Temples, Temples, and More... Temples?

This past weekend I took four days to make the mandatory trek to explore the temples of Angkor, located near Siem Reap, tucked away in the northwest corner of Cambodia. I met a Canadian friend, who was in Phnom Penh for the week and was also interested in seeing the temples, and we caught the early bus to Siem Reap on Thursday morning. Over the next few days we spent most of our time at Angkor, walking through and clambering over the countless temples that dot the landscape there. Unfortunately, rampant tourism has already left a discernible imprint on this cultural and architectural treasure left behind by the Angkor empire, so we made an effort to explore the more far-flung temples.

Attempting to describe these magnificent temples in words would undoubtedly be fruitless, so instead I will post some pictures (you can browse more here) that will do relatively more justice to these masterpieces, although I often found my camera insufficient for capturing the enormity and grandeur of these structures. In addition to visiting loads of temples and an interesting landmine museum, our tuk tuk driver also took us far off the beaten path to witness life on a Cambodia rice paddy, which local kid eagely showed us.

Besides visiting Siem Reap, I have been conducting one-on-one sessions with the seven scholarship students here in Phnom Penh, evaluating their progress according to three-month plans that they routinely complete. It has been fascinating to observe how culturally-bound our perceptions (both the students' and mine) of leadership are, and navigating how best to overcome these cultural differences promises to be a worthy challenge for the remainder of my time here. For instance, in Cambodian society, parents and older people rarely (if ever) show affection for their kids, and this feeds into what I perceive as a general lack of self-confidence among Cambodian youth. The impacts of this phenomenon on leadership are multitudinous and complicated, and certainly comprise a subject too wide in scope and nuanced in substance to dissect in a single blog entry (or many, for that matter), but they are shaping up to be an interesting case study in cross-cultural leadership training. More to come.