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