Temples temples and some more lok lok

Siem Reap, where all the temples that make up the pride of Cambodia are located.

We arrived in the evening and headed to our guest house, Rosy's, just outside of the main area of town. Great spot, nice rooms, friendly staff and a cool upstairs sitting area, with hammocks! Hammocks are totally the thing in Cambodia. They have them everywhere, restaurants, roadsides, patios, and at any given time, you can usually find someone sleeping in one.


After dropping our stuff we headed into town for dinner--nice walk along the river on to crowded 'town.' At once we were bombarded by tuk-tuk drivers asking if we needed a ride (don't they realize we just walked 15 minutes and now only have two more till we get to dinner on a street thay can't drive down?), women (umm, girls) asking if we want massages, and tourists everywhere. We head to pub street and walk into the first restaurant we see, mostly b/c we are pretty hungry and it had a cool roof balcony area. My got super excited because they had Vietnamese food on the menu, so combine that with lok lok and some other goodies and you've got quite the meal (don't forget the super fruity fruit shakes-mm watermelon).

On the way home we thought it would be stellar to have a massage--after all, as Jason says, we deserved it-it had been a rough day of shopping and hopping from one city to another. Now, knowing that sometimes Cambodia can be kind of sketchy in this area, and wanting to make sure we did not get, umm, taken advantage of, we made sure to go into the most established looking massage place on the street--or so we thought. Let's remember though, it was about 11:30pm, anything is sketchy at 11:30pm....

So we walk in, we ask for just head and shoulder massages, and we are told to have a seat. My, Priz and I sit down in the foot massage chairs, and as Brian is about to sit down the boss says, no, you, sit over there. Commence giggles and bickering in Khmere from the massage girls in the corner. Hmmm. Five minutes later the boss comes and says, we need to go across the street. Why? we ask. 'Upstairs here is...umm, well, it's occu-busy.' right.

Across the street we go, upstairs, a bunch of mattresses. 'Change.' Into what? (mind you, there are five of us, together, they did not separate out the boys as they'd hoped, 2 boys, 3 girls. 'Change!' they say again. No no, we just want head and shoulders, no oil. The girls massaging Priz, My and I acquiece, we can keep our shirts on. However, the girl massaging Brian persists. 'Sir, Change!' she says forcefully. Brian asks, 'do you want me to take off my shirt?' Yes she says, change. Brian does as he's told. Jason begins to follow suit until My says, also forcefully, 'J, don't take off your shirt.'


So here we go, massage. You coud tell someone had sort of told them what a thai massage was like, and they tried, but mostly it was a lot of a girl sitting on my butt trying to rub my shoulders and crack bones that should not crack, ie, not a good massage. Well, there was also a peanut gallery. Brian's forcefull sargent began asking if Priz was his girlfriend, no we both giggled, and then she just asked, do you want to go to sleep with me? umm, NO! 'You me, go make baby?' NO...giggle giggle with the girl next to her massaging Priz. This keeps up for the full 45 min we are being massaged.

After they asked if we wanted tea. We said NO thank YOU. And ran out of there as quickly as possible.

The walk home, while we laughed about the whole experience, it was also kind of saddening. How old we these girls? They really looked like they were no more than 15. And do most people walk into the VIP Massage looking for sex instead of an actual massage? Do all these places do that? The sex industry Taylor leads a trip about suddenly became very real. It was just so in our faces.

We stayed away from massages the rest of the trip, we didn't really feel like, 'Taking the memory home.'