Friday at the Temple with Crystal

Today we had an extra early 6 am start, so we could go to the Angkor Borei temples.
We took a tiring walk up 152 stairs (yes, we counted them) and once we got to the temple which was on the very top of the hill, we were already exhausted and it was only 8 in the morning! The temple was very old and despite how large the exterior looked, inside it was quite small. The view from the top of the hill was really beautiful, we could see how green and alive the land looked, and if we looked from a particular side of the temple we could see Vietnam, which pretty much looked exactly like Cambodia.
The temple was so peaceful, especially because it was so isolated from the rest of the village and the people. We learned that the temple was bombed in 1971, under the authorization of Richard Nixon. After we'd seen the temple we walked down to the Angkor Borei museum, which is in the village of Borei. It was really amazing as unlike Perth, we were allowed to touch all of the artifacts in the museum, some of which were about 2000 years old.
The children and the families living in the village were all quite poor and a few of the children would come up to us and ask us for money, so we gave them our 100 riel notes, (which are worth less than 5 cents) but it was really nice to see a huge smile sweep across their faces when we took out our money and gave it to them, so they could buy a packet of crisps or something. After we had seen the temples we made our way back to the centre for siesta. Quite a few of us were rather tired, so we just relaxed and slept until we made our way to the NFO.
It was quite a usual day at the NFO, Anjali and I were reading to a few of the kids there, until a few of us girls left and made our way back to the centre and learned how to carve roses out of watermelons! It was such an interesting thing to learn, and it's surprisingly easy considering how amazing they look once they're finished. Now some of us can come home and impress everyone with a watermelon, just one of the many cool things we've learned in Cambodia.
So yeah, overall it was a pretty good and interesting day, and tiring as well!

Crystal