Woke up early and full of energy (6:30 am!) and after downloading some exercise plans that looked close to what Maha does (my mantra for gym classes at this point) I went to gym and spent 30 minutes (timed!) kicking my own butt and feeling good about it.
Parents were awake by the time I got back, so after showers and packing we had another amazing!!,!,!!! Breakfast and went to the airport to fly to Cambodia.
The cleverest thing we have done on thisndy was at the duty free – we bought 2 bottles of wine and a bottle of prosecco ensuring we have decent relaxation.
Our trip to Cambodia was organized to have a tour guide pick us up and essentially baby sit us the entire time that we are there. The guys name is Sumbat, and he is a middle aged dad of 3 kids. After a quick break at the hotel we went to a lunch (really nothing amazing, ok curry but wouldn’t have that again). Annoyingly/entertainingly Sumbat kept trying to convince us to buy tickets to “smile of Angor” for the following night – so definitely we were not going to do that. Anyway, after lunch we went to a beautifully done museum (Sumbat did not impress with his knowledge of different sculptures – he definitely turned out to know more about Hindu stories and all the gods that he did about different period of carvings and their style). The museum was nice but honestly a bit boring and by the end of it I felt the jet lag kick in.
Instead of dinner we asked to stop by the fruit market where we got a bunch of lychee, “hurma” – cant recall English name – and pomegranate.
I honestly felt awful for the contrast. Buying fruits to eat with alcohol amidst such poverty…. It’s insane. Everything and everyone are so obviously poor, and this was even before we made it out to more rural areas we saw the following days.
The evening was spent eating the fruits left in our rooms, drinking prosecco and wine, discussing the eastern narrative versus western narrative and how could the difference have been caused.
The short summary of that – all the tales within the museum of the Hindungods make absolutely no narrative sense. It’s on the level of a 4 year old describing a fantasy/story:
There were two wives who were fighting for who is more beautiful, one one and kicked the other one out but then changed her mind but the first one asked gods to have her kids eat/kill the kids of the “bad”one and then gave birth to a bird boy whom she tasked to (no, not kill kids) bring her some potion from some lake. The boy brough back the potion but a god stopped him and fought him but the boy bird almost won so the god told the woman that the boy is now his and then the god asked the boy to kill kids of the first wife from the start. And thsts how the god is shown riding a bird.
Uh…. What?
So, how is it possible that books upon books and a whole religions is founded on stories that just don’t make sense.. There is no moral. There is no rhyme – in others things change into other things just cuz. It’s weird.
The best solution we came up with was that eastern society is more strongly built on respect towards elders, and therefore words of mouth stories are passed on more reverently than European ones. (which have to follow a logic/moral to be interesting and “win” for being passed on).
And then we dove into comparing and contrasting east and west civilization birth path. and then we somehow ended up tslking about the difference between “manipulation” and “relationship building” and I started zoning out shortly after we agreed that manipulation is evil and shirt term, where as relationhsip bulding is more ensuring long term rsse of working together.
Fell asleep instantly, and woke up with no alarm by 5:30, regretting not booking a sunrise trip.