What's old / What's new

There's an array of things that I've promised to write about but still haven't gotten around to. One of them is my birthday. It's nearly a month in the past and no longer topical, so I'll write about it just briefly. I woke up that morning to find that Korea had decided the perfect birthday present for me would be an inch of snow. But it was a Saturday and I had no responsibilities, so that tempered any disappointment. I gave myself a present first, by trying sundae (as I mentioned in the post about the market). Then I lounged around, chatted with a college friend on Skype, that sort of thing. In the afternoon, Sean and Natalie came up. Natalie had just arrived from London, and she'd brought some English candy with me. The English do candy pretty well, I'd say. For the next several weeks I was completely set for liquorice allsorts, Cornish dairy fudge, and rhubarb & custards. When it became a suitable time of evening we all decided that the party ought to start up. So everyone came up to my room and we had green tea cake from the bakery in town (pretty good) and ate pizza and just chatted. And then, at a rather convenient time, we all decided the party had run its course, and I got online in time to chat with Nana & Papaw. That's always sure to give me that back-home feeling. And later Dad showed me his carnivorous plant bog over Skype. So the day was just the right mix of hanging out here and talking with people from back home.
   That wasn't actually as brief as I'd planned. Well, anyhow, the other thing I've been putting off writing about is the hike Sean and Deanna and I went on to Candlestick Rock way back in the beginning of March. So I'll get on that now.
   Early on in our year here, we found an illustrated map of our county (the "Hwacheon-gun" that you see when you mail stuff to me). It was hard to get a sense of how big it might be from the little illustration on the map, but what was clear was that just down the road from us was a sizeable stone monolith projecting out of a hillside. It would be preposterous not to visit it. However, we didn't get around to it before winter, and then when winter came we all lost motivation to do anything outside, so we didn't actually get around to it until this day in March. Practically and technically speaking, it was still winter. There was snow all over, patchy but definitely present. And there was definitely a chill in the air. But we had a day off in the middle of the week, and it was forecast to be a few notches warmer than all the iron-cold gray days we'd gone through up until then. So it was clearly time to do something special.
   After poring and puzzling over maps that were all in Korean, we figured that we should probably set out at 9:30 in order to get back at a reasonable time of day, so that's when we all met and left the house. We walked south, well bundled up, and felt warm from the activity. In fact, Sean felt warm enough that he declared it to be just like summer in England, and undressed to his T-shirt. (This was the first time Sean claimed it was just like an English summer, but he's been doing it variously ever since. I'm still not sure if I believe him, but there was the day last week when he said it and it was actually pretty nice and warm out. Not the sort of thing I'd expect from a summer, though. Maybe it was like a day during a cool spell of an English summer. Or maybe England is really that cool all the time.) We followed a stream, known as Jichon Stream, as it flowed along the road , mostly under ice.
   And in not too long at all, we came upon a great little surprise that buoyed our constitutions. In the middle of the stream was a giant boulder, vaguely cube-shaped and a couple feet taller than any of us. On top of the boulder was a gazebo. How about that? Just a serene little gazebo perched on top of a smooth, timeworn, white boulder with a Chinese character carved on one side, in the middle of a tumbling mountain-fed stream in a bed of round rocks, almost more idyllic than any painter would dare to put on canvas. A tall green fence separated it from the road, and near a gate in that fence was a sign in Korean, English, and Japanese explaining that the gazebo had been built by a monk or a king in the 1600s who thought it looked like the perfect place to meditate. And he was absolutely right, though these days the road running alongside it and the not-the-prettiest fence would drive me further up into a mountain. All the same, I climbed up the side of the rock to stand on the gazebo. It was a modern reproduction, but probably built the same way that the ancient meditator built his. As I recall, the roof was even made out of thatch. With some difficulty, Sean climbed up too. Apparently I make climbing look too easy. Deanna couldn't make it up, but she tossed both of us bananas from Sean's backpack, and we ate them while looking out at the scene around us.
   We still had progress to make, though, so we jumped down from the boulder and hit the road again. The sun kept shining, and we talked about how nice a day it was, even if it was a little chilly. And within the hour, we arrived at another place to stop and look around. We'd known about this one beforehand, unlike with the gazebo, but all we knew was that it was a temple called Beopjangsa, and it was at a good place in our journey for us to take a look around. So we turned onto the little side road. On our left was a tributary to Jichon Stream, and on our right was a very steep hill. We turned a corner and a metal staircase appeared, leading from the road up to the top of the hill. The staircase was encased in ice. It appeared to have been built in a waterfall that was now frozen over. The ice was several inches thick toward the middle of the stairs. I was thrilled. I took point and, slipping several times, crossed the ice coating a metal walkway with no railings before making it to the bottom of the stairs where I would actually be able to hang on to something with my hands. Mostly using arm strength, I made it up to the top of the stairs and found an old man with a dog standing outside a temple painted in all the intricate red, green, and white that cover Korean temples. He told me it was fine for us to look around. So we did, once the other two got up. They'd been delayed by the dog, which apparently was adept enough on the ice to walk down to greet them and make them wonder if it was going to chase them back down the ice stairs. Luckily it just accompanied them up to the top.
   There was more than just the one temple. That one was quite nice, in the general sort of way in which most temples around here are pretty nice while looking mostly the same. But the other stuff around was cooler. Off to the left, for instance, was a pile of boulders surmounted by one big, flat stone, stood up and covered with inscriptions. On the smaller boulders in the pile, people had made stacks of rocks. I'd never seen these before. An oyster-shaped rock about the size of a beanbag or maybe a book is at the bottom. Then a slightly smaller rock is put on top of it. In order to stabilize the top rock, the stacker puts little pebbles between the two as shims. Then another slightly smaller rock is put on top of these two, with pebbles between again. The sizes are graded down very gradually, so the whole stack can get to be skyscraper-shaped and several feet tall. And these spires were all over the boulders, perched anywhere someone could get a bottom rock to stay still. They set the mood: this was a place where the world was still and at peace.
   A little ways away were some statues of pagodas and the Buddha. There was a shelter where they had a big drum suspended from the rafters. One or two other temples like the one that had greeted us when we came up the stairs, though smaller. And another staircase, this one thankfully not flooded with ice, leading up the side of a mountain, with the sounds of chanting coming from above. We climbed.
   Temples were stuck onto the side of the hill next to the staircase through sheer determination. The first one was covered with murals depicting a story that I couldn't quite figure out. I think it was something like this: A young man comes out to the countryside to meditate while looking at the vast mountains and fields of Korea. Then a bull comes along, and the man jumps on it and rides it. As he does, both of them become purified, symbolized by the bull turning from red to white. The bull stays with him and he continues meditating. It was all shown in the misty, eternal, philosophical style of ancient Asian paintings.
   The other temple wasn't just on the hill, it was a part of the hill. The builders had taken a huge rock overhang and put it to use as the temple's back wall. So it was more like it had grown there than like it had been placed. Cautiously, in case we might be disturbing some meditation, we looked inside. Imagine blending a Buddhist temple with the fantasy of a little boy who's seen caves and decided that a clubhouse there would be way cooler than one up in a tree. The Buddha images were arrayed in front of the rock back wall, and hanging from the ceiling were hundreds of golden pieces of paper, probably each one representing a donation or a blessing or both. I think I have no other choice but to call it perfect.
   After this we were out of temples. We came back down to the level place with the sculptures and discovered that there was a back way down to the road, a hairpin turn that cars could travel, so we took that rather than sled without sleds down the stairs. And we continued on our way.
   Jichon Stream started meandering away from us and the road was free to wave up and down through the mountains, though we kept following it from a bit more farther away. We walked some and rested some, and Sean and Deanna gave me snacks. I had just written the post about consuming as little as possible and only shopping at the market and not accepting plastic bags, so I didn't have anything with me to eat. (I was in the middle of the longest period without a market day in four years—eight days from February 26 to March 4 with no days ending in 5 or 0, including February 29, which seemed added in just to taunt me by not being the 30th.) Without their kindness I would've surely shriveled up and blown off a cliff.
   Candlestick rock snuck up on us. It was in the shadow of the slope behind it, and its outline was almost impossible to see unless you knew just where it was. But when we got closer it became clearer and clearer. It was about 60 feet tall, a serious monolith. We rounded a sharp hairpin turn up a steep slope and at the top of it we were right downhill from the Candlestick. But there didn't appear to be any path. That was rather a let-down. Here we had come all this way and we wouldn't even be able to go touch the rock and take pictures of ourselves leaning against it? But there was in fact no path.
   Not that we were going to let that stop us. We climbed over a concrete barrier and up a slope and found ourselves in a steep gully running down the hill next to the Candlestick. It was full of snow and loose rocks, but it looked like the only way up. I got to climbing. Sean and Deanna, more sane, told me to go right on ahead while they sat and watched. So I tumbled and bumbled up the slope, grabbing on to small rocks and loose stringy roots for grip, and eventually wrenched my way up to the very bottom of the monolith. My idea had been to get there and see how high I could climb it. But besides being exhausted, I could also tell pretty clearly that it wasn't going to happen. For one, the ground underneath the monolith wasn't flat anywhere. If I fell just so, I might stand a chance of landing in the saddle between the bottom of the stone and the upslope of the hill. But any other direction and I'd just keep falling down and tumbling for probably several minutes. Also, it was wet and slippery and looked like it might even crumble under weight. So I decided to content myself with touching it.
   I picked my way laboriously back down and joined Sean and Deanna standing on a big rock looking out over the road we'd left behind at the bottom of the hairpin. The view was indeed majestic, and better than I'd had from among the trees at the bottom of the Candlestick anyhow. The tectonic plates under Korea sure know how to create a dramatic view. Forest and cliffs and the road following Jichon Stream. If only my shoes weren't soaked with melted snow and it were a little warmer. But I took what I could get, and it was pretty darn good for a Thursday.
   On our way back we found one more thing to do. Sean and I scrambled up a leafy embankment about fifty feet, closer to vertical than to horizontal, to get to a big rock looming above the road. There were pine trees growing on top that made it hard, but not impossible, to get out to the edge and wave to Deanna. We climbed, or rather basically slid, back down and walked home. We saw more cliffs and figured that, come warm weather, this place must be paradise for people looking to casually climb a cliff. I'll have to remember to do some of that before I leave here.

Anyhow. What's been going on more currently? It's mostly not spectacularly interesting, so I'll try to sum it up briefly. I've been getting bored with work, which is my sign that it's time to move on to something else, but I can't, so I'll just have to make do. I stopped doing hapkido, which cleared up time for me to make serious progress toward finishing my font. Earlier this week I finished making all the characters (except the ones that need to be revised, which will be plenty, I'm sure). And just yesterday, I finished making a specimen booklet for it that's pretty snazzy, if I say so myself. I posted it online here and people have been saying they really like it, which is encouraging, because I've been working on it for so long that I've started getting sick of it and wondering if it's actually not that great after all.
   Another recent development is that I've been doing a sort of language exchange with a Korean. His name is Lee Jin-won; he's a second-grade teacher from my school, and he speaks better English than my co-teacher the English teacher. We get together a few nights per week in my room and talk about whatever, alternating nights between English and Korean. The Korean nights go a lot slower. I still have a pretty small vocabulary, so I tend to have to ask him for definitions after almost every sentence he says. Luckily, he can usually give them, because he studied English for a test, and though that's no way to learn fluency, it can help you learn vocabulary, and he did that rather well. He says I'm doing pretty well for someone who's only been studying the language for less than a year. He's a pretty good guy. He recently went to see Lenny Kravitz in concert in Seoul, and he's watched Into the Wild seven times and yearned at least a bit for that sort of freedom. I think most of the questions we ask each other over the coming months will probably be about each other's cultures. Finally I have an actual Korean acquaintance I can learn about Korea from, instead of just judging it through conclusions I jump to based on stuff I can see.
   Oh, and I've of course been cooking. I set aside last week for making bibimbap in various ways with spring vegetables from the market. So now I know what chwinamul is like: bitter but fresh. I got some chwinamul from this spring, as opposed to the dried, brown stuff that you can see wrapped in paper in the post about the market. Also I started delving into the realm of the unidentifiable roots. One that I've learned now is burdock root, which in Korean goes by the shapeless word u'eong (in more familiar-looking phonetics, that's "ooh-ung"). I don't know what to compare it to, really, but it's sort of bitter, sort of earthy, and generally pretty alright. I'll definitely be searching out burdock to dig in the States. Jin-won told me that during the Korean war a lot of people had to go into hiding in the hills, but they hung on okay, because they knew all the wild edible plants that grow there. Stuff like chwinamul and ssukgat, and even roots like u'eong and doraji. The sheer variety is impressive and admirable. Sometimes I wonder what will become of my Korean language skills after I leave Korea. Am I going to search out Koreans to talk with? About what? But now that I think of it, if nothing else, I'm pretty sure finding recipes online to adapt for American wild plants will keep me in fairly good practice for quite a while.

SE Asia — Pictures II: Patterns (and videos)

Everywhere I see them there, I stop and stare at patterns,
I don't care, I must declare, I've got a flair for patterns,
On my hair, the clothes I wear, my savoir faire is patterns,
All I see is patterns,
The patterns that repeat.

—"Weird" Al Yankovic

Wat Rajbophit, Bangkok

Wat Pho, Bangkok

Wat Arun, Bangkok

Zooming out #1: I took a close-up picture, and then one from farther away, and so on until I got to the big picture.

Zooming Out #2:

Zooming Out #3:

(This one isn't actually from the same part of the temple, but the pattern is analogous.)

Zooming Out #4:

Temples of Chiang Mai

A few from Luang Prabang

(The following two are the same door. I couldn't get the whole thing in frame from a good angle.)

Wat Preah Prom Rath, Siem Reap

And... Angkor Wat and associated temples

(There are other pictures of the bas-relief murals in the previous post. I duplicated a few other pictures for this post from the last post, but I decided that the murals are already a gray area between patterns and art, so I shouldn't really duplicate them. Hence why I don't have many pictures here from this engraved-everywhere place.)

Also!

Chinese New Year celebration, Siem Reap

This was in a back alley in town. These guys were a wandering troupe of Chinese New Year merrymakers, and apparently celebrated just wherever a celebration was needed. The building they're walking through in the video is a restaurant, and after this they went to a massage place. I don't know if the business owners pay them to come and celebrate the new year, or if these guys just go around and ask, "Hey, mind if we celebrate the new year in your building?"

Video tour of Preah Khan (I think), Angkor Wat complex

It's hard to get a feel for a place just from pictures. But a video can make it feel a bit more like you're actually there. Or at least I hope so. The sudden pan to the left at the end was because the bird that you hear was really loud in real life and I was trying to move the shot to where it sounded like it was calling from.

SE Asia — Pictures I: Chronologically

Okay, I always keep my promises eventually, so now I'll put up my pictures from my southeast Asia adventure. Here's how I'm going to do this: I'll make two posts. This one will be full of pictures that show you all the places I went to. The second post is one that Micah put me up to—he told me before I left to keep my eye out for awesome patterns, and if possible to send some back for him. Little did I know before leaving that I was going to a land where covering a building with awesome patterns is considered the best way to decorate it, and all buildings are given this treatment. So, this post will mainly be pictures of whole buildings and places and such, and the second will be full of details. 

This picture and the next few are from the Rajbophit temple complex in Bangkok. It's the first big monument I found after landing in southeast Asia. And it was practically empty, which I never figured out. The nearest I could guess was from a plaque telling the complex's story; it's supposed to be a fusion of ancient temple-building styles and modern French-influenced architecture. So maybe it doesn't have enough history, or maybe no one likes the colonialism built into it.

But in any case it wasn't totally empty—the occasional kid was wandering around in it.

Everything was made with the utmost care. Consider how much effort must've gone into creating those walls. Painting the patterns, sculpting the molding, inlaying the colored glass. And then there's making an elephant, and growing a bonsai.

One of the few places I found people in Rajbophit was in an actual temple with a Buddha in it. Almost every temple I found in southeast Asia—modern or ancient, whole or nearly rubble—had an assortment of people doing this: sitting, bowing low, leaving money, and often burning incense. 

The only other tourist I met in Rajbophit was Glenn from Colorado. We talked about how puzzling the emptiness was here, and he told me about his trip to Nepal. In this photo he does a good impression of someone totally lame.

Together we moved on to Wat Pho. It was a collection of lots and lots of temples, monuments, and statues of various sorts. For example, here's the Buddha sitting on some rocks under an amazing tree.

These are stupas. Wat Pho has dozens of them.  Again, consider the details.

A pagoda.

This plucky fellow was guarding the way to the next courtyard.

The walls of the courtyard were lined with dozens upon dozens of these Buddhas, each one representing a long time of intense craftsmanly devotion.

More guards, these ones with awesome hats. I believe Micah has some similar hats.

Inside an elaborately decorated purpose-built building lies the largest Reclining Buddha statue in the country. This is one of a few permissible poses for depicting the Buddha. It represents him at the moment he passed into final nirvana.

We're talking about a big Buddha.

Feet are looked down upon all throughout the region as the cesspool of the body. But the Buddha is so holy that even his feet are worthy of high respect. The kind of respect that involves inlaying hundreds of intricately detailed auspicious symbols into them.

Later, Glenn and I stuck together and got on a boat across the Chao Phraya to see another wat. Every public transportation vehicle the whole region through is packed tight on pretty much every trip. But hey, the trip cost three baht—a dime.

Here's what we came for: Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn.

 It's nice to have someone looking out.

Here's the top of Wat Arun. I have a lot more pictures, but, perhaps more than any other building I saw on this trip, Wat Arun was made completely of patterns, so the other pictures will mostly be in the second post.

These creatures were all over the wat, holding up higher levels.

Here's Glenn, still around.

They build their staircases steep around here.

Up as high as I could get in Wat Arun, I took this not-the-greatest picture of a bunch of railing decorations. But you can tell how high up I am.

Here's Mom's friend Yoshi, who I met and had dinner with in the evening in Bangkok. With his hand he demonstrates that you can take the Japanese out of Japan, but you can't take the Japan out of the Japanese.

He took me to the bus station to get out of Bangkok. There, they were selling this enigmatic product.

The bus took me to Chiang Mai, and I got a tuk-tuk to a place right near the main city gates. There's more city outside the gates than inside nowadays, but most of the coolest stuff is still inside. Having these walls took Chiang Mai, for me, out of the realm of the real, and made me feel like I was staying someplace fantastical. It'd be even more amazing if there weren't so many neon signs and hipster coffee shops right next to it. What this place must've looked like before it became so full of tourists!

I quickly found a guesthouse with several massive tamarind trees. This one hung over the entrance. Another, bigger, one shaded the tables and lounging places in the yard. Its aerial roots hung down far enough that you could bat them around while lying around languorously.

Chiang Mai is temple central for Thailand. All of them were beautiful.

All appearances to the contrary, these three men aren't real. I did a series of double-takes before I realized they were wax.

Somewhere, an old stupa in the city wall, or perhaps a standalone stupa, is taken over gradually by nature. This bird has pretty much the coolest home any bird could ask for. Well, except maybe the birds that live in Angkor Wat.

I didn't take many pictures at my cooking class, but it was a pretty enjoyable time. We all got to take this mesh bag full of ground-up coconut and learn how to make coconut milk.

Since I made this one, pad Thai has rapidly become a staple of my diet.

 Another day, I took a trip to Huay Kaew waterfall with H.

We were pleased with it.

On the way out, we were greeted by this selection of allegedly delicious insects and other arthropods.

Eventually I left Chiang Mai. My bus stopped on the way once and I took a picture of this, something that intrigued me but left me entirely flummoxed.

The bus left me at Chiang Khong, just across the Lao border from Huay Xai, where I got on the slowboat down the Mekong to Luang Prabang. The Mekong is not a gentle, lazy river. If it were a person, it would be a grizzled-faced old man with hands like boot leather.

But it's friendly with its neighbors, at least.

I'm pretty sure there's a hut hiding somewhere on this hill. But as far as the hill is concerned, it's tiny enough that there may as well not be.

Arrived in Luang Prabang. It looks different from anywhere else in the world. I think you could show me a picture of just about any street in the city and I'd be able to tell that it was a Luang Prabang street.

It, like Chiang Mai, is full of temples.

But of course there's other stuff, like markets. Several of them, in fact; this one is the morning market.

These cages each contain two little live birds. You take them to a temple and let them free. I don't know what it signifies, but it seems like a really quaint, interesting ritual.

Now that I know how to cook fish, this looks delicious to me.

I think this is a place where they were carving Buddha statues.

There were a few peculiar little things about Luang Prabang. This guesthouse seemed like they must've named it with a phrase randomly picked from their English textbook. Unfortunately, when you say it out loud properly, it's less funny because it's more like taat-sa-pone.

And they fly Communist sickle-and-hammer flags all over the place. This one is next to a rather capitalist-seeming bar.

And here's the bamboo bridge that they rebuild every year.

I climbed up Mount Phou Si in the middle of the old town, where they have their most visible and (I think) most meaningful wat, Wat Chom Si. All along the path up were Buddhas from various days of the week (or with other names), in different poses, none of which lore I understood.

Saturday Buddha.

 Prabang Phoutthalawanh, whatever that may mean, with worshipers.

And here we are at Wat Chom Si itself. I didn't take many pictures because I was too distracted by the view  (picture at this post—I've decided not to duplicate here any pictures I already posted).

 A sunset seen from a Mekong-side deck restaurant is one of the better experiences this life has to offer.

Down below the restaurant were kids playing in the water. Those boats are the same kind I traveled in from Huay Xai.

The place is magical, I tell you.

I took a "minibus" from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng. It turned out to be a minivan. To cope with Lao roads, every driver takes along some good luck charms—for instance, lotuses made of folded Lao money. 

This picture and the next few are why karst topography is awesome.

Besides karst, I also saw a clutch of kids getting out of school.

Apparently I didn't actually take any pictures in Vang Vieng; I don't remember if I kept forgetting my camera or if it was refusing to turn on or if I was too demoralized by the bacchanalia around me. So this picture is from a few days later, when I got to Vientiane. It's a pretty modest capital city, and I'm not sure what this building is, but it might be the most ostentatious thing in the city.

I was gratified to note that there were kids wandering around on its front steps.

There's also the Wat Si Saket, with several thousand Buddha images. Each of those little cavities on the wall has not one but two tiny seated Buddhas in it.

After some intensive bus-riding, I got to Phnom Penh, and in the morning went to the Chœung Ek Killing Fields. This was one of the biggest killing fields, but by no means the only one. Yet even just here the brutality was devastating even to view from over thirty years' remove. Each of these pits, I believe, was a mass grave.

In the glass box are bones that were found when they did a comprehensive clean-up of the site some years back, having already dug out all the mass graves. But people are still finding bones even now, and when they do, they pile them on top of the box. There was another box like this full of victims' clothes. I was pretty sure I saw a scrap of clothing along one of the paths in the pile of dirt, but I didn't pick it up to put it on top of that box.

The sign on the right says, "Please don't walk through the mass grave!" The sign on the left says: "Magic Tree... The tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed". To clarify, the sounds being amplified were propaganda songs glorifying the Angkar and the Khmer Rouge, and when they say "avoid" they mean "drown out". In the last stop on the audio tour, there's a recording of what this would've sounded like when mixed with the drone of a Diesel engine that would've been running nearby—the last sounds victims here would've ever heard. It was haunting. 

Back in the city, I went to Tuol Sleng prison, where people were kept before going to Chœung Ek. It used to be a high school.

 In each of these rooms is an exhibit about what happened back then.

For example, in here are pictures of the people who made all the death happen. Appropriately, the pictures have been defaced, presumably by people who lost family or friends.

In this room are farm implements that were pressed into service as killing tools.

Unfortunately, I didn't really take many pictures, or any good pictures, of the parts of Phnom Penh that aren't given over to gloom and death. Those are of course far more numerous, but I wasn't as prepared to find them, I suppose. At any rate, here's a group of people celebrating Chinese New Year, who I witnessed as they came out of a building, finished dancing animatedly, and then packed up their stuff and got on a truck to go to the next place that needed a Chinese New Year celebration.

I went to a riverside walk lined with flags from every country in the world and had beer with a friendly Belgian girl while watching the cars go by on a main city thoroughfare lining the river, and yet the only thing I took a picture of there was this sign that says enigmatically, at the bottom, "Mr. Toilet Public / Funded by the World Toilet Association, Republic of Korea".

I left Phnom Penh and arrived in Siem Reap. This was probably the most well-kept temple I saw during my whole journey. Its courtyard walls were covered with these very well done bas-reliefs.

Dozens of them.

Inside the courtyard was a building housing two Buddhas—a typical seated one, and this one that's apparently been sinking into the ground under its own weight since it was made long ago out of a legendary monk's canoe's hull.

As far as I can gather, these lotus petals each say the name of a donor and how much they donated. For example, at the very end, you can see that this donor gave US$10. (They use different numerals in Cambodia. Their 1 looks like a 9. Here's what they look like.)

The next day I got to Angkor Wat. The sun rises behind it.

There are tourists aplenty.

The outside walls have these tremendously detailed bas-relief stories.

I don't know the story, but whatever it is, it looks like these carvings tell it pretty well.

And at length.

Opposite the carvings is the jungle.

It's been bouncing light onto these carvings and columns for centuries.

What the carvings' corridors look like from outside.

Here's another story, apparently about a god with many heads wielding a tremendously long battering ram with the help of about a hundred soldiers.

There's a stupa in the lawn of Angkor Wat.

On the stupa offerings are left for the Buddha. A monkey gladly accepts them as his proxy.

On the left is that same stupa. This is a view of one of the several entrances to the temple.

They left nothing undecorated. Every column is adorned with, at a minimum, this much carving.

More carvings.

I got farther into the temple and eventually got to the top, or at least as high as anyone's allowed to go. It's pretty high up.

But the giant lotus flowers are still higher up.

You might not have realized how big the lotus flowers are. Consult this picture while viewing the previous one.

Cambodia has some of the most amazing-looking trees I've ever seen. They look like something that exists in fairy tales. This gate between Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom had some good ones growing nearby.

Here's the thoroughly disassembled temple of Bayon.

It has faces everywhere.

Everywhere.

While I was at Bayon, I found someone wearing the most aggressively nonsensical "English" shirt I've ever seen.

Another excellent tree.

A lizard living in the ruins of Preah Khan.

It looks like it should be collapsing on you at any moment.

And in plenty of places, it actually has.

Now trees grow through the old walls and rubble.

Trees that can only exist because of the incredible vigor of the tropics.

And now, getting away from temples, here are pictures from my trip to the Tonlé Sap. This is what it looks like to live in a floating village. The term is pretty literal.

I think this may be a general store of some sort. Or maybe the people who live here are just packrats.

Here's the view from the deck of the restaurant that Graeme and I got to on the local teenagers' boat. 

These are the alligators in the tank there that Graeme was unafraid to swim with. Though he wasn't swimming in this tank, but rather in the Tonlé Sap itself.

And here are the alligator skins they had hanging there.

One of the kids who went around letting people hold his snake, then asking for a dollar.

Before we leave Siem Reap, here's the view from my hostel's roof restaurant.

Lastly, back in Bangkok. Here's the Chinese market. Or rather, a tiny portion of it.

You can get every miscellaneous kind of goods here, including things you can't even figure out.

Or, should you prefer, you can get a lantern or a stuffed hand or some useful breasts.

That's a weird place to end these pictures, but hey, I'm doing it chronologically, and that's where I finished my trip. The only other things I did after this were walk back to Khao San Road and find a minivan. And, I guess, come back to Korea and continue living my life—but it seems like that hardly counts, since everything was so lively there.
   Anyhow, I still haven't written about any current events, but I'll get to it next blog (not counting the one about patterns). For now, enjoy these, and if you now look at the Chinese market and wish I'd gotten you some breasts or hands or a Jem Hook, I apologize. I don't know when I'll be able to get back to the market again. But I do hope it's someday.