The ABCs

First of all, thank you to everyone who has commented! makes me happy to know that I'm not just writing to myself. Secondly, I apologize in advance for typos etc in this post, I'm writing from a computer in our guesthouse in Siem Reap that has seen better days, and the screen is rather (hem) blurry.

A is for Ayutthaya. Laura and I spent yesterday touring Ayutthaya or the City of Gorgeousness, as the city's tourist brochure has labeled it. Ayutthaya was the ancient capital of Siam/Thailand and is about an hour and a half north of Bangkok, making it a nice day trip. The old city is mostly located on an island created by the confluence of three rivers and unlike the temples (wats) of Bangkok, is mostly ruins. There are tons of wats there, so many that it's impossible to really see them all/tell them apart from each other after a bit, but it's very cool.

The difference between seeing tmeples meticulously cared for and shined versus seeing ruins is interesting. The wat's of Ayutthaya were all in various states of returning to nature, with mostly only their brick underpinnings left. It was beautiful, and strangely peaceful. There's even a famous kodak spot, as it were. We were also lucky in that the day wasn't as hot as the previous two had been, though this was countered with the rain showers in the afternoon...we decided to cut our losses and head back to bangkok a bit earlier for foot massages.

B: Bedsupper. Despite overhwleming exhaution (I think I actually fell asleep from 8:30-9:30 in a food coma) we rallied to go out with Ed to the Bed Supper Club, a famous night club just down the street from us, and it turned out to be really fun, albeit bizarre. The club itself was pretty cool, named for the fact that it has these sort of giant long beds lining the walls of two stories of club, with a dancefloor in the middle. There are trays set out intermittently on this giant bed for drinks. Suprisingly they played almost exlusaively American music (and not from the 80s as seems to be favored in lots of other places). Also hilarious was the fact that everyone but Laura and I was in their nightclub finest...and not they're only sort-of clean backpacking finest. It was great.

And C is for Cambodia. Today we made the trek (via aeroplane) to Cambodia and are now settled into our new guesthouse, Le Tigre a Paper (very nice aside from the blurry computer), in Siem Reap. We were picked up from the airport by a ride arranged by our Le Tigre a Papier, which turned out to be a tuk tuk. Although this was a bit of a suprise, the ride was actually fantastic (up until the end when the road disintigrated into endless potholes) and we will be using the same mode of transport tomorrow when when we go Tomb Raiding Lara Craft style in Angkor Wat (read: wander around like the other 1 million tourists here and try to avoid hordes of begging children). We're hoping to catch the sunrise and beat some of the crowds, so we're leaving at 5. yikes.