The day we arrived we didn't do anything other than swim and walk around a little bit. We didn't even go out to dinner, but just went to a minimarts to get some bread, cheese, and pickles. For the first time in months the pickles were good and I OD-ed a little bit and had to drink a few bottles of water for the salt. Breakfast was at our hotel and I didn't know that it was April Fool's Day until my parents convinced me that they were dragging me out to these temples more obscure than Angkor Wat and less touristed because to get there you needed to do a homestay and hike about seven kilometers each way. I wouldn't put it past them, but I was NOT happy.
April second my parents got our airplane tickets to Luang Prabang. In the afternoon we took a tuk tuk to Artisans d'Angkor, a school teaching traditional crafts. There was a large shop there so after we booked a tour of the factory we browsed a while.
About forty five minutes before the bus left we went to a streetside cafe for lunch. The food was good but the service excruciatingly slow. Sitting through a brief downpour was pleasant but when our food arrived only ten minute before the bus left my unhungry dad went back to keep the bus from leaving without us.
It only took about twenty minutes to get out of the city and to the factory, and there we only six other people on the bus. First in the factory we were taken to see the mulberry bushes briefly and then to the silk worms. They have a forty seven day life span, but eighty percent are killed for their silk before then. The eighty percent have their silk spun into skeins of raw silk and some is respun into fine silk. Strands from dozens of cocoons feed through a hand-cranked wooden machine and twist up to create one thread about four hundred meters long.
The thread is then washed because though it is naturally a beautiful yellow color that will wash out. Traditionally, Cambodian textiles have employed natural dyes. Red dye comes from lac insect nests, blue dye from indigo, yellow and green dye from prohut bark, and black dye from ebony bark. There are two main types of Cambodian weaving. The ikat technique, which produces patterned fabric, is quite complex. To create patterns, weavers tie and dye portions of weft yarn before weaving begins. Patterns are diverse and vary by region; common ones are lattice, stars, and spots. I could find no websites that talk about this in great detail or I'd include a link.
For dinner my mom found a restaurant she really wanted to try that was another charity organization restaurant. Meaning, it was a good cause and we were glad to support it but my scalding soup was spilled on my lap while being served and not the deliciousness we still aren't too disillusioned to hope for.
The next day we went to Angkor Wat (see last post) and for dinner walked half a block down to Rosie's Guesthouse. The portions were on the small side and the salad weird, but my jacket potatoes were good. I find that it's easier to write about what is wrong with a meal than what is good with it and part of it may just be natural pessimism or that bad food sticks in the memory more than food that is good but not astounding or even that we've just had bad luck with restaurants but I am so sick of eating other people's unsatisfactory food. Lucky for me my mom REALLY misses cooking and is making a list of all the stuff she plans on making so for a long time we will be set and at least there will be the ingredients for me to whip up some good pasta... Or a salad.... Yum, salad....................
The day after Angkor Wat we slept in a little before taking a tuk tuk to drop off some laundry and to bookstore and walking around from there. We each got a book, and just in time because my kindle broke the same day. It was either serendipitous or I jinxed something. Unfortunately the crisis was diverted only temporarily because the Michael Conelly was gone in two days. Of course this happens at the climax of my book! I was so relieved when I found the kindle app, connected it to Amazon, and found that all my books were saved.
We walked around for a while looking for a second bookstore but gave up when it wasn't where it was supposed to be and the direct sun and ninety-plus heat started really getting to us. The power was out for a large section of town but we found an ice cream-based restaurant called the Blue Pumpkin with fantastic ice cream.
On our way home we took a tuk tuk. Despite planning on staying in for a couple of ors we got hungry and found a place that got amazing reviews called the Peace Cafe. Do not go there. Tis is not just me missing home food--the service was horrible (despite them being in a part of town with power!), the food utterly tasteless, and the flies awful.
Without a particular restaurant in mind after a lazy morning the next day we headed out on foot to a late lunch. It was just as well I was the only hungry one because our attention was diverted by a movie theater. Claiming to be the 'number one tourist attraction', somehow bypassing Angkor Wat, it was a genius idea. Choose your own movie and get a private viewing room with a big couch against one wall and a ginormous screen onto which the movie was projected. Also serving noodle soup for peckish people such as myself.
From the list of fifty or so movies we chose Life of Pi and though the cinematography was beautiful and the movie well-cast I have to say that it didn't even begin to compare to the book. The book seemed like such a vivid, slightly surreal but above all believable story of amazing survival with such huge ambiguity and slow revelation and this was... Pretty. Really pretty, especially in the ocean-at-night scenes, and not so pretty in others and I'm glad I saw it but it lacked so much.
Afterwards I wasn't hungry anymore but my parents were so we walked over to the alley where a bunch of restaurants are clustered. We picked a vegetarian restaurant called Chamkar. I sampled the dishes my parents ordered and the food was really, really good.
In the morning the next day, which might have been Friday, I skyped first with one friend and then a different group of friends. It was so good to see everybody and instead of making me melancholy I just got excited to be home.
My parents went out to do errands while I dealt with the picture formatting for Angkor and the after one last swim we left for the airport. It was smile day and we were given palm sugar candy after breezing through security.
While waiting a little over an hour for our plane to take off we found out that the airport had a Blue Pumpkin and we entertained ourselves with milkshakes. It was my first time in a propeller plane but since we didn't fall out of the sky it was fairly anticlimactic. In this case, that was a good thing.
It was a smallish airplane, with only about thirty rows of four seats. Eight of these seats were filled, two people a few rows behind us and two ahead.
Leaving Cambodia was really sad but that kind of got pushed out of our minds when we land in Lao. I say 'Lao' because that's what people here say. It wasn't a long walk from the plane to the airport and it was super quick to get visas and grab our bags. The Laotian visa is shiny and silver and pretty, much prettier than the Vietnamese one.
A car from our hotel came and picked us up. Luang Prabang is tiny! The area where we are, a peninsula surrounded by rivers, is four streets wide exactly.
Our first night here we learned how to say hello and thank you and set out to explore. It was an outing of several hours, stopping at hotels to investigate moving, looking at menus, stopping in shops. We finally ate at a guesthouse that I don't know the name of but that had many great veggie options.
This morning my parents went on one more hotel-scouting expedition without me and then we all set out to explore. After a while we stopped at a cafe for cold drinks before heading out for a little more meandering and lunch.
Finding our way across one of the rivers on a bamboo bridge to Dyen Sabai was a feat of navigation but we made it and were glad in the end. Sitting on cushions around a low tile table we tried the vegetarian fondue. Laotian fondues are not cheesy, but instead are a cook-your-own-soup and fry-your-own tofu arrangement made with a bucket of embers and a metal burner/pot to put on it.
A small store on our way back to the river caught our eye because of the kitten and puppy inside. The cat was sweet and very vocal but the puppy was the star of the establishment. Typically, she chewed on my arm but was exceedingly cuddly. I also forgot what it was like to pet a dog distinctly more on the chubby side rather than the skin-and-bones one.
Tomorrow we are leaving to spend a couple of days with the elephants. I should be back within the week.
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