L&C Day 2: Visiting the Temples
Well this is David and Jake doing L&C’s first student blog… Yay!
Today we visited three of over 1000 temples around Siem Reap – it’s amazing how many temples were built, with the oldest we visited, being over 900 years old.
The map below shows you where each of the three temples are situated.
After a great buffet breakfast at the hotel, we headed on a bus to our first temple. Our first temple was called Bayon. It was first built in 1181 and completed in 1221. To access this temple, we had to walk along a bridge with many statues of faces along
We then walked through the South Gate to the city of Angkor Thom. The passageway through the old city walls was so narrow that we had to split into two mini buses, which just fit through. On the walls of this temple, there were human faces everywhere. The directions also had to do with significant astronomical dates.
The second temple that we visited was called Ta Prohm. It was build two years after Bayon and was the setting for the movie Tomb Raider. What was special about this temple was the trees growing through it, which made for some amazing tree root formations through the walls. At this temple, there were lots of monkeys in the trees and along the side of the road.
We ordered lunch at a local Cambodian restaurant called Soassrung, which was along the banks of the Baray Reservoir. After lunch we visited our last and largest temple, called Angkor Wat. It is the 7th wonder of the world, a Hindi temple that is 800 years old.
Paragraph written by David Gray
Some of us took a swim in the pool when we got back to the hotel to cool off. Later that night we took a quick bus ride into town to explore the maze which is THE NIGHT MARKET; one of the main bargaining spots in Siem Reap. This labyrinth of stalls and hallways was jam packed full of people going right up to your face and trying to sell you anything from a cheap taxi/Tuk-tuk ride as well as foot massages, fake t-shirts, wallets, watches, ‘food’ and a magnitude of other cheap items. Everything there needs to be bargained for. In fact, everything sold here is always overpriced and/or expensive and offered at about 4 times the original price. One effective bargaining method is when the seller begins to bargain too high, just walk off, the dealer will usually try to call you back with a cheaper price which you can and should start bargaining effectively with. Here is a hypothetical example: The item is valued at $3 but sold at $9, you bargain down to $7 and leave if the seller bargains higher, the seller will then attempt a slightly lower price of $6 which you the bargain down to $4 and subsequently buy.
When we arrived at the market we were given an hour to browse around and then return back to the entrance and walked back to our hotel. When we got back to our hotel our tour guide, Billy, gave us a rundown of tomorrow’s activities, i.e. the jobs we will be doing in the village for the next three days and how we should behave in terms of respecting the culture in the village. I for one am looking forward to tomorrow’s adventure.
-Paragraph written by Jake Tyers
