December 23, 2004
Cambodian Trip 2
The Angkor World Heritage consists of many temples that were built in different times between 9C-13C. We needed 3 full days to visit most of them. They were absolutely beautiful and more magnificent than you ever imagine.
Our favorite was Ta Prohm, where a huge jungle is encroaching upon the ancient temple;
Angkor Thom's main temple, Bayon, has different beauty than others.
I will upload more pictures on a different page once I get all the pictures from Yukiko.
Since we hired a driver for the first two days and another one for the next two days, we had lots of interesting and fun conversation with them. A driver, Kol, was working for a French company to search and dig up land mines near the Thai border before. He taught us some Khmer sentences such as "Dei O-kun! (No, thank you!)" "Tleak ngeob (slip and die)!" "Mui ni ti!(One minute!)" (not sure about sp). According to him, there are more than 20 vowels and 40 consonants in Khmer. It sounds very complicated. Kol told us several jokes that seem very popular among Cambodians. One of the stories was:
"Cambodian guys go drinking. When they drink, they get drunk. Not drunk, drink for what? When they get drunk, they meet girls, professional girls. WHY? Because!! they do not like mine! don't like mine!" The last sentence means "they do not want to get caught by land mines while they are drunk." It was hilarious that moment but we felt shocked afterwards when we realized that people make fun of land mines that are buried everywhere.