I’m back in Chachoengsao after the weekend trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  It is a lot of travel  hassle going through that border I an overnight.  But I got my passport stamped so I won’t be overstaying the 30 days Tourists are allowed in Thailand.  I also saw Angkor Wat, which is something I wanted to do.  It was a bit of a disappointment.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that if you have seen one set of temple ruins you have seen them all, but I didn’t see anything at Angkor Wat that excited or inspired me.  The landscape is very flat and uninteresting and the art is decorative and very repetitive.  To be awed by the buildings you have to imagine how it would have looked back in the times it was built rather than how it looks now.  Now a days it is easy to build much more impressive structures, even a third world city like Bangkok has hundreds of them.  But that is the point, isn’t it, that back them there was nothing like these building so they must have been truly awe inspiring.

 

                It is amazing how quickly we adapt to technological change.  I get annoyed and a little mad because the wifi internet service in my hotel often drops my Skype calls, yet the first time I was in Thailand in 2001 I felt very happy to get dialup and send and receive plain text emails.