Day 18 - Siem Reap Exploration

Hi everyone welcome to the January 18th blog!

I’ve never blogged before but I hope you can enjoy the photos and see your loved ones having a great time in Siem Reap.

P.S. I am blogging this day from my point of view which is why I’m not in any of the pictures.

To start the first half of the day we visited three more temples.

                                                        Everyone smiling big to our first temple!

                                                                           Neal Poan Temple

                                                                            Ta Som Temple

                                   Another Temple, I did not catch the name of this one though.

For the second half of the day we went on an hour bus ride along a river surround by a village.

We were taken on a boat ride through the fishing village. You could sit on top of the boat or down below to enjoy the views. 

We boated all the way through the village and out to a floating restaurant where they bred crocodiles for food and material.

                                                 Hard to see but these were the adult crocodiles...

                                                                     And these are the babies. 

                                                                  Distant view of the restaurant. 

                                                        View from the top of the restaurant roof.

After all the sight seeing we made our way back to the hotel for some free time where we could either shop at the night market or explore the city. Thank you all for taking the time to read my blog I hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed our day!

Also we are playing a game where you are given a card with a mission to complete, so my mission card was to try a new food and give it to someone. When I was in Vietnam with my family I tried duck egg for the first time and gave them the card, mission completed!

Thank you,

Joshua Nguyen

January 15th, Vietnam River Cruise

Hey y’all, Stephen here.

Today started off with a tour of a temple used for worshipping the god of the sea. This was catered toward tourists so it was more flashy than a typical temple but still gave us an insight on Vietnam culture. Some things that our guide Hai pointed out was the raised doorway to keep spirits out as well as some of the meanings of the different carvings overhead. The temple was not focused around religion but rather a belief of different gods.  In order to show respect to the gods, people would bring oil and give it to a temple worker along with your name and wishes and then you would wait for the oil to burn off while you prayed.

After seeing the temple we drove through a wholesale market. The market had many different vendors that specialized in one type of product i.e. paper, plastic, chairs.  In this market you could bargain for a price and then ask for up to 10,000 of a certain item and it would be delivered in a couple days. And if you do business with them often, you don’t have to pay immediately (Chinese way). There is no middle man so people prefer to shop at these markets rather than companies, and people are treated the same for buying 1 or 10,000 of an item. Shown below is the heart of the market.

 

Our main activity for the day was taking a river boat cruise through the Mekong river. It was about a 2 hour bus ride to the water and we started out on a large raft that carried our whole group along with the bikes that we would later use once we reached the island village. 

While cruising through the river we saw wholesale boats that had advertisements on long sticks that would show what they sold e.g. fruits or veggies. 

 

We were provided some miscellaneous fruits as a snack as we had a quick tour of the river before making our way into smaller 4 person rafts.

 Using a combination of the small engine on the back of the boat and a large paddle, our boat drivers navigated us down a smaller river with views of the peaceful nature and small village homes along the waterfront. This was a very relaxing experience and everyone could appreciate the quiet rural experience contrasted from the busy sea of scooters and cars zooming around in the city.

After about half an hour on the small boats we reconvened on our larger boat and travelled to a small island in which we rode our bikes around and checked out many local villagers’ homes and how they make a living by creating a product. 

Some of the items we saw being made were rice paddies, hammocks, and woven goods from dried hiyacynth. 

We also visited a small bee farm that also grew mushrooms for medicinal purposes.

 While still on the island we then walked over to another business that had all sorts of coconut products, attached to a shop that made and sold different candies. 

Then we went to lunch on the island and enjoyed a variety of delicious seafood. 

After lunch we took the boat back to the bus while enjoying fresh coconut water.

 Then we took the bus back home before enjoying a delicious dinner at Di Mai

Vietnamese coffee was a staple food group for several of us during our time in Vietnam and so after dinner a small group of us walked to a coffee shop and bought some souvenirs to try and make our own once we get home. Then a couple of us who had service rode scooters/motorbikes using the Grab app (Uber for scooters) back to the hotel. After regrouping, a group of 5 of us went out to get massages. Most of us (or at least the men in our group) didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into and the place we went had Thai style massages which involved a lot more twisting, cracking, and extreme movements than I had expected from a massage. At one point the masseuse was underneath us holding our bodies above their knees in order to extend our spines in an arch and my masseuse must’ve been used to Vietnamese sized men because she could not withstand my weight for very long and I ended up crushing her at which point she started laughing and told me to get off. There were several points in the massage where some of us couldn’t hold back our laughter due to the awkward positions and we made sure to tip well for our American behavior as well as my mishap of flattening a small Vietnamese woman. Overall we were glad to have the experience of a getting a Thai massage, but personally in the future I would opt for a more relaxing variant.

January 21

Hey everyone! This is Ben.

We are approaching the end of our stay in Asia and the time has flown by! We got an early start today by eating breakfast and then leaving the hotel at 7AM. We rode our bus about an hour to yet another street market, but this one had a twist. This market was set up along a section of an active railroad. It was like any other street market, except there was a tiled path between the rails and the goods being sold were right up against the rails. Trains come through the market eight times a day on a regular schedule. So, a couple minutes before the train arrived all the vendors moved their goods away from the tracks and all the people found spaces to stand off the tracks.

Train leaving the market

We then experienced another unique market which was a floating market. We rode in long, narrow boats in groups of five along narrow waterways, passing vendors on boardwalks, on porches, or in other boats. There was a more open part of the trip where the boat could pull over for us to interact with vendors, and there was a very crowded part where we slowly passed by vendors as we moved with the flow of all the other boats.

Floating market

After the markets we had a three hour drive to the city of Ayudhaya, which used to be the capital of Thailand, to see two temples. The temple Wat Yai Chaya Mongkol was the royal temple for the capital city. The temple Wat Maha That was built in the style of Angkor Wat, which we saw in Cambodia. These temples were different from the Cambodian ones because there weren't many indoor spaces, but we got good views of the whole construction from outside.

Wat Yai Chaya Mongkol

Wat Maha That

We got back to our nice hotel after 7pm and had free time. Personally, I went out to dinner, wrote this post, and then went to bed in preperation for another long bus ride tomorrow morning.

January 19th - Cambodia to Thailand

Hello blog readers! This is Rachel, and I'll be blogging for today! Today was another travel day - we traveled from Siem Reap to Bangkok. 

We got to sleep in and headed to the airport around 10:40 this morning. The Siem Reap airport is pretty small, but they have a lot of stores and nice places to sit. A few of us have been craving a burger, so we found a Burger King and a Dairy Queen after going through customs and security. 

After enjoying our burgers and ice cream, we boarded the plane shortly after. 

 

The flight was only about 45 minutes long and we landed in Bangkok airport. After getting through the airport, we met our tour guide, Wassana, who has been working as a tour guide for thirteen years, and headed to the hotel. On the way there she told us some fun facts about Thailand: there are currently nine million people living in Bangkok and 95 percent of people in Thailand are Buddhist!

After checking in to our hotel, we left to go to dinner at a buffet. We had some pad Thai, tom yum soup, curry, Thai fish cake, and coconut ice cream.

The Davis Bangkok Hotel Lobby

The dinner buffet 

When we finished dinner, the bus dropped us off at one of the biggest night markets in Thailand. The streets were filled with people and it was very humid. It was busier than the markets in all of the other countries we have visited! There was a lot of street food, clothing, and souvenir items for sale. When we were walking through the street food section, we found candy on skewers, meat on skewers, squid, and many other items. We grabbed some mini pancakes, which were fantastic with condensed milk. Once we were ready to leave, we took a tuk tuk back to the hotel and went to sleep. Tomorrow we will be visiting a university and a kindergarten class!
- Rachel

The very crowded night market streets!

Meat Skewers

Squid

Candy Skewers

Day 15 - The Temple Run

Angkor Wat is up fellow classmates and parents at home!  It's Justin, back at it with another legit temple review.  Today was a pretty neat day of visiting some ancient temples and viewing large cultural sites with our tour guide, Savoun.

The day started off alright; a few of us woke up feeling a bit sick.  Whether it was bad water, food poisoning, or the malaria medication, quite a few of us were toilet-ridden this morning.  Not the best way to start the morning.  After a satisfying breakfast at the hotel, we headed off to the Angkor terminal to collect our tickets to visit the sites.  We had three specific temples that we had on the schedule to visit.

The first temple that we visited was called Ta Prohm (pictured above), where Savoun informed us on the state of the temples.  There is an ongoing restoration project, in order to maintain and upkeep the quality of the sites for visitors and religious people alike.  He had also mentioned that the restoration project was not likely to finish anytime in the near future.  In this walkthrough of Ta Prohm, we were able to see the stone blocks used to create the original temple, and how they were restored by modern builders as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.  The sponge trees, however, made it difficult to maintain the blocks' original form.  As the trees grew, they wedge themselves between the blocks and continue to grow, pushing the blocks from the spots they are supposed to be in.  Being a soft wood, the trees have no use, so there was no need to cut them down.  I rate this temple site 8 spongey trees.

On our way to the second site, we drove through what is called the Victory Gate.  We learned that this gate was constructed as an entrance to the city of Angkor that the king used when returning from victory over an enemy.  It was originally over top of a man made moat infested with crocodiles!

Anyway, the second site we visited was called Angkor Thom, which was a bit of a climb.  The view from the top was very worth it, though (pictured above).  After the visit to Thom, we took a group break to head to get lunch.  The food in Cambodia has been on par with the rest of the trip, and we've been eating well.  I rate Angkor Thom a solid 37 steep stairs out of 51.

And finally, the moment that we had all been waiting for: Angkor Wat.  The largest religious monument in the entire world, visiting Angkor Wat was an experience of a lifetime.  The amount of storytelling and detail put into the building was incredible, and left a lasting impression on our students.  The carved stories and the immaculate masonry of the construction was jaw dropping, considering the period of time in which it was created.  The moat surrounding the compound was large enough to be a lake itself, and the different galleries allowed for multiple levels of discovery.  This well-preserved site is an attraction for tourists and religious practitioners alike.  Angkor Wat's rating?  10/10 stone points.

We ended the night with a couple hours to relax at the hotel before dinner.  Some of us hit the swimming pool, some of us hit the showers, and some of us hit the sheets for a nap.  After the regroup, we enjoyed a delicious dinner together as a group before dispersing for the night market or the hotel.  Overall, today did not seem to be lacking in excitement.  Exploration, adventure, cute animals, and good friends make for a good Jan term overseas.

-Justin Hagedorn

PS. Here's a collage of cute stray dogs we saw today.