Nearly a year!!

I took a long bike ride today and was thinking about all of the stuff that I haven't done since living in America. Then I was thinking about all of the cool new things that I've done in Cambodia. Hope you enjoy the lists.

Haven't done in a year:

• Driven a car
• Used a washing machine
• Used toilet paper (it's true....not used here)
• Seen snow
• Gone mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, or camping
• Eaten a Chipotle burrito (used to be a staple in my diet)
• Bought gas or paid for insurance for my car
• Hiked a mountain
• Showered less than two times in one day
• Scraped ice off of my windshield
• Eaten a piece of pie (I've had two pieces of cake this year though)
• Pet a dog despite being surrounded by lots of mangy ones
• Eaten savory crepes at the Boulder Farmers' Market with my sister on Sunday morning
• Eaten a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner

New things I've done this past year:

• Sea kayaked on the Gulf of Thailand
• Learned to speak Khmer (or at least enough to get around)
• Taught in a classroom and people actually listened
• Wore the craziest looking clothes to celebrate weddings and funerals
• Seen Angkor Wat and ridden around the whole complex two separate times
• Ridden in a skinny river boat to visit a chunchiet cemetery
• Bathed fully clothed in a muddy river while the villagers stood on the banks and watched
• Spent weeks upon weeks alone at site with no contact with other Americans (minus the text messaging)
• Visited the market nearly everyday to buy my food
• Became addicted to coconuts
• Fed a monkey a banana
• Fed an elephant a whole bunch of bananas
• Kicked a dog in the face because it tried to bite me
• Ran over a poisonous snake on my bike (or at least I think it was a banded krait)
• Hitchhiked nearly every week to get to wherever I need to go
• Swam in the ocean in the middle of the night when the moon was out
• Slept in a bamboo hut
• Drank a little too much Lao flower wine during Khmer New Year
• Eaten the following: fire ant salad, fried crickets, fried grasshoppers, fish cheek, fried fish stomach, pigs' feet, cow intestines, chicken brain, chicken feet, chicken stomach, coagulated chicken blood, and basically every other part of a chicken that technically can be eaten but shouldn’t.

So as you can see my new list trumps my old list, so that makes me happy. I’m still missing America though…my family, the food, and the mountains. One year down, one to go!

Also, today was pretty hot and I went for a long ride and drank A TON of water…6.5 liters to be exact, and that doesn’t include the 1-1.5 liters I’ll drink before I go to bed. It’s sickening how much we sweat here. But don’t sweat it, because I re-fill my plastic bottles so they don’t end up in the burn piles.