Chen Lu Pottery Village and Pictures from Cambodia

It's been another great week here in Xi'an including a visit with friends from Minnesota. They were in Xi'an for just a couple of days but it was fun getting together and catching up on life in Plymouth.  I got in a few afternoon walks in the park which was fun and yesterday I took the bus to a mall / park on the West side of Xi'an and then walked home.  I hadn't planned on it but since it was a nice day I just kept walking.  It was a 9 mile hike so I was tired by the time I got home.  Spring continues to bring out the color and the "colorful!"   Check out the instruments of this new spring arrival to our street corner!

Colorful baby chicks ... kindergarten teachers need to try and hatch colored chicks!

The parks are full of people taking pictures

Chen Lu Village has a 1.400 year history of ceramics and is called the "Oriental living fossil of Pottery Production."  The city walls are made of ceramic urns rather than bricks and sidewalks have inlaid ceramic designs.  The city is also unique in that it is terraced against the mountain so every block is either up or down.  To buy pottery, you need to visit the individual "factories."  Quite a unique place.

My trip to Cambodia was during the semester break and it was very interesting.  I was surprised by the level of poverty I saw ... much more than in Vietnam and much less developed.  We spent most of our time touring temples in the Siem Reap Area and they were pretty amazing.  The jungle is very thick so it's easy to see how they "disappeared" for hundreds of years.  With some of the temples now being excavated they are trying to leave many of the trees as part of their history.  It was over 100 every day so we had to drink a lot of water and again wear the straw hats to try to keep the sun off of us.  The other very interesting area was the "Great Lake" floating villages.  The water was so muddy it stunk but the lake is huge and many people living on it ... supposedly they are mostly refugees from other surrounding countries.  In the evening, we enjoyed getting foot and back massages in the markets.  One night we had a full row of Americans so we created quite the stir.

We visited the floating village of the Chong Khneas, south of Siem Reap and took a traditional wooden boat ride on the Tonle Sap, the "Great Lake" of Cambodia and the largest in Asia. These two brothers were "working" on the boat offering little shoulder massages for tips.  They were very cute.  We had several smaller boats come up to the side of our boat with children jumping on board and trying to sell fruit, drinks, or the worst were children with pythons wrapped around their neck and they wanted you to pay them for a picture with the python.  I did not have my picture taken but I did tip the boys for a little shoulder massage.