We depart for Bangkok from Chiang Mai on Saturday, March 3, as follows:

Thai Air Asia Flight FD3239
Depart 11:40am
Arrive Bangkok 12:50pm

We are staying at the Bossotel Bangkok hotel until Tuesday morning, March 6, when we depart for LA from Bangkok, as follows:

Asiana Airlines Flight 744:
Bangkok (BKK)
Depart 1:20 am
 to 
Seoul (ICN)
Arrive 8:20 am

Asiana Airlines Flight 202:
Seoul (ICN)
Depart 4:30 pm
 to 
Los Angeles (LAX)
Arrive 10:10 am

Then we're off to Minneapolis via Denver, as follows:

Frontier Airlines # 412
Los Angeles International (LAX) to Denver International (DEN)
Departure (LAX): March 6, 2:40 PM PST (afternoon)
Arrival (DEN): March 6, 5:50 PM MST (evening)

Frontier Airlines # 108
Denver International (DEN) to Minneapolis St Paul Intl (MSP)
Departure (DEN): March 6, 7:00 PM MST (evening)
Arrival (MSP): March 6, 9:55 PM CST (evening)

We have a ride from the airport. See you all soon!

We are very sad that we'll miss March game night :( We tried, but tickets would have been nearly 2x as much to fly on or before the first Saturday. No idea what that's about, we've been scanning for changes over the last week or so, but it got worse instead of better. Ultimately, we found a better deal than when we first looked. Molly's persistence and willingness to search high and low (including straight googling for flight numbers and airport codes) resulted in some really great deals. We're taking off and landing a zillion times, but it's going to be CHEAP! If anyone wants something from the Seoul airport, let us know--we'll have 8 hours to kill ;)

So we looked through our pictures of Singapore, and we're not terribly excited about posting anything. IOW, this will be a text-only trip summary...

Singapore is a very beautiful, very HOT and HUMID country. It was 90+, sunny, and extremely humid every day we were there. There is soooo much green space on the island, even in the extremely urbanized downtown areas. The riverfront is very beautiful, and if you ever go, it's definitely worth taking a river taxi tour just to get a feel for how developed the place is.

Our trip was delayed a few times--the first time because the tour company sold our plane tickets out from under our group of 50 when they got a better offer, and the 2nd time because our hotel reservation slipped somehow. In the end, we were only able to reserve a hotel in the red-light district off of Alumni station because of the short notice. Never seen so many prostitutes and sex shops in my life. Molly was harassed whenever I left her alone by Johns looking for a date (even in our hotel lobby). The hotel was nice, but it (like every hotel in the area) had an hourly "transit" rate of like $20 for 2hrs. We frequently saw men getting on and off elevators with scantily clad women from the various clubs up and down the street, and it was hard to even go up and down the street without being propositioned by the women hanging out of doorways or waiting for a drink at the little sit-down spots along the road. We arrived on a Friday night, so it was pretty crazy in our area--men camped out everywhere.

We saw lots of interesting buildings, but nothing mind-blowing. Their giant 16-story dual skyscraper downtown library was pretty wicked--if I lived there I'd be camped out in that place at all hours. For some reason we only had the tour busses for the first two days, and ended up doing a LOT of walking in very hot weather on Saturday and Sunday, which nearly made me melt a few times. Unlike the Cambodia trip, we were responsible for feeding ourselves, so we went to a lot of interesting little places in our neighborhood and downtown. The trains were very convenient for getting around--everything is in English (ticket machines, signs, voice prompts on the train). We also got to eat two things Molly has been dying for: Mattar Paneer and Mexican food. Lots of good restaurants downtown, but food was very expensive everywhere. Also, like Thailand, they have 7-11 stores every 200 feet by law or something, except that the Singapore 7-11s actually have slurpee machines. Mmmmmmm, sluuuuuurpeeeeee. Had to try an Apple slurpee--nothing is better when it's 100 degrees yo. They also have lots of western candy, so I was able to secure some peanut butter M&Ms and Skittles ;) OK, they also had vanilla and lime Coke, so I had a can of each. What? Food/junkfood was the highlight of Jesse's travel experience? THAT'S RIGHT, GET USED IT!

Molly went nuts on Sunday and made we go on a marathon waking tour of downtown and Little India, both of which were interesting. My highlights: bought a $35 2gb SD card at a computer flea market, and we had possibly the best dim sum of my life for lunch ;) Altogether, the trip was interesting, but Singapore is basically what American would be like with legalized prostitution, clean streets, comprehensive mass transit, and more Chinese people. I mean, besides Little India, Arab Street, and signs in Mandarin, it has just as many (if not more) malls, Starbucks, and McDonalds everywhere. Made for a fun weekend, but...not what I thought it would be.

Oiy. What a trip. Lots to write, so we'll put something together with photos in a few days.

We're flying to Singapore for a field trip with Molly's 3rd year studio class. It was originally planned to happen right after the 2nd years got back from Cambodia, but there have been a series of unexplained reservation screw-ups. We only received surprise notification yesterday! We'll be gone Thursday Nov. 16 to Monday Nov. 20.

On the morning of our last day in Cambodia, the students toured three 5-star hotels: The Victorian, The Grand Hotel, and Le Meridien. They were all pretty amazing, but we liked The Victorian best--it definitely has the most character and is the most beautiful, in our humble opinion.

Then the students toured two construction sites, which was an interesting experience. Holy cow, there were some extremely young children working there. Molly found a group of 7-10 year olds who were hanging out around the painters and plaster workers wiping up spills.

Next we went to Neak Pean. It was originally constructed to act as a healing area of sorts, with four medicinal pools surrounding a central pool with a large, unreachable structure in the center. Each of the medicinal pools features a small cave with a large stone head with a water spout in the mouth. From the outside, you can pour water into the cave from the central pool, and it will flow through the mouth of the stone head for various ceremonial purposes. Molly loved that the students could finally interact with the architecture of the sites, and they eagerly scooped water into the first cave with an improvised cup. Molly liked this horse head the best:

Next we went to Ta Prohm, aka the "Tomb Raider" ruins. I guess part of a Tomb Raider movie was filmed here. There are dozens of enormous, extremely old trees growing in, on, and through the structures, knocking them down in some places. Makes for great photography, though:

And Molly took a picture of a weird little spider that ended upon my shirt while I stood back for the photo above.

So I said "last day" above, but it was really just last day of touring. We left at 6am the next morning for home. Holy crap, the road out was flooded like a mutha. The shots below are of a part of the road (completely covered in water by this point) where we were stuck for four hours waiting on dump truck filled with sand to split its load with another truck so they could get the sand over the flooded area. After the first two hours of waiting, our travel agent tried to buy the sand just to get them to dump it out and get moving, but the drivers said it was urgently needed to mix concrete in a nearby town.

Four hours and about 1 km later, we got some _real_ Cambodian food for the first time. For the last four days, we'd been eating really good food, but just about everything we were given had a spicectomy. This stuff was so spicy my mouth was on fire for almost an hour. I don't mean that it took an hour to die down, I mean my mouth was full-on, four-alarm fire for 60 minutes and 2 bottles of ice water before it even started to cool down. It was one of the hottest things I've eaten in my life, and it was fricken awesome. The fish sauce was also amazing. I LOVE FISH SAUCE!

This is a Cambodian gas station. They fill empty, former 2 li pop bottles and old plastic drums with gasoline and diesel. There were dozens of these between Siem Reap and the border. Wild.

Anyhow, we obviously made it home safely, and I would now like to share a few thoughts about Cambodia.

Warning: these thoughts are based on my Americanized, westernized, well-insulated perspective, so maybe my opinion is total BS.

Holy cows is Cambodia fucked. Yes, France and the US contributed, but they've been gone for a while, and Cambodia has been trying to get on their feet for about 15 years now, and it's still really awful. The imbalance between the wealthy and poor is extremely evident right inside Siem Reap--there is about a 2 sq km area that has reliable electrical service (regular brownouts being the standard there) and running water. Everyone else gets spotty or zero service, and clean drinking water is actually a major problem. Siem Reap is a weird mixture of ridiculously extravagant wealth (the 5-star hotels) and utter poverty (the people selling stuff to tourists at the temple sites). There is no other way to describe what I saw than the term "failed state". The government is unable and/or unwilling (see: corrupt) to provide anything for its citizens. In an economy where the majority has absolutely nothing, everything (including the bodies of the young and old alike) becomes a commodity--as evidenced by the large signs everywhere warning foreigners not to have sex with children. The temples are beautiful, but the situation was just fucking tragic and really hard to take at times. They also still have a huge problem with landmines--I've never seen so many one-legged people of all ages, many begging with their families in the streets at the markets where privileged foreigners haggle with impoverished store workers for beautiful handmade goods. OIY! That's all I have to say about that.

It was an amazing trip, and we both had a great time, but I (Jesse) don't really want to rush back--maybe someday when average Cambodians are able to afford to enjoy this amazing world heritage site, too...

This is a small but very beautiful temple called Banteay Srei. Btw, we all had to wear special full-color ID badges with our pictures and picture of some ruins on them. All of ours had a picture of this temple--everyone calls it "The Pearl" of Angkor because it's so well-preserved and intricately designed. I got to overhear the tour guides explaining the features to Japanese tourists, which was pretty funny sometimes. Holy crap is was _hot_ that day.

And finally....ANGKOR WAT!!

This photo was taken from the highest reachable point at the top of the temple. The moat we're walking over in the previous picture is so far away at this point that you can't see it through the haze on the other side of the main gate in the background. The scale of all of this is hard to believe unless you're actually standing inside of it.
 
Two photos of me at the top of the first layer of the main temple, after having climbed the extremely tall, steep, and well-worn stone steps. Molly is pictured after having climbed up the interior (and even taller, steeper, more worn) steps. The next photo is of the dome in the very center of the top of the temple, about 15 feet away from where we took the photo that overlooks the interior yard of the site.

The 2nd year students posing for a picture of themselves seeing the reflection of the large central dome in the water:

This is a photo of an unfinished structure from about a 1/2 km directly "behind" the main temple area.

One thing I didn't mention yet was that no matter where we went around the ruins (not just Angkor Wat, all of them) was the huge number of children running up to us with stuff to sell just before, just after, and sometimes inside of each set of ruins. Some of the children were so aggressive it was all we could do to get away. One kid (not the girl in this picture) followed us for about 1/2 km away from his starting location shouting, "FOUR FOR DOLLAR, FOUR FOR DOLLAR!!!" at the top of his lungs.

At the end of our long, hot afternoon at Angkor Wat, we did the only natural thing left to do: we climbed a huge hill, then climbed a huge ruin at the top of that hill, and photographed Angkor Wat during a very cloudy sunset. Molly got a shot of my nose hairs too.

Join us next time for the conclusion of our show, Wats Part 4: Escape from Watland, where we check out the Tomb Raider ruins and head back to Thailand over the bumpiest route possible.

So day two started out rough: it was raining and we were all pretty damned tired from the day before. Phasu handed out ponchos and turned us loose. It was awesome! The first temple was called Preah Koh. There were many Japanese tourists with bilingual guides. It was built in the late 19th century and still has some of the original lime plaster.

It stopped raining when we got to the second temple, Bakong. This was a large pyramidal structure with a bridge on one side going over a moat of sorts.

This next set is from the "Elephant Terrace", or Lolei

That night we went to an "authentic" Thai restaurant. Apparently we don't eat enough authentic Thai food, because we didn't recognize a lot of it, but is sure was good.

Join us again tomorrow for Wats Part 3: Wats, Wats, Wats!

Note: I'll post one set of pictures per day for the next four days.

I got caught looking grumpy. In all fairness, that's not very hard to do. I was feeling tired because I had to wake up at the crack of noon to get to the bus for Cambodia<rimshot>.

This is the student bus. The ajarns (teachers) road in full-size van (well, full-size for SE Asia ;) and they were kind enough to let me ride in there too.

Before we crossed the border, we stopped at a small hotel so everyone could take a shower, collect their passports from the travel agent, and eat some breakfast. Everyone was exhausted because we'd been on the bus >12 hours.

w00t! We made it to the border.

Molly didn't get a good shot of this, but there were about 50 of these cart-pullers waiting on the Cambodian side of the border to haul luggage and goods for people heading across the border into Thailand. They were right in the middle of the street lined up like regular traffic at a stop sign, and I thought they were all waiting for us to cross because they were looking at us expectantly. I realized after nobody yelled for us to get out of the way that they were just waiting for us to give them some work.

At Hoi Pet, the border town where we crossed over, there's a bridge over a large, garbage-strewn gorge (is there a river under all that?). This is the view from on top looking from the Thai side to the Cambodian side. This city has basically no sanitation or garbage collection, and there are garbage piles everywhere--probably out of necessity more than anything; many people are selling extremely used items in piles all along the road where tourists and locals might pass. That big Angkor-Wat-looking thing is a really interesting piece that spans the road at the first major intersection.

Molly skipped the photos where the Cambodian "highway" hands us our asses over 10 hours of extremely rough road. We transferred from the enormous busses to tiny busses at the border, which were more suited to the almost complete lack of drivable roads. I have no idea what this is:

So when we arrived at Siem Reap (pronounced see-ahm ree-ahp), the tourist city next the Angkor ruins, we immediately left again and headed to Tonlé Sap, or "Great Lake", for a boat ride to see all of the structures built on the water and get an idea of just how enormous that lake actually is. After we got waaaay the hell away from shore, four tiny kids in tiny buckets paddled over to us to try to sell us pop and snacks. There were a couple of slightly larger canoes that had whole grocery stores on them, but the buckets were adorable.

Our guide Pet, who did an awesome job showing us around:

That night we had dinner at an international buffet that had a huge stage with a 90 minute traditional Cambodian dance show. The dancing was great and the food was incredible. They had about 200 different things to eat, and I think I tried every one of them.

Please visit later for Wats Part 2: Revenge of the Wats.

Wow, what a trip! We have lots of stories and lots of pictures to share, but we also have some seriously tired bodies after a 16hr bus ride through 125km of the roughest roads of our short lives, between Siem Reap and the Thailand border. After we decompress, both literally and metaphorically, we'll get to posting.

Molly and I have a chance to join along with the 2nd year architecture students on a field trip to Cambodia for a week to visit Angkor Wat. WE CAN'T WAIT!!! We'll be there October 16-20.

Molly has a week off between semesters starting Oct. 14th! w00t!! We're definitely going to go somewhere, but we aren't sure where just yet. Molly has been pricing tickets from Bangkok to cities in Australia, India, and Japan...we'll see what happens and keep the blog updated.