With our visits to the Angkor Wat temple park concluded, all we had to look forward to in Siem Reap was our final week of volunteer teaching at the little school where we’d spent most of the month living and volunteering. But we still had an opportunity to explore another wat (temple), albeit it was a contemporary one: Wat Po Banteaychey, which was almost directly across the street from us.

Wat Po Banteaychey

Though it doesn’t have the archaic grandeur of the decaying architectural masterpieces at Angkor, Wat Po Banteaychey is much more colorful, with red, gold and green competing for your eye’s attention at a frantic pace. The structures included little tombs, apparently for monks.

One bit of color we stumbled upon that we had not anticipated was 100 dollar bills. Strewn all over the ground in one spot. Really. Well, sort of. We picked one up and examined it, and it looked entirely authentic except for the word “COPY” in small letters down near the lower left corner.

Why on earth would anyone have fake Benjamins lying around? Well, these on the ground were clearly scattered by the wind or other random elements, and not merely discarded like candy wrappers — it’s hard to imagine that monks would be litterbugs. But why did such funny money even exist in the first place?

The answer, we’d learn, is that it’s common to place stacks of hundreds at Buddhist shrines, along with other offerings like food, candles, flowers and incense. You can find these packets full of bogus century slips for sale in shops. And they look so real that it’s a good idea to be on your toes, lest someone try to pass one off as the real thing.

Volunteer Teaching

Meanwhile, back at school, we had our students perform a couple of stories drawn from our repertoire of international folktales we enacted for years as touring educational entertainers in the U.S. It was a productive cap to our month of teaching that had been rather chaotic at times.

Cambodian schools follow a protocol that seems rather rigid by American standards. They assemble in formation in the morning and go through various rituals like the national anthem, and they also assemble in formation at the end of the day. But in between, the students may not be quite so orderly in class.

Finally the week concluded, and we posed for an obligatory group photo. And then we turned in our green teacher shirts and started packing up for our next adventure.

10/25-26/2022