April Happenings

We're officially on break from school for the Khmer New Year Holiday. This is a three day holiday, so obviously we need the entire month of April off. However, my school decided to start vaca back in late February for Khmer New Year, so I have not been teaching much in public school. I have been teaching a private class in the afternoons and it has been going really well. This past week we worked on paragraph writing and I really got into teaching this topic. It was a nice change from talking about grammar, which I'm completely inept to teach about.

Tomorrow I'm heading out for a two week vacation. After a short stint in Phnom Penh my friends and I will head south to the beaches. There's supposed to be some snorkeling spots on some of the islands off the coast. I'll post pictures after my vacation.

The week after that a friend and I are heading north to Ratanakiri Province (near the borders of Laos and Vietnam). The plan is to explore some of the jungle happenings, hike to a few waterfalls, try and talk with the locals (who speak a different dialect of Khmer than I do), track tigers, try the local cuisine (probably bugs, snakes, and anything else that slows down long enough to be thrown into the pot). Just kidding about the tigers, but I hear there are elephant rides and freshwater dolphins in the Mekong. Speaking of animals, a gecko just ran across my foot.

I'm looking forward to the time away from site because I'm incredibly bored. The most exciting thing to happen this week was waking up to rain this morning.

Pictures: A huge basket full of chopsticks drying in the sun (top), after my nightly bike ride down a very dusty road to a neighboring village (middle), I wear this silly looking mask a lot becuase the roads are really dusty (bottom)