The Floating Village

Well, I will give a brief account of the floating village, but, like Angkor, it will be so much better with photos. I will probably go over to my friend's house tomorrow evening and upload the photos up to now.
We left at 8 am yesterday, and traveled in the back of a work truck over, surprise, worse roads than on sunday for about 2 hours, and then we got into a boat with a sputtering motor and a mismatching set of wooden chairs, and chugged down the river to the "lake" where the village is- another 2 hours. Yesterday was the hottest day I've yet experienced here. We arrived in the floating village- all of the houses are raised way up on stilts, and everyone uses small wooden boats to get from one house to the next. There is a pagoda and restaurant at the edge of the town, where we stopped and had some iced coffee before I was bundled off with two of the Khmer workers to go check a few of the water filters, while Brian and Ben sat in a meeting with the town officials. So, we climed on to a boat made mostly of ancient wooden slats, in which you had to sit perfectly still or the whole thing would flip over, and the guys rowed from house to house, joking with me (one of them spoke so so english, the other spoke very little) and teaching me a few words in Khmer like, its a little hot, its REALLY hot, and the names of flowers, etc. So now I can say the basic things like yes and no, please and thank you, as well as talk a bit about the weather. It went from being reasonably warm to the sun beating down on us in the afternoon, in our little wooden boat, but the peoples houses were surprisingly cool. We went into about four households, where we were welcomed and chatted with (well, I was grinned at and chatted about) and I watched the two guys clean the filters and explain to the families how to use them properly. The people of the village pull up buckets of water from the lake, which is the colour of mud (or poo, whichever gives you a better visual), and use it for everything- washing, cooking, drinking. And of course they go to the bathroom in the lake, so the water often makes them really sick. So the filters were donated by someone. and a few of the households opted to have them, and Brian's organisation, the Trailblazer Foundation, set up the filters for them. They filter the lake water, and it's amazing the difference it makes- the colour of the filtered water is completely clear, and when we took in samples to the lab yesterday afternoon, the results were very good as well. So after the trip back, I was exausted and curled up to watch the television in the common room for a while, made some cool friends, and ate some pancakes for dinner.
There is so much more to describe about the village, as well as the temples, so when I upload the photos I will describe the actual experiences with them.
Today I am not feeling very well, I'm wondering if the heat got to me yesterday, as I am feeling a little feverish and have a slight cough, and can't keep much in my stomach. But I think this is probably due to the heat- today is quite hot as well, so I am taking it easy today, I slept a lot and I'm going to relax and drink iced coffee and not go outside the town. Hopefully will be feeling better tomorrow!

By the way, no, I didn't go to the echo chamber, but funny you should mention, me and Bina were talking about that last night- she had seen it on the amazing race as well, and had never heard of the echo chamber until then either!