture glimpses of my experiences throughout the past three months.

This is the last time I will __________.

When you get in a routine over three months, the final week is all about realizing that this blank can be aptly filled in many different ways. The following is a random spattering of what crossed my mind shortly before leaving to return home.

1. No more moto rides with my driver Veasna.
2. No more french bread for breakfast at the roadside stand around the corner from my house, purchased for about 12.5 cents.
3. No more dinner meals with the Cambodian family.
4. No more hearing the geckos barking in the house at night (the geckos only recently learned to be rather dangerous, after weeks of living in ignorant bliss).
5. No more smelling the occasional wafts of incense from the family..s shrine when I leave my room in the morning.
6. No more trying to distinguish between moto horns on the street outside and calls to dinner echoing from the bottom of the staircase inside.
7. No more hearing dinner referred to simply as "eat rice."
8. No more taking my flip-flops off when I get to the office door and greet the staff with my best rendition of hello in Khmer.
9. No more little kids running up beside the vehicle to wave and say ..hello.. even though they have never seen me before, will never see me again, and they will never get anything out of it.
10. No more kids having a blast just being able to see themselves on the LCD screen of my camera.
11. No more hair-raising rides on ricketty motos through red lights at crowded intersections at rush hour.
12. No more mien fruit.
13. No more meatballs of questionable texture and content. Oh wait, meatballs in the States are just as freaky.
14. No more fried tarantulas, crickets, cockroaches and maggots in the market, just around the corner from the eels and the fish that people eat eyeballs and all.
15. No more rain until the sewers flood and bubble up into the streets, which bogs down the moto engine and forces you to roll up your pants and walk the rest of the way.
16. No more bathroom at home with no hot water, no sink, and a drain in the floor and a fixture on the wall for showers.
17. No more only speaking like fifty words of the dominant language.
18. Hence, no more amusing locals when I unveil one or two of said words.
19. No more saying sarcastic things and then being corrected for being way off base, with the joke having not been understood as such.
20. No more bus rides across the country with cheesy karaoke music videos and locals singing along the whole way.
21. No more $1 meals that please the taste buds and leave you satisfied.
22. No more barrages of solicitations from moto and tuk tuk drivers.
23. No more barrages of solicitations from moto and tuk tuk drivers who have just seen me get off a moto or a tuk tuk and could not possibly expect me to be ready to go somewhere else.
24. No more being a barang (white, and therefore, rich, person) who can and should pay ten times as much as everyone else.
25. No more bargaining on t-shirts at the market, getting the price down from the ridiculous barang price of $3 a pop to something a bit more reasonable.
26. No more scratching my head at the fact that professional wrestling is very popular here.
27. No more watching the hustle and bustle of the noodle shop on the street corner from my fourth floor balcony.
28. No more walking through crowds where women arbitrarily believe it is beautiful to be pale, and therefore cover virtually every inch of their skin to prevent any further tanning (though I'll be returning to the land where they [also arbitrarily] believe that the opposite is true, and women pay good money to spend time in an oven so they look liked a baked potato by the time they're thirty-five).

and

29. No more wondering what it would be like to spend three months in Cambodia.

Angkor.

I'm sitting in this retro/futuristic all-white air-conditioned lounge with free wi-fi Internet as slow as molasses in January and perhaps the best banana milkshake ever to make contact with my taste buds. And they are closing in 13 minutes, so I'll make this quick.

Spending a couple of days galavanting around the largest religious structure in the world (and its environs) has proven to be a good time. Here is where I should have done some research, but I haven't even had time for Wikipedia.com on this one, but I am going to suggest that maybe Angkor Wat is at the center of global tourist growth. I say this because if I am not mistaken, Cambodia has one of the fastest rates of tourist growth, and every tourist (probably without more than a handful of exceptions) visits Angkor. More flights come in and out of the airport here than out of Phnom Penh, the country's capital. Again, I heard this somewhere. It hasn't been verified on Wikipedia.

A more interesting and perhaps well-researched entry to come later, along with some photos, but for now let me leave you with the quote of the week.

Josh (in regards to some stone carvings at one of the temples): Oh, here are some decent carvings.

Me: Decent? Really? Are you sure they aren't half decent*?

Josh: I don't think I'd go that far.

* "Half decent", in Josh's arsenal of compliments, ranks right up there with "snazzy."