Friday, July 10, 2009

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.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Happy 4th!

For the Fourth some of us headed to Phnom Penh for a celebration at the US embassy. It was a really nice time with lots of good American food and a huge American flag cake. The cake was basically the highlight of the night. They brought it out and all of the PCV's swarmed the area. I pushed my way into cutting it and got the biggest stars corner piece with tons of frosting. This was the second piece of cake I've had in a year and anyone who knows me knows that chocolate Whole Foods cake is a Sunday night staple in my diet.

This summer is going well so far. We're now in the rainy season and the weather has cooled off a little. It still hits the mid-90's in the middle of the day with humidity, but in the evenings it'll drop below 80. So, there is no longer any reason for me to get out of the mosquito net twice a night to take a cold shower because I'm sweating so much.

School's finished. It's actually been winding down since February, but officially finished at the end of June. So for the next three months I've arranged to work on my school's farm with the agriculture students. It's nice to be outside (despite the heat) taking care of the vegetables and trees. Last week they taught me how to take care and fertilize a certain type of tree. They teach me the names of the plants in Khmer and Thai and I teach them the English word (if it exists). So many of the plants here are unique to the tropics, so I don't know their English equivalent names.

I've included the picture of me cutting the flag cake.