Date with Angkor Wat

Another toasty day of temple-exploration under the blazing hot sun. As we enter the area this morning, we make a drastic change in plans: we are both tired from the long day of cycling yesterday, and the overwhelming amount of temple-visiting, that we fear we will over-exert ourselves by trying to pack too much in today. After all, we did some 30 km of biking in total over the course of 7 hours, in 30-plus degree weather. With that in mind, we drop all other temples and instead devote our time to the jewel in the crown, Angkor Wat temple.

This is the centerpiece of the entire area. This is the temple to top all temples, the one with the exquisite bas-relief carvings in the surrounding galleries, the one with the 5 perfect towers meant to represent the 5 peaks of Mount Meru, home of the Hindu gods. The complex is a sprawling 5 sq. km field, once filled with the wooden structures of the village that made this entire place run, but time does nothing but disintegrate wood, and so there is nothing left to indicate what once stood here. Instead, paved walkways and a few token outlying temples indicate the way to the center of the complex, where we can ascend to the top of the main Angkor Wat temple, in the middle of the 5 towers, and look out over the world.

It is hot, and there are obviously many more people visiting this complex than any of the other places we explored yesterday. Sitting in a shady window, breeze cooling us off, and eating fresh, juicy pineapple, we come to the executive decision that to visit anything more would ruin the experience, and we should just cut our losses now. We have enjoyed the day thus far, best not to ruin it by pushing ourselves too much. Mario and I drag ourselves through the heat back to our bicycles, and peddle back into town.

Insert here a rest in the cool air-conditioning of our luxury hotel room, only to be cut short by an unexpected email from a cooking school I had been waiting to hear from. Their site had been down, and at 4 pm, we received confirmation for our registration in the evening's class, which begins at 5 pm. So up we get and hurry out into town, down the street to Le Tigre de Papier, for a lesson in Cambodian cooking.

Turns out, we are the only students who have signed up this evening, and so Mario and I have the pleasure of a private class with our teacher, Sang, who is quick, funny, and impressed that we can do more than just chop vegetables, so she puts us to work. We get to each choose a starter and main course to make, plus one dessert between the two of us, and we make it count, by picking the most typically Cambodian dishes available. First, we get to tour the neighboring market with Sang, who points out all the dried and fresh spices we will use, local vegetables we might not know about, fruits that we have seen at street vendor stalls. She takes us to a sweets vendor, who works with sticky rice and coconut milk, and helps us pick out some locally produced coffee to bring home. With that, we head back to class to cook our meals.
I have to say, I am impressed with the level of involvement we have, but that might just be Sang playing to our capabilities. Sure, we chop the vegetables for our dishes, and the aromatics to pound into curry paste, and of course we roll filling into rice paper for fried Cambodian spring rolls, but she also has me cook the curry paste with coconut milk, with the fish and noni leaf for the fish amok, and Mario does the season and sauce and beef for his beef lok lac. He fries the spring rolls, while I toss a green mango salad. Every step, Sang is over our shoulder, explain what needs to be done next, but letting us do all the work. With the exception of cooking the rice(thank goodness), and platting the final dishes, we actually made EVERYTHING we got to eat for dinner. And oh my was it every DELICIOUS! But it was a lot of food, and though we ate everything to not insult our teacher, we were absolutely STUFFED by the end of supper, and basically had to waddle back to the hotel, just to fall into a food coma. But that's okay, our hotel even provided us with entertaining and thematic DVD copies to watch, The History of Angkor Wat and The Killing Fields. Might I suggest NOT watching the latter just before bed and after a big meal - it makes for very poor sleep.