the 'Rents come to Cambodge!

first off, has anyone else ever been hustled by their parents in SHUFFLEBOARD? 

these folks kept saying, 

'shuffleboard, what's that?! is that that thing where you push the little polishing cloths on the end of poles back and forth real quick on the ice in front of a large puck?' 

'no, mom. thats curling. shuffleboard is on a table. and i rock at it, and i will kick your ass at it soon enough... you just wait!'

....and then they play for the first time (according to both of them, which means they must have colluded about these lies ahead of time), and dethrone the previously-crowned Queen of the Cambodian Shuffleboard Table with hardly any visible effort at all. 

 i just stood aside in wonder and in shame. 

damn their precociousness.

we travelled to Battambang first, after a few days in PP. we stayed at the most wonderful newly-renovated art-deco hotel called La Villa. according to the guidebook, it 'celebrated a wistfulness of the romantic colonial era' in Cambodia, when the people were more enslaved and impoverished than they are even now! wheeee!

from Battambang, on a day trip to the countryside, we rode on the bamboo train: a platform on two axles. when you encounter another thing on the tracks, like a train, you have to stop (with a wooden 2x2 for a foot brake), pick up the platform and the axles/wheels from the track, let the thing pass, and reassemble the simple structure to move on. 

it made loud noises and went fast and we liked it. 

...and now we have arrived in Siem Reap. 

we took a longer than expected boat ride on an exceptionally high tide, traversing the central Cambodia waterways on a crowded boat around hairpin turns, with the occasional head-on run-in with the tree-lined riverbank, and almost with other boats on a few memorable occasions. we drifted past floating villages and fisher-families, with naked children waving and blowing kisses for miles and miles and miles. 

here we are at the beginning of the almost-8 hour boat trip:

and here we are toward the end, sunburned, sore-bottomed, and hungry:

tomorrow - the temples of ancient Angkhor!