Four Million Bazillion Angkor Wat Photos! (approximately)
Hi hi hi!! 🙂
Countdown to India! I’m so excited! Especially because I have now turned in the last manuscript I needed to finish before I left (WOOOOO!) and therefore I only have, you know, about a hundred other things to do, but none of them involve creating 200 pages of story out of thin air, so all is splendiferous.
Welcome to Angkor Wat! (Not India.)
I’ve decided to intersperse this blog entry with photos from our trip to Cambodia, because this is kind of my last chance to get through them all before I start deluging you with India pictures, and it’s impossible! There are so many that I like! SIGH!
Some of the fellows guarding the route to the temples…
One of those hundred things I have to do before leaving is decide what to READ while we’re in India! (by which I mean, "on the thirty-hour plane flight", of course) (yeee, I hope that’s an exaggeration!) Oh BOY! I love planning what books to take on vacation with me. I start doing this months in advance. And then I order a flurry of new ones a week before we leave and change everything around. But that’s OK, because MORE BOOKS YAY!
More of the fellows. I think these are the good guys (devas) and the ones on the other side are the demons (asuras), and they’re all pulling on a long serpent that stretches all the way around the world, churning the sea of milk. As you do.
It’s extra-complex this time around because I’m traveling with not only Adam, but also my mom and dad, so ideally we should bring books that we can all share and would all be interested in reading, but I’m not sure we can find common ground on, say, Adam’s business books or Dad’s historical nautical adventures (I say booooo to books with no girls in them. BOOOO!). Plus I specially ordered a big fancy India novel called A Suitable Boy (which is like FOURTEEN HUNDRED PAGES LONG and that is not an exaggeration) but my mother has ALREADY STOLEN IT. I BEG YOUR PARDON. AHEM.
Some Cambodian gents hanging out on the giant head archway.
No, no, that’s just fine, because I’ve ordered Soon I Will Be Invincible and Carter Beats the Devil (yay, a recommendation from Cyd!), and no one can have them until I get my big fancy India novel back. 😉
Us hanging out near the giant head archway.
I’ve also ordered Graceling, by my genius amazing brilliant friend Kristin Cashore, which I CANNOT WAIT TO READ EEEEEK! although I may have to wait until after India since it’s in hardcover (and I suspect my mom might try to make me leave any books I finish in India, so it wouldn’t be safe!). But YOU can read it RIGHT NOW! Yippee!
This giant head wants you to read Graceling. Are you going to argue with the giant head?
There are a lot of giant heads all over the temples in the Angkor complex, incidentally…
Giant head!
Giant profile!
But none of them have sexxaaayyy hats like we do…
Also before we leave for India, I need to spend some Quality Time with our DVR, reassuring it that we love it and we’re not abandoning it and please don’t eat any episodes of The Amazing Race or Heroes while we’re gone. This involves deleting all the So You Think You Can Dance episodes that I’ve saved just to watch whenever I need them, plus also the trillion Katharine Hepburn movies I recorded during the TCM marathon last weekend. I’m afraid new Sarah Connor Chronicles is more important! Did you see it last night? BAH I totally want John Connor to hook up with the hot Terminator robot girl! Mainly because I love Summer Glau. She is AWESOME. But I’m not sure the show is ever going to go there. I think I’m watching it mostly out of hope. I guess we’ll see!
Terrace of the Elephants! Well, obviously.
As for new shows, we’ll try Fringe (if I can get Adam out from behind his computer long enough to watch it before we leave) and I’ll probably record Valentine even though no one knows anything about it, mainly because it involves Greek gods living in this world, so, yes, I think I’m kind of there, don’t you? Other than that…just waiting for Dollhouse! 🙂
Terrace of the Leper King! Er…obviously?
And I am TOTALLY FREAKING OUT that I won’t get to watch next week’s Gossip Girl until October, because the preview looked SO exciting! A blackout! Scandalous Blair and Chuck! Just the way I like them! Hooray!
And here we are at Angkor Wat! The most famous temple in the complex! Which it turns out is QUITE a hike from the parking lot! See those towers off in the distance behind us? Yes. The key word being "distance."
I’m also very glad we’ll be in India for the next couple of weeks, because this election is MASSIVELY STRESSING ME OUT and if our next president isn’t someone who genuinely cares about the climate crisis, I’m going to be very sad, and OUR BEARS WILL BE TOO, so think about that, Seekers readers who can vote or who can make their parents vote (do it! voting is awesome!).
Only about a quarter of the way into the Angkor Wat temple site.
So it’ll be nice to think about temples and elephants for a couple of weeks instead, assuming I can get Adam not to turn on CNN at night in the hotels (ack!). I do need to be cut off from the political blogs; they’re a horrible addiction for a procrastinator who is trying to write about vampires (all while kind of living like one, my goodness).
There it is! We’ve got through the first enclosure! Central temple thing, here we come!
Speaking of living like a vampire, I’ve discovered that I might possibly have an actual thing: delayed sleep-phase syndrome! Which sounds to me like a fancy scientific description of a night owl, and I’m not sure how I feel about calling it a "disorder." Blah blah "sleep pattern that is desired or regarded as the societal norm." Societal norms! Who needs those? I say anyone who wants to sleep from 4am to noon should be allowed to! Especially since apparently we’re incorrigibly difficult to treat/cure. Weird!
My new theory is that night owls are evolutionary necessities, because surely SOMEONE had to stay awake all night to make sure the other cavemen didn’t get eaten by wolves or bats or whatever. So there are the morning people, who get up and farm or whatnot, and then there are us, who stay up till all hours keeping the fire from going out and saving you sleepyheads from being eaten. Doesn’t that make you appreciate us more now? 😉
I feel a little silly diagnosing myself with a Disorder, though. On the one hand, that would be a lovely convenient explanation for why I fell asleep in pretty much EVERY class in high school and college, but then again, so would the fact that I was a teenager, hello (yes, all the way through college; I graduated when I was 19), and no teenager ever gets enough sleep. Right?
Then again, I sent this disorder description to my mom kind of as a joke, and she wrote back that yes, she wouldn’t be surprised, given that starting when I was about 18 months old, she would leave me awake reading while she and Dad went to bed. That sounds like an exaggeration, don’t you think? 🙂
But on the fifth hand, I can be pretty agreeable about shifting my sleep schedule back when I have to, like, say, when I’m on vacation. I just don’t like to. For instance, on our very last day in Cambodia, Adam and I got up at something like 3am so we could…
TADA!
…see the sunrise over Angkor Wat! I KNOW! Are we crazy or what? Especially since that afternoon we had to get on a plane and fly home, via (a) Vietnam, (b) Singapore, (c) Germany, and (d) New York. Seriously. We were literally in transit for TWENTY-NINE HOURS, not including travel time to and from the airports on either end. That’s not something our travel agent clarified for us, by the way, so keep that in mind if you ever use Asian Affairs to plan your vacation. I actually had to buy a book on the way because I ran out of stuff to read, which practically never happens to me because I am a wild overpacker when it comes to books (it was Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which was FANTASTIC, so that was actually OK).
Sun! Rising! Over famous temples! Whee!
So we knew this was a bit of a crazy plan, but we were like, dude, when are we ever going to get to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat again? We’d been there the day before (day 2 in Cambodia), but our guide kind of whisked us through tout de suite and there were people everywhere and we figured we’d like to go back on our own anyway. And you know what? It was totally worth it.
Pretty!
First of all because: pretty, and second of all there really weren’t many people there at all so it was peaceful and magical and cool and THIRD OF ALL MONKEYS!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE WOO HOO!!!!!!!!
The monkeys really deserve their own post once I figure out how to post my own videos, but let’s just say this was pretty much the highlight of our trip. We stayed there for practically an hour watching the monkeys climb the scaffolding and fight with the dogs. TOO HILARIOUS!
‘Sup. Didn’t you know Angkor Wat was a monkey playground?
So evidently I can get up and stay awake for really important things, such as monkeys and temples (not so much for school or work, though), so I don’t think I have anything Very Severe. But there were parts of that Wikipedia entry that sounded eerily familiar, such as "They feel most alert and say they function best and are most creative in the evening and at night" and how we sleep perfectly well if we’re just allowed to sleep from 4am to noon like we need to, and also the part about sleeping in on weekends to compensate, which is what I always did when I had a 9 to 5 job. But doesn’t everyone?
Hmmm. It’s all very fascinating. Maybe lots of people secretly have this, and that’s why everyone’s so tired and cranky all the time. :-) Anyway, I still think everyone needs more sleep, whenever they can get it. That’s my complicated recipe for World Peace. 🙂
A shrine inside Angkor Wat! So bright and shiny!
Bye, Angkor Wat! You were wicked awesome!
OK, that isn’t nearly all of my Cambodia photos, but it’s certainly the most I can impose on you in one blog entry, I think. Maybe I’ll sneak in the ones of the Tomb Raider temple and the monkeys in later entries, but hopefully first I’ll have exciting India photos to share! Yippee!
I don’t know if I’ll be able to update the blog while we’re away — I’m afraid that’s not something that falls under the purview of housesitters or dogsitters. But if I can figure out a way to do it, I will! Yay! Wish us luck and elephants! :-) :-) 🙂
Quote of the Day:
Chuck: Which is why I have to get to know him. No one is that perfect. Once I get him out of the way, I’ll have a clear shot with Blair.
Nate: You know it’s love when you start talking like an assassin.
— Gossip Girl