Amidst all of the hustle and bustle of classes each week, our Saturday excursions are a welcome break from classes, though I'm still constantly processing (or at least attempting to) in Khmer because all of the explanations or information given about a place is stated in Khmer. Needless to say it's exhausting, but at least I'm getting better at understanding! That stuff aside, last Saturday's excursion was to Phnom Chisor about an hour drive South of Phnom Penh in Takeo Province.
It's a popular site for Cambodian students to visit on school trips as I found out while I was there. There weren't many foreign tourists there, but at its top was a spectacular view of the rice and watermelon fields below. Also at the top is a temple built in the 11th century but bombed during the Lon Nol regime in the early 1970s as the Vietnam War was raging and the Khmer Rouge was beginning to build momentum. But words cannot really do it justice, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves :) You can find them here.
After the trip up the mountain, we stopped by the house of a family who farms watermelon and rice as well as weaves silk cloth to make skirts and the traditional pants/bottoms for Apsara (Khmer Ballet) dancers wear for their performances and to practice. The cloth they made is done by hand on a loom very similar to the one my sister wove on, but instead of petals, there are pieces of wood that you press on to make the different patterns with the base fabric. Yet, unlike the fabric made by my sister, which was done with wool, this fabric is entirely silk including the base. The string is so thin that it takes roughly 2,000 strands to make fabric that is one meter wide. The weavers said that it took them two days to set up the strands and get them threaded through correctly so that they could begin weaving. The actual weaving process for a piece of fabric that was about 104 meters long took them about 9 or 10 months to complete. As one of my classmates said, "it's like having a baby!" or something like that... The results are pretty spectacular either way! [I'll post more photos of the weaving to the same Flicker album soon!]
It's a popular site for Cambodian students to visit on school trips as I found out while I was there. There weren't many foreign tourists there, but at its top was a spectacular view of the rice and watermelon fields below. Also at the top is a temple built in the 11th century but bombed during the Lon Nol regime in the early 1970s as the Vietnam War was raging and the Khmer Rouge was beginning to build momentum. But words cannot really do it justice, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves :) You can find them here.
After the trip up the mountain, we stopped by the house of a family who farms watermelon and rice as well as weaves silk cloth to make skirts and the traditional pants/bottoms for Apsara (Khmer Ballet) dancers wear for their performances and to practice. The cloth they made is done by hand on a loom very similar to the one my sister wove on, but instead of petals, there are pieces of wood that you press on to make the different patterns with the base fabric. Yet, unlike the fabric made by my sister, which was done with wool, this fabric is entirely silk including the base. The string is so thin that it takes roughly 2,000 strands to make fabric that is one meter wide. The weavers said that it took them two days to set up the strands and get them threaded through correctly so that they could begin weaving. The actual weaving process for a piece of fabric that was about 104 meters long took them about 9 or 10 months to complete. As one of my classmates said, "it's like having a baby!" or something like that... The results are pretty spectacular either way! [I'll post more photos of the weaving to the same Flicker album soon!]
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