This past week in Siem Reap has been pretty great, we have gotten into the routine of manual labour in the morning and teaching English in the afternoons during the week, although we have had to be reminded that we are supposed to leave the house at 7:30 in the morning, not 8:30.
The students at the schools are very cheeky so to begin with a lot of us struggled to get them engaged during lessons but practice makes perfect and now we leave school each day with pictures, bracelets and an uncountable number of high fives! They really are very adorable. Today we went to spitler school and took part in a cultural exchange, we got shown some traditional Cambodian dance which was really beautiful but we weren’t told about the exchange part before hand so we had to think on our feet and just taught them the Macarena… the empitemy of western culture.
We have started work on the toilet which is much harder than I expected, I don’t think brick laying is a career I should pursue but it’s fun to learn a new skill and to play with the children we are helping during our breaks. Although it is hard to communicate most of the time we have realised they really really enjoy piggy backs and Rock Paper Scissors!
The boys bought 3 guitars so the communal area is now always a rehearsal space for the ‘Siem Reapers’ who will be making their debut at one of the schools next week which should be quite entertaining. Aiden has had some on stage practice on a night out in X bar which leads me to believe the performance will be pretty good!
This weekend we visited Angkor Wat, we woke up at 4:00 to try and see the sun rise but missed it by about half an hour but it was still insanely beautiful, possibly the most photogenic building ever. We also saw two other temples, one of them being where tomb raider was filmed. In my opinion it was probably more spectacular than the Angkor Wat because there where trees growing on top and the buildings with roots wrapped round all of the ruins, it felt like we where in the heart of a rain forest.
We also all received a water blessing so we now have incredibly good luck, it was an interesting experience, not as spiritual as I thought it would be as the man before us brought his new motor cycle to be blessed and the monk just drenched us all with water as we tried to hold in giggles, but if it means nothing bad will happen to us now so it was definitely worth it.
We are adjusting to the extreme heat, and I am looking forward to finishing the toilet this week as we have all worked so hard on it. I am also looking forward to some more Fro-yos and a $4 massage as well as taking part in the legendary pub crawl in order to make the most of our final week in Siem Reap.