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.

Canary in the Coalmine

Traveling in-country is an undertaking that can turn even the most patient traveler into a raging lunatic. My 120 mile trip to Phnom Penh often turns into a two day adventure thanks to inclement weather, road maintenance delays, or missed taxis. Despite the seven hour trip, I look forward to weekends away from site when I can visit with my American friends, and eat food that is not rice. A few weeks ago I took a trip down south to visit my friend Kristine, and the taxi ride will be one that I’ll never forget. The 60 mile trip from Phnom Penh to her village took nearly 8 hours. I hope you enjoy my story.

“Hi, I’d like to go to p’saa chubah ambeuh,” I tell the tuk-tuk driver in Khmer.
“P’saa thmey (central market)?” he questions me.
“No, no, no. I want to go to p-s-a-a c-h-u-b-a-h a-m-b-e-u-h,” I restate slowly, knowing that my words are understandable so long as they fall on attentive ears.
“Ok lady, I take you to Wat Phnom,” he tells me in English.
“No, dammit. I want to go to p’saa chubah amebuh. It’s across the bridge on National Road No.1.”
“Oh! P’saa chubah ambeuh. Ok, I take you there.” He replies.
“How much for one person?” I ask in Khmer.
“Brahm dollah (five dollars),” he answers.
“Five dollars? To go two kilometers? No, I’ll pay you….a dollar and a half,” I bargain.
“Three dollars,” He counters.
“No, a dollar and a half,” I state and begin to walk away pretending to look for a cheaper tuk-tuk.
“Ok, ok, ok lady. Two dollars.”
“Alright.” I finally agree.

I climb in and immediately sling my right arm through the straps of my bag. I don’t want to become an easy target for the notorious Phnom Penh moto thieves. They drive up next to tourists in tuk-tuks, grab their bags from inside and take off through the traffic, rarely to be caught.

We turn into P’saa Chubah Ambeuh at 9:30am sharp, like Kristine said to do. The tuk-tuk is swarmed by a crowd of Khmer taxi drivers. One grabs my arm, another grabs at my bag, and yet another hops onto the moving tuk-tuk to try and convince me to ride in his taxi. They yell their destinations at me:

“Siem Reap”
“Svay Rieng”
“Prey Veng”

Holding tight onto my bag I jump off the tuk-tuk the moment it stops. I shove a wad of khmer riels into the tuk-tuk driver’s hand and push through the crowd of men saying that I already have a driver and to leave me alone. I make my way to the taxi vans parked near the food stalls that sell everything from cold bottled water to fried grasshoppers to sugar cane juice served in a plastic sack with a straw. I find the only taxi going to Kristine’s village; it’s empty except for the driver and his wife.

An empty taxi in Cambodia is a bad omen because taxis only leave when they are completely full. There’s only one option in dealing with an empty taxi: get your iPod out, get comfortable, and patiently wait until it fills up. A thirteen passenger van is considered “full and ready to leave” when the three following conditions have been met:

1. There are at least 25 people crammed inside the van, plus another 5 sitting on top.
2. There are about 30 cases of Anchor beer, a few dozen chickens, a moto, and a few bicycles tied to the top too.
3. The Khmer music in your van is loud enough that it drowns out the Khmer music in the van next to you, which is only three feet away.

I take a seat in the back next to a window after negotiating the price with the driver. The May heat hits hardest around 11:00am. Today it has to be close to 100°F with stagnant and humid Asian market air sticking to every inch of me while I sit and wait. Every smell emanating from the market fills my nose and soaks into my clothes. I can smell the gasoline being pumped by hand out of hundred gallon steel barrels, the fermented fish paste that Cambodia is known for, and the rotting pile of trash that was soaked by a rainstorm yesterday afternoon and marks the beginning of the tropical rainy season. The sellers stop by my window every few minutes trying to convince me to buy salted river clams, bananas, bottled water, and cheap plastic toys.

“Lady you want buy something. I give you special price.”
“Lady you buy water.”
“Lady you want pineapple?”

The van slowly starts to fill with people and I continue to sit and wait. It’s been nearly two hours now. I’ve sweat through my tee-shirt and have been constantly wiping the drips off my face and arms with my favorite green bandana. The driver climbs to the top of the van to tie down some empty 5 gallon plastic gas containers, three bicycles, and an assortment of neon colored flower patterned body pillows. Out of the corner of my eye I see our driver fall off the van and land on the ground. The rope he was balancing himself with snapped and he went over the side, but fortunately he landed on his feet.

The anticipation of our impending departure makes me irritable. My mood does not improve when the young guy sitting behind me lights up a cigarette and fills the van with cheap tobacco smoke. My blood boils and I turn around to tell him that he should smoke outside away from me because the smoke makes me sick. He laughs at me and I realize that I’m just a foreigner with a silly accent who can’t express feelings of anger using only basic Khmer.

We begin to move after more than three hours, but five minutes into the ride I leap out of my seat when something furry moves across my foot. I don’t realize that I’ve scraped my leg on a loose piece of metal until after I look under the seat in front of me expecting to see a rat, but instead find a puppy wagging its tail. I don’t remember seeing the dog get on the van.

Now that we’re moving, my clothes start to dry out, I cool off a bit, and my mind is looking forward to spending the weekend with a friend, but mostly I am looking forward to getting off this van and having a cold bucket bath. We reach the Neak Lohm ferry crossing after an hour or so. The road we are driving, National Road No. 1, is the main route between HoChiMinh City and Phnom Penh. It crosses over the massive Mekong River and travels through the Mekong Delta, the largest rice producing region in southern Vietnam. To cross the river you have to take a ferry at the town of Neak Lohm. A few years back the Japanese government gave Cambodia close to $10 million to build a proper bridge that could handle the immense amount of traffic that travels this route daily. That money was “misplaced,” so here I sit at the Neak Lohm ferry crossing, also known as that absolute arm pit of the earth, waiting to cross the river.

I go through the motions again with the sellers who shove plastic bags of warm fruit, sunglasses, and styrofoam containers of rice in my face trying to entice me to buy their food. After refusing to buy anything they eventually leave me alone, only to be replaced by beggars, who reach in through the windows, grab my hands and ask for money. Again the young man behind me lights up a cigarette in the van. This time though instead of relying on my limited Khmer, I reach back and start grabbing for his lit cigarette to throw it out the window. He gets the point and exits the van to smoke outside. We eventually load onto the ferry, cross the Mekong River, and turn off onto a dusty cow path of a road through the poor rural areas of Prey Veng.

Soon after turning onto this dirt road, a foul smell begins to take over the van. Putrid smelling vans are part of life here and I’ve learned to always have a bandana with me to cover my nose and mouth as a makeshift face mask. Nearly two hours after turning off onto this rough dirt road I overhear the Khmer family in front of me say: “Gcong chikah slahp.” This translates to “baby dog dead.” Now I think I know what the smell is: the dead puppy underneath the van seat in front of me. I ask the family if we can throw it out of the van, but they say no because it will be cooked for dinner tonight.

The van ride ends 10 minutes later and I jump out never being happier to be finished with a road trip. The lesson of this story: if the dog dies in the van because of heatstroke, it’s too hot to be traveling in Cambodia.

Technically I don't speak Khmer

I read over the previous post and I don't want to mislead anyone. I speak terrible Khmer. Most of the time I say things like "Me want chicken" or "I want go there."

Step right up folks...

Surprise, surprise this week is a holiday. Needless to say I’m out of school for a week. In Colorado they say the sun shines 300 days per year, but in Cambodia there seem to be about 300 holidays, festivals, or celebration days per year. I think my school has had one full week of classes since starting at the beginning of October. This is the week of the Water Festival: one of the main Khmer holidays. There are boat races and all kinds of celebrations in Phnom Penh. Sadly though, I’m not allowed to travel to PP because Peace Corps rules put me under a kind of house arrest for the first three months of service. No traveling for me, except to Siem Reap. So here I am hanging out at site wondering what I should do for 8 days. I’ve already ridden every road within a 15 mile radius of my town, scrubbed the bugs off my floor that reek like the market’s fish stalls, sewn up the holes in my mosquito net, finished my third book in a week, and I even sat on a rock and looked at a tree for an hour. You’ve got to make your own fun in rural Cambodia or the boredom will kill you.

On Sunday I returned to my home around 5:00 after a long bike ride, showered, and was hanging out waiting for dinner. Suddenly someone turned on the world’s largest speakers up the road from my house. In the distance I could hear Fergie’s “my humps” in Khmer and figured someone was throwing a party for the festival. My family invited me to go to the Wat with them after dinner, and of course I accepted. It’s not very often that I’m outside past dark here. Usually the gate’s locked up by 7:00 and I’m under my mosquito net by 8:30.

Upon arriving to the Wat, I was shocked to find that a carnival had been set up complete with music and lights (quite a feat when there is no electricity to speak of). I have no clue how they got the rides to my village and assembled without me ever noticing. The Thais had to helicopter computers in to my school, but somehow the Cambodians brought in a Ferris wheel by truck. Imagine the most dilapidated circus from the 20’s and you kind of get the idea of what this carnival was like. I started looking around for the bearded lady or the man with tattoos covering his body oblivious to the fact that everywhere I walked a crowd gathered. I was looking for the freak show, while the Cambodians had already found theirs.

At first I watched the kids’ ride which was similar to ‘the swings’ at Eliche’s. You know, the ride where it spins really fast while you sit in a chair suspended by chains to a large metal frame. Well, the kids’ version had a mismatch of various plastic toys to sit on (a frog, a faded and cracked school bus, etc). There was a fan on top of the whole contraption that I presume was charging the battery that powered the lights. This was amusing and all, but the Ferris wheel loomed in the background begging for my attention.

I decided that I just had to ride it. In the back of my mind I wondered if I got hurt would the Peace Corps add “no riding sketchy Ferris wheels at Wats” to their list of rules. Let’s find out! I dragged my little host sister over there to ride with me. For 1,000 riel (25 cents) you get to ride the Ferris wheel straight out of hell for 5 minutes. The whole thing was powered by a gas engine hooked up to an old truck axel that spun a bunch of belts. No doubt it was handmade and had seen better days. I had to hunch down and crunch up my legs just to fit inside the cage. My particular cage/seat thing, lucky number 10, didn’t have a latch on the door. So there I am holding the door shut, my knuckles turning white from the death grip, and I’m coughing up a lung thanks to the smoke from the engine down below while a crowd of Cambodians gather round to watch the barong ride the Ferris wheel. At the end I jumped out thankful to be alive and thought, “Once is enough.” That wasn’t in the cards though. My students thought it was the most hilarious thing that their teacher rode on the Ferris wheel and soon they all wanted to ride with me. After a few more trips I had to quite and explain that the fish soup I ate for dinner combined with the motion was making me sick.

I then wandered over to the food area to see about buying a funnel cake and ice cream. Ha-ha, yeah right Rebecca. There were fried bananas being cooked over a small fire in the dirt…I declined. The darts were next. There was this large wooden structure set up and balloons were put in between the boards. A ‘safety net’ was strung up behind the contraption, but a lot of the kids kept putting their faces right up to the net watching the crowd throw darts. Thankfully no one lost an eye that night.

So that was the carnival experience. Sure there weren’t popcorn stands, safety ropes, or bearded ladies. But who needs those things when police with assault rifles slung over their shoulders walk around while the best internatinal dance song of all-time plays in the background…ah, the Macarena.

Surreal Lunch

Some of you may already know this (and I don’t want to brag to my fellow PCV’s), but my high school is nothing less than beautiful. It was a donation from the princess of Thailand to the Cambodian people and has no physical resemblance to Cambodian high schools. I do however face many of the same challenges as other volunteers despite the new buildings and neatly manicured gardens. Email me about that if you’re curious. Back to the point.

One of the Thai teachers here who serves as the day-to-day contact with the Thai government invited me to lunch with the school’s project manager and all of the other “big wigs” who work for the princess. Of course I accepted! Eating yummy food on dishes encrested in gold with the Thai royal emblem while watching soccer on a massive TV was not what I had envisioned for my Peace Corps experience. But I certainly wasn’t going to complain while sipping down that ice-cold Coca-Cola.

The project manager and I chatted for most of the meal and he told me a lot about the buildings and the obstacles they faced in placing this massive school out in rural Cambodia. They actually helicoptered materials in from Thailand (like computers and tech equipment) because the roads to the site are absolutely horrific. He also invited me to come to Bangkok with the students who receive scholarships to study at universities in Thailand. Sounds great, but I doubt the Peace Corps would okay that trip. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to explore the sandy beaches of Thailand on my own dime over vacation next summer. Enjoy the snow everyone….I’m off to drink a coconut. Life’s rough here :)

Siem Reap synopsis: I bought the town out of peanut butter, drank a latte a day, ate Indian food twice, Mexican once, and maybe had one or two beers. It was a gluttony fest and just what I needed. Halloween was fun. I wore a rice sack and went as “white rice.”

Nice Pyle Gomer

Here it is! You all may not know why you're looking at, but I see months worth of spring cleaning sprees. Granted I would be unable to move these things on a scooter, but a regular car would do the trick. I have managed to sell, donate, or throw away about 2 Subaru loads of stuff. What you see in the picture is really everything I own (minus my 3 bikes, of course).
I've spent the past few months giving away my furniture, throwing away questionable t-shirts from way too long ago, and forcing numerous kitchen related items on my my sister (including my beloved omelet pan). Last week I sold Gary, my camping buddy/Grannie grocery getter/snow plow. It was a little tragic to watch the Subey drive off and leave me in the dust, so I treated myself to a strawberry milkshake as a pick-me-up. Ah, much better.

I guess I'm almost ready to go. All I have to do is learn to speak Khmer, figure out how to teach English to non-native speakers, and find out how to use one of those squat toilets. Piece of cake, right? Oh, and I forgot to mention...I've heard that Cambodia has snakes. Seems that I've had my fair share of snake sightings this year already. Not okay with me!

A few months ago I went to the reptile shop as part of my self-prescribed ophidiophobia treatment. I held that little guy on the left for a while, which was barely tolerable. Then the shop guys brought a big boa out of its cage and it started hissing at me. I just about lost it when it gave me the "I'm gonna eat you" look. The second run-in was with some funky road kill....gross. Then a few weeks ago I nearly ran over a huge bull snake on my mountain bike. Outta my way!

This weekend I'm racing again and real nervous that all of the ice cream I've been eating lately will not actually make my legs pedal fast. We'll see. For anyone who's interested (Meg and Lieschen), I'll be riding in Winter park on Sunday. Just assume that yes, I would in fact like a beer at the finish line. Here's a pic from the hill climb race two weeks ago. I jumped up to the Expert class this summer and I'm now racing with the fast girls who completely kick my butt on the climbs.

Thanks for reading my blog everyone. I will try to post somewhat regularly about my adventures abroad. Maybe I'll even throw in a picture or two of Angkor Wat.