In other news, this weekend I took the Angkor Wat plunge, which just means I finally went to see these damned temples that everyone keeps raving about. The fact that I'd been in the country nearly two months and hadn't paid homage to Cambodia's crowing religious and architectural achievement was kind of blasphemy as far as most people were concerned, so I said fine, took a few more days off work (and speaking of work, i know i never talk about it, but it's just not the mass-email worthy, unlike my never ending supply of cat stories: i write little snippets about extractive industries in cambodia or how the global financial downturn has affected my NGO, pretending i know about these things enough to keep getting assignments from my boss, and i edit reports that my coworkers write in broken but amusing English, and i try to be helpful in various other ways but the truth is it just doesn't take up all that much time and probably doesn't merit a whole lot more parenthesis space here either so...) and headed up to Siem Riep, the town in the center of Templeland.



And then yesterday I came across the Cambodian version of old people dancing in the park, and let me tell you, if I thought that Chinese 70 year olds waltzing was the pinnacle of delightfulness, I really underestimated what the Cambodians are capable of. This was something altogether beyond my expectations: hundreds, literally hundreds of people of all ages, from wobbly infants to wobbly senior citizens, but mostly (surprisingly!) really hip teenagers, engaging in mass jazzercise after work, or school, or daycare, or whatever. Where we have happy hours and soccer practice and bingo, they have communal dance aerobics...this country just keeps getting better and better! I'm definitely planning on joining in, but I need to buy a couple sweatbands and some one-shoulder neon workout shirts, and maybe a scrunchy, before I will really be presentable. I will make sure to take pictures.

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