“One night in Bangkok…”

That’s the song that has been playing in my head all day. I was supposed to be traveling to Hanoi, Vietnam today. But I had noticed a month or so ago that the company who processed my visas got the date wrong on the Vietnam one. It’s valid for tomorrow instead of today as I had submitted. So I figured my flight got in around 7:30 pm so I’d just be hanging out in immigration for four hours until midnight and they let me in then. I wasn’t too psyched about missing my transfer and having to get a taxi after midnight in notorious Hanoi where a cab driver drove off with Karly’s bag in the trunk a few weeks ago! But nor did I want to pay hundreds of dollars to cancel and rebook a new flight.

But turns out the airline didn’t even want to give me get a boarding pass for my flight because they weren’t sure they would let me wait or make me return to Thailand. Given all the issues and not feeling that excited about the late night prospects in Hanoi, I decided to play it safe and asked if they could rebook me to a flight tomorrow morning instead. They kindly made the change at no charge! Of course, I have to pay for the extra night hotel, Bangkok transfers, etc but I suppose it is better to be careful. I may try to recoup something from the visa processing company that made the error in the first place. But either way, Bangkok isn’t a bad place to spend an afternoon and night.

So I revisited the Royal Palace (which interestingly has a model of Angkor Wat!) and Wat Pho and just stuffed myself on yummy Tom Yum soup and Pad Thai and am feeling quite happy to be in my comfy clean hotel instead of trying to charm the Vietnamese immigration officials!

It’s hard to believe my Cambodia part of the trip is now behind me! And it’s been a packed couple of weeks. I know you're all dying to hear the latest in my battle with the ants and you'll be pleased to know that my DEET war and ant carcass warnings did the trick! I've seen virtually no ants for a couple of weeks...they've all moved over to Jen's room instead! Sorry Jen!

We visited the Land Mine Museum which was a fascinating and sobering place. As a fan of the Tintin books, I was surprised to see a Land Mine version of Tintin as part of the exhibits.


Last week at the orphanage and our first school, we did Halloween masks out of paper plates and various creative supplies. The orphanage crew really got into it and had such a blast! We took them “trick or treat”ing for candy in the different rooms.


Then later last Friday, my co-teacher Chantha had a field trip with his students to Angkor Wat and asked me to join. It was such a blast riding on the back of Chantha’s motorbike with about 12 other motos filled with two or three students each zipping all around us!

The actual temple part was a bit tough for me since our guide was speaking in Khmer. And I must admit I almost dozed off during the shady sitting on the grass time. But we were up quite late playing Pub Trivia with our new buddies, Stephen and Per from Sweden. It was a very fun night and I was happy to find a trivia outlet on the other side of the world. We even placed second! Jen’s Facebook knowledge and my Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid random info came in very handy. And of course we had to celebrate at our regular bar, the Warehouse.


It was sad to say goodbye to Chantha and the kids from Khmer Help Khmer school. Since the water festival kept schools closed until last Wed, Chantha had given them all the week as holiday. So I had to say goodbye to some of my students earlier than expected. I took a bunch of photos, though I think it’s funny how serious Cambodians can look in their pictures when they grin and laugh all the time in real life. They can treat pictures as a very formal occurrence! Looking at most of the pictures of Chantha on his motorbike or the classroom, you’d never guess how huge his grin is usually!

Saturday we went to Laos, and had a really awesome four days. Our first night was Halloween and we had an entertaining time dressing up a fellow traveler in drag for his “costume.”
We picked a central hotel located right in the middle of the amazing night market. It was filled with lots of really nice stuff and went the length of the street. Laos in general was fabulous. A bit cooler than the non-stop heat of Cambodia, but still beautiful. We rode elephants (and sat on their heads like the mahouts do!), went kayaking and survived the baby rapids, trekked through the mountains and swam and climbed beautiful turquoise tiered waterfalls. We also ate loads of awesome food! And did WAY too much shopping! All in all a great mini-vacation during our travels!

We flew back Wed morning and swung right into school. The last three days have been a whirlwind getting ready to depart Cambodia. I shipped a box home and the DHL cost was almost as much as the stuff in it!

We has planned to visit the orphanage for my last time on Friday, but Thursday, Jen and I had stopped along the side of one of the road trying to snap a picture of a monk on a motorbike (we see them on the backs of bikes in their orange robes all the time, but never manage to get a picture!) While we were there, Mr Tong from the orphanage pulled over when he saw us. I love being here long enough to be recognized! Turns out the kids were going to Phnom Penn for the weekend. So thank goodness he saw us and let us know or we would have missed them! (Bummer the only pic I got of monks on motos was far away behind a telephone pole! So the quest continues!)

And I really wanted to give my final surprise to the orphans in person. I’d printed out some large group shots along with the individual baseball card type pictures of each of them in the Red Sox shirts. So I was able to give those to them that night along with some coloring books (which they always love!) It was great, but really sad saying goodbye. They are just the sweetest kids and the people who work there take great care of them. There may not be much money, but the kids seem very happy, bright and engaged.

Thursday Jen and I had set aside for our last night watching The Amazing Race and ordering pizza. I’ve got her hooked on the show now! It was such fun, but bizarrely later that night I had my first really bad stomach issues. Usually if I’ve had any twinge, one prescription pill does the trick right away. But Thursday night I was just miserable and up half the night alternating between sweating and freezing. Not fun! And strangely Jen felt absolutely fine and we’d had the exact same food. Very weird. I was supposed to have my going away lunch with Mr. Paulie from the second school and didn’t want to be rude and not go, plus it was my last day with the kids at the first school, which I couldn’t miss! So I slept half the morning and rallied for lunch, though didn’t eat much of the yummy Khmer food. Then I had to lie down a little while before school so Jen started class without me. I did still manage to bike though! I was determined!

At school, it was so sweet! Many of the kids had made me little gifts or written goodbye notes of how they will miss me! Lots of hugs all around. Even our chicken friend came into the classroom to say goodbye! We played one final game of Hangman and my message was “I will miss Cambodia and all of you!” Which is absolutely the truth.

Last night was one last Khmer goodbye dinner with Meng and Jen. I was feeling a bit better but still not 100%. We made a last stop at the Warehouse, but my stomach issues kept me to Sprite. Bizarre that I’ve been in Asia for over nine weeks with no real problems and my last day in Cambodia, I’m sick!

I still can’t believe the time went so quickly! I’m going to miss Jen a ton! We had such a blast together. Well I know I’ll see her soon when we do the Amazing Race together! You know we’ll win it “Jenny!” :)

One moment will stay with me from Cambodia. Jen and I were in the night market one night and I was bargaining over the price of some earrings. The woman started at $4, I said $2, etc. As we chatted, she asked about my being in Cambodia and I said we were teaching English to local kids who couldn’t afford to pay for classes. When she heard that, not only did she give me the earrings for $2 but gave Jen and I both free bracelets as a thank you for helping her country. We both were so touched by the gesture! That is pretty much what we found across the country…wonderful people.

Now it’s on to Vietnam and the last two weeks of my journey…

Sunday, October 25th Siem Reap, Cambodia

It’s almost been two weeks since I last posted – time has flown! The teaching has been going well, though last week was tough since we focused on grammar at our first school (the one where we do all the planning and teaching). NOT the most exciting topic I the world. Is there a more entertaining way to teach singular/plural, past tense, negatives, questioning, etc? Well we do try to at least finish with some games.

At least the rain has diminished a great deal so we’re no longer standing in water to teach. It does mean the mosquitoes have gotten a bit worse, though still not nearly as bad as I’d feared. There is still enough water in the river for the kids to do a bit of fishing during break time, but the fish they catch are about 2 inches max. Our students at the first school are really a range of English. Some grasp it all very quickly while others just look blankly at their paper.

At the second school, I have a co-teacher, Chantha (he goes by his nickname Toy.) So we usually follow his lesson plan and I do the readings and practice the grammar and pronunciation with the kids, who are overall more advanced than our first school. It was a bit awkward last Friday when Toy handed around a sheet with a story he’d written in English about the upcoming water festival. He asked me to read it out loud, which I did, but it was rather filled with errors, incorrect grammar, and run on or awkward sentence structure. I started to make edits on my copy to give him later, but he wanted to try to have the students make corrections real time. He was a great sport and said he was really glad I was there to correct the mistakes, but there were so many I offered to go home and retype the sheet, which I just finished. Even a relatively good English speaker has difficulty, which is why they so appreciate native speakers here.

Outside of school, Jen and I have done more exploring. Sometimes it’s just running errands, getting groceries or school supplies. We just hop on our bikes and navigate through the cows, blaring horns of warning and crazy wrong way moto-drivers wherever we need to go. I am so glad to be biking instead of taking tuk-tuks like the tourists. Much better exercise and much more local interaction. Though more often than not, someone local will start biking alongside either Jen or me and start a conversation to practice their English. Everyone is really friendly, but usually biking these streets is when I need to concentrate so trying to carry on a conversation and avoid running over small children or being taken out by a larger vehicle is not ideal!

Knock on wood, we’ve managed to avoid any serious mishaps, stomach bugs or . Well, I did manage to trip down some stairs and scrape up my knee like a six year old. But more entertaining was my ant battle. Overall, our hotel is really nice and quite clean. But there have been times of little ant swarms. They are teeny, but seem to come in numbers. From my college days and living in Somerville with occasional ant problems, these are not my favorites! So I keep all food in the fridge or thrown out in a trash can in the hallway. Even so, I’ve seen them from time to time and I have taken to using my 30% Deet Ben’s bug spray on them, One day, was finding quite a few of them in the bathroom after school. These were high up and I was afraid they were coming in packs out of the ceiling railing. At one point I put down the bug spray, saw some more and grabbed it again…only to have picked it up backward and my aggressive attack squirt went right into one eye! OWWWW!

Fortunately, I was fine by the next morning, but I left the sticky spray littered with a few ant corpses up at the top of the wall. Figured that would serve as a warning to any other little buggers who try to make their way in! HA! (And again knock on wood, but I haven’t seen any for a few days so maybe my strategy has worked!)

Jen and I have been trying to explore more in and around town. We’ve actually lived it up a couple of weekend days by hitting the pool at the Meridian hotel. Considering we’re talking about 100 degree heat and dripping humidity, a pool is just heavenly. In general, our hotel is far nicer than either of us might have expected. Reliable, though a bit slow, wireless, cable tv, A/C, delivery food options… It’s weird to have all these amenities, though! At least we see the other side with our teaching and our students and I’m certainly not going to complain about air conditioning in this heat We’ve also found a regular bar to hang out and we’ve met some westerners who are more or less local having lived here for a while. Some of them still don’t speak much Khmer though.

We had a third volunteer for a very short period. Karly was supposed to be here for two weeks but on her first day of teaching, she got word that her parents had been in a bad car accident. We’d first heard that one of them had died, but it turned out it was a taxi driver, not her parents. Still, they were in pretty bad shape and she headed home to be with them.

So Jen and I are on our own again. Thank goodness Jen is here! I would be having a very different time without a buddy to experience it all with. Yesterday we saw the artisan center, silk farm and floating villages on the lake. A very cool day!

And we are going to Laos on Saturday to check out another country while we’re here.
That means we’ll bump up our visit to the orphanage to Friday – hopefully we can find some Halloween masks to do with the kids. Our visits to the orphanage have been amazing. We play baseball, do sticker books or just play around with them. The orphanage is small and the kids seem very well cared for. They do hate to see us go though! It will be sad saying goodbye in less than two weeks!

Well, that’s probably more of an update than anyone would have wanted and it’s getting late here so off to bed! Can’t believe I’ll be home in less than a month now…

Miss everyone! Thanks for writing when you can! I love hearing from people.

Val

Monday, October 12, Siem Reap Cambodia

Greetings all!

First the good news…I didn’t get sick at all from eating the crushed ice last week! Amazing! And I’ve tried several smoothies since then with no problems at all.
The bad news is I did feel a little under the weather today for no reason that I could think of! (Well, could be the Red Sox implosion and lack of sleep made me ill…) But considering there are no viable bathroom options at either school, I decided to play it safe and miss today. So I’ll use the time to catch up the blog a bit.

Thursday last week was hilarious! At the second school (the one with several inches of water on the floor) it started to downpour. Hard rain pretty much means the end of school for the day as it makes so much noise on the tin roof that nobdody can hear! Plus the sheets of rain were getting everyone soaked since there are no walls. So Jen and I got out a little early and celebrated with fruit smoothies at a “fast food” place on the way home. While we were there, it started to rain even harder and everyone stopped under the overpass to try to avoid it. Well, Jen and I decided what the heck and I put the backpack cover on and off we went! We were soaked to the skin in seconds, laughing nonstop and yelling Sou sday to everyone we passed while raising our smoothies in passing! I’m sure the locals all thought they must have been spiked for these crazy American woman to be out in the rain laughing and shouting! It was awesome!

Even better was I had scheduled a massage for after work! They do them right down the hall from us. $5 for an hour. It’s not a Swedish style massage but more like a Thai massage where you wear loose fitting pajama type clothes and they basically contort your limbs and body into all kinds of crazy positions! Almost painful at times, but still great!

The next day was Friday and since I haven’t been gainfully employed for a couple of months, it was the first time in a while that Friday felt like the start of a weekend and something to celebrate. I tried to turn TGIF into TBIF (thank Budda it’s Friday, but not sure it works in translation!) Usually by the time we get home, dripping with sweat and often with rain, we are ready for a shower and bed. But Jen and I had planned to “hit the town” this Friday night. So we got ourselves decked out (relatively speaking!) and went to the touristy area.

Jen’s been here on her own for a month and as our hotel is somewhat far out of town, she’s mostly been staying in and hanging with the hotel staff (who adore her!) So I think she was ready for a little western contrast. And after checking out the restaurant options, we both had a definite craving for Mexican food! And after all the rice and Khmer, it tasted pretty darn good. And since there’s no 21 year old drinking age here, I was able to celebrate Jen’s first legal drink with her!



After dinner, we headed over to a bar for a bit that turned out to be mostly Cambodians. Jen is extremely popular with the local boys (both in our class and out and about!) I don’t know that the Cambodian girls were as happy since there were definitely some there that were clearly “working.” So we didn’t stay too long but it was a great night out and definitely needed after staying in most nights.




Saturday and Sunday were both temple viewing days and I must have taken about 500 pictures! I love the crazy trees the best. I’ll have to watch Tomb Raider again now that I’ve been to the place it was filmed. Angkor really is amazing and each temple has so many hidden charms, detailed carvings, etc. It was great to spend the two days climbing all over. One temple was still quite flooded and we had to pay a dollar to take motor bikes across to view it. Even though the flooding has improved and so far Jen and I haven’t had any more tuk-tuks get stuck and have to get out in lots of water to push! (That was my first day!)








Saturday night it was raining again and we weren’t really feeling like going out. So I suggested to Jen that we try to order a pizza delivery! And it actually worked! Of course, we’d ordered veggie with half mushrooms and got half pineapple and half ham, but a version of Hawaiian tasted good too. And we just hung out watching movies. Jen is delaying her first year of college to volunteer, so we had a little pseudo college dorm experience going with pizza and movies in Jen’s room. Wild Saturday nights here, I tell you!

But one of the best experiences I’ve had was on Sunday when we visited the orphanage. Of course, with the Sox down two games, I pulled out all the stops to try to bring them luck. I’d brought a bunch of Red Sox shirts plus a plastic bat and wiffle balls (or rather Kat brought them over with her when she met me! Thanks Kat!) Since I’d given them Sox cards last week, they at least recognized the Red Sox and when Jen and I showed up in our matching red shirts, they really liked them. So how awesome it was to be able to pull out the bag of shirts for everyone! I had just enough for all the kids and the two staff working there. They were all totally excited and put them right on. And even more so when I pulled out the bat and balls.




I’d brought copies of my old childhood baseball pictures and we took some official Cambodia Team Red Sox pics. I even taught them the “horns of hope” for good luck! Then we used rocks for bases and everyone joined in. Fortunately, the yard area wasn’t flooded anymore. They grasped the basics quite well! It was just a terrific afternoon.


Sadly, the Sox couldn’t respond with a win! I think my Cambodian kids team could have done better. The game started after 11:00 pm my time and I made it until after 2:00 am before falling asleep with the Sox comfortably up by three. Of course, we don’t need to talk about the ninth inning, but I certainly picked a good year to be on the other side of the world during play-off season.

Ok, time to work on school lesson plans for tomorrow!

Later in the evening....
Just finished watching the Amazing Race and they were in Cambodia! They unfortunately didn’t make it to Siem Reap, but still really cool to see while in the country. And I invited Ta, one of the ladies who work in our hotel, to come in and watch it with us. She got a kick out of it and the scenes of Tuk-Tuks, markets and monkey challenges. Guess we’ll try to watch it weekly now!

Val

Wednesday, Oct 7th, Siem Reap Cambodia

Sou suduhee! (Hello in Khmer)

Well, I’m writing this on Wednesday evening pretty much waiting to get sick later on. I violated one of my basic travel rules for underdeveloped countries and ate a whole cupful of crushed ice from a street food place. But what do you do when your students want to take you out for a “sweet” after class!? It was a very yummy iced treat, kind of like a snow cone with some jelly gumdrops in it. I asked about the ice and they said it was fine, but I’m skeptical. So keep your fingers crossed that I avoid a bout of “block island fever” later on.

I figured I’d better do an update while I can since the days have been so busy! I arrived Saturday night after four flights and a long travel day from Borneo. But I really have to say kudos to the folks at Bangkok Air! My flight from Kuala Lampur to Bangkok was almost two hours late and I figured there was almost no chance to make my connection leaving in less than 30 minutes with a whole airport to cross. I was mentally thinking about how to find a hotel in Bangkok and notify my program coordinator in Cambodia that I wouldn’t be on the flight in.

But when I came out of the jet way at a run, there was a sign with my name on it. I was plopped in one of those airport cars which zipped me across the airport. Then I was handed off about six times to people running with me down various corridors (in heels!), rushed through check in and security and taken to a private van with the engine running to zoom me to a distant runway where I was the last to board! The entire process took only 11 minutes! Six sigma could learn from Bangkok Air.
Of course, no chance for the luggage so that had to wait until the following morning.

Since I’d come in a day early, I wasn’t sure how busy Sunday would be, but it turned out to be packed full! I had my orientation with my coordinator, Meng, was taken to temple to be blessed by a monk (thank goodness fellow volunteer Jen told me the right way to sit in advance!), bought a bicycle (so much for all those skirts I bought to teach in!), visited the orphanage and did coloring and games, visited both schools where I’ll be teaching and had a welcome dinner where I got to try local loc lac and lemongrass soup. And you know – it’s pretty much like the Elephant Walk! Awesome – especially with a local Angkor beer!

I’ve definitely benefited a ton from having Jennifer Hicks also here as a volunteer. Jen has got to be one of the most impressive 18 year olds I’ve ever met! She’s doing a gap year before college and volunteering here for three months and then in Tanzania after Christmas. Jen got here a month ago and has learned the ropes, from figuring out the way the teaching goes (meaning they look at us and ask what we are going to teach that day!) to knowing the routes by bicycle and learning a really impressive amount of Khmer.

Having Jen around makes a huge difference, just to have someone to ask questions of or bounce ideas off of. Plus it’s just more fun!

The schools are both open air partial rooms with dirt floors and a single board to write on. Well, the second school actually has water for a floor right now as flooding from the rains has been really severe. So Jen and I have been teaching in six inches of water, or balancing on boards if we’re lucky. And as we bike through town, you can see all the houses and shacks filled with water up to knees or higher.
In the mornings, I’ve had Khmer lessons though I know I won’t come close to where Jen already is with the language! The mornings are spent preparing lessons for class and what we want to teach. Jen and I share a class at the first school, but at the second there are 2000 students so we’re spread as thin as possible to maximize the English speakers. I had thought there were existing lesson plans that we would just be incorporated into, but for the most part, we are the teachers and the local teachers may help translate. So I’m making it up as I go!

Of course, makes me realize how much I rely on spell-check as now I’m trying to write words up on the boards. And after years of business facilitation, I’m used to writing on whiteboards in all capital letters, which is confusing to the kids! So I’m relearning some of the basics. And also some of the basic grammar terms! Since when do I think of words in Past Simple tense! We’ve been doing body parts this week, which is fun and interactive.

We bike to the schools, which is great to get a bit of exercise and also see the land and people a bit better. Everyone is very friendly, waving to us and trying out their English. The streets can be a bit hazardous, both from the flooding as well as the Siem Reap traffic. Helmets and vehicle safety do not exist – yesterday I saw a man on a motor scooter with a small baby on the seat in front of him held by one hand while he drove the scooter with the other! And people carry everything on the back of bicycles and scooters: three or four people, massive piles of wood, three dead pigs at a time…etc.

The kids are great. Wide range of English so it’s challenging to balance. And especially at the second school, kids are all ages and in and out so you have to be flexible and creative. But they are thrilled to be able to work on their English as it can really open up job possibilities for them. We finish around 7:00 pm (though tonight, my Khmer teacher asked if I could start staying until 9:30! I told him that was a bit late to be biking home by myself in the dark! So we’ll see how it goes.

But overall, things are good. The volunteering is challenging but rewarding. The hotel is nice, though a bit far from the town center. We’re the only guests so they take excellent care of us and love to help us practice Khmer. It’s nice to have regular internet connection to stay in touch better! I’ll be visiting Angkor Wat this weekend, which I’m really looking forward to!

Hope all’s well in the states. And of course…go Red Sox!!!

Val