giant, hairy spiders....

first of all, hot pot was wonderful. ariel and i got to have hot pot in cambodia, and i know the temples at angkor are going to be amazing, but if we leave cambodia having only had hot pot, i will be happy. it was just like china (including large fish tanks up and down the walls) and i spoke chinese and got everything we needed ordered perfectly. love!!!

currently we are in siem reap, the gateway city to see the temples of angkor. we will see those tomorrow. this morning was spent in phnom phen and the whole afternoon was taken up by the bus ride to siem reap. this morning we visited a former khmer rouge detention/interrogation center. pretty heavy stuff, i will have to cover that in another post. actually, we are going to go back when we get back to phnom phen. i didn't have quite enough time before we had to get on the bus.

again, we spent many happy hours observing the cambodian countryside. it is just so beautiful! the road we were on was lined with houses continuously, for the six hour duration of the trip. behind the houses stretched miles of rice paddies, for as far as we could see on either side of the road. the houses were the same as we saw in south western cambodia, on stilts, built out of anything and everything. each house has a yard, and then, basically, a moat between the house and the road. in many of the yards we saw large sheets laid out with food drying in the sun. lots of chili peppers and corn. some of the houses had water underneath them, and i saw many pigs tied to the stilts wallowing in the shady mud. it was dry under most of the houses, and people hung hammocks between the stilts. a lot of family life happens beneath the homes. the actual houses are dark, and none of them had any electricity. we happened to be driving through the villages in the evening and watched as dusk fell over the homes and rice paddies. at 5:00 children in blue uniforms (very similar to the kind i saw in india) began to make their way home from school, walking and on bicycles. a half hour later, just before dusk, the road filled up with cows and water buffalo, driven home from the fields by 10 year old boys. the animals were tied under the houses for the night and for a while, the people and the animals spent the evening together. next to the cows, among the stilts, cooking fires lit up under each home.

none of the houses had running water or electricity. even with the building materials, the place might have looked largely the same 1000 years ago. we saw a number of different rainwater collections systems, including a large piece of plastic hung between two sticks that would catch the sheets of rain. the rain would then drain off the plastic into a plastic lined hold dug into the ground.

the bus ride was like many in asia. we were on the local bus and so we were treated to a lot of cambodian music and movies on the tv in front of the bus. mostly we tried to ignore it and look out the window. they do the same thing on chinese busses, i just don't understand how they can listen to music that loudly!! for about an hour the music was really frantic and with the bus honking incessantly i thought we were going to loose it. we finally pulled over at food stalls and everyone got off to get food. there was a young couple sitting across from us and they got back on the bus with bags and bags of food. our window was a little dusty so we were staring across them to look out of their window. it was then that we noticed that they were eating the largest spiders i have ever seen. no exaggeration, the spiders were 6 inches long. they were huge, hairy, and roasted. the couple pulled the legs off first and nibbled.....yum? when the legs were gone they broke the head, abdomen, and thorax off and ate those separately. i don't even know if the music was still on, we were captivated. they also consumed about 4 cups of roasted grasshoppers, but i've seen that before. the spiders??? wow.