You Want Buy Something, Lady?

Siem Reap is much more intense then I expected. Unlike Bangkok, people will actually grab you as you are walking along the street and try to shove you toward their stand saying 'you buy something lady. I make good price. Just for you, just today. Tomorrow too late.'
I was planning to go to the temples of Angkor alone the next morning, but when I woke up, I met another girl and she asked me if I wanted to come along with her, so I did. 
The temples were cool, but I can say that I was pretty templed out by the end of the day. My favorite part of the day day was the sunset. 
As we were watching the sunset, a bunch of kids came up to us trying to sell us stuff, but ended up just chatting with us for a long time. It made me realize how lucky I was to have the childhood that I did. At 15 years old, I used to complain about having to wake up at at 6:30am to milk cows or babysit in the evenings, but here was this 14 year old girl who got up every morning at 3am, went to work trying to sell things to tourists until 5:30pm, then went home to watch her baby brother until 8:30 or 9pm only to do it all over again the next day. 
Since Karen and I were both pretty over temples, we decided to just go there for the sunrise and then go to the floating villages afterward, so we had to wake up at 4:30. 
Our tuk tuk driver knew of another floating village that was not as full of tourist and he highly recommended it, saying that it would be a more cultural experience for us, but it was a little further out. After our experience in Koh Lanta, I was a bit skeptical, but we took his word anyway, and I'm glad that we did. They were amazing.
We had to drive for about 1/2 hour to get there on the red, dirt roads, passing little villages along the way. Then we took a boat to the actual village.
The houses were all built on bamboo rafts so that, depending on the season, they can be moved according to the water level. 
We stopped first at a little school. The kids there were so much different from the ones in Siem Reap. Nobody was begging. No one even dared to look at us hardly. They were so shy.
After the school, our driver asked if we wanted to go for a swim. Thinking he was joking, I said of course. He wasn't joking. The boat stopped and he jumped in. The water looked nice, so we decided to jump in too, clothes and all. 
Before jumping in, we forgot to think about how we were going to get back up. After we'd finally managed to get back on, we went to a little island which was the 'city center'. This is where all the people who lived in the village would come to meet up. There was a doctor there that day, selling medicines and giving shots. 
We stayed there for a few hours playing with the kids and looking around before heading back.
On the way back we heard a loud pop. One of the tires had exploded, so our driver asked us to get out and walk for a bit to a nearby bench where he left us to go find a new tire. 
It was such a cool day. There was not one other tourist in sight and we got to see the real way that the real people live without being changed by tourism. It was exactly what I as hoping for when coming here; a true cultural experience.