Siem Reap, Cambodia

some snippets from Siem Reap...

• we saw a dog that was half Inspector Rex and half Murder She Wrote. it was brilliant.
• 50 cent pots of cold beer.
• took a Cambodian cooking class, for which we traveled a little bit out of town and down a few wonky dirt roads. to our surprise there was a nice hotel there with the class conducted just a short walk down the road. they also took us to visit one of the families at the local village for which we gave them 2 kilos of rice as a thank you. they were a young couple 23 years old, with 2 kids and a third 7 months on the way. they were extremely poor and i was grateful we were able to visit and hope the rice helped. if the husband works laboring in the city he will work an 8 hour day for $2.50. later in the arvo (during our class) the 7 month pregnant lady rode past us off on her way to search for snails near the lake to use in her cooking for her family and hopefully some extra that they can sell.
• Angkor Wat. deserves to be the 8th wonder of the world. impressive, huge and nearly 900 years old.
  
• our tour guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom was Socur with an old, mad Englishman named Shah (of Indian heritage and born in Sth Africa) rounding out our group of four. Socur joined us for lunch and it was interesting to have a chat with him. he had a good sense of humour (well i found him funny!) and his english was pretty good. he only works 2 days a week, because of the oversupply of english speaking tour guides and his wife, 18 month old daughter and him all live with his mother in law - apparently it's not a happy situation, but he's thinking of trying to move to Qatar to work.
• "Angkor What?" was probably not as impressive as Angkor Wat, but it was a good pub none the less.