Sousdey Cambodia!!

It's been a week since I posted but it feels like I can hardly keep up with all the things that I want to write about!


After a teary goodbye last Sunday to my friends/co-workers in Vietnam - we hopped a 45 minute flight from Saigon to Phnom Penh.  The nice thing about this job is that we have built in friends everywhere we go, so we had a great send-off lunch with our friends from the Vietnam team and got to meet our new Cambodian friends soon after we arrived!  (To all my new friends who might be reading this blog, I apologize if it seems presumptuous to be publicizing our new days/weeks-old friendship without discussing it with you first.  I went ahead and assumed that we had an unspoken friendship agreement.)


I had been sort of uncertain about what Cambodia would be like and if I could possibly love it as much as I loved Vietnam, so I was a little anxious about what was was ahead.  And wouldn't you know it, as soon as I arrived, out of the shadows of uncertainty like a beacon in the night, there it was......Dairy Queen.  Blizzards for $1.65!!  Me + Cambodia = meant to be.


Things are very squiggly here.  Most of the signs are written in Khmer (pronounced "kem-eye") but surprisingly many signs and menus have English written on them as well - so that is helpful.  If we veer off the beaten path to local places with our Cambodian friends, then nothing is in English so we have to rely on them to get us around and order dinner, etc.  Cambodia uses US dollars as currency, mixed in with some riels which have very little value (4000 riels = 1 USD).  Sadly, dollars and riels are not hilarious.  I miss the dong.


In talking with some of our new friends/co-workers, I've learned that Cambodians are very sensitive, emotional, and polite people.  They will go to dinner and always eat someone's cooking even if they hate it just to make sure that the person cooking doesn't feel bad (but then they'll go home and eat a second dinner).  Cambodians also don't like to do things alone - travel alone, go shopping alone, even drink alone.  Our friend Vuthy told me this the night before I was heading off to travel for a few days alone and had bought myself a bottle of wine to drink alone.  I'm not ashamed.  It was my vacation, people!


Anywhooo.....I got my first lesson in the "not drinking alone" rule when Ryan and I went out to dinner with Vuthy and Hoeurng (both colleagues).  Anytime you want to drink, you must do the Cambodian "cheers" every time as a group - for every sip of your drink!  The first time you say "Chul Muey!" and drink.  Every time you want to drink after that, you raise your glass and make a noise saying "ehhhhhh" instead of saying "chul muey" and everyone has to raise their glasses too and say "ehhhhhh" with you.  Though this is a nice, friendly way to drink, it did create a bit of a problem for me.  I kept accidentally drinking and not raising my glass to wait for the group to drink with me every time, and it got me in trouble.  They even moved my beer away from me to teach me to pay attention to my own drinking.  I don't think I was drinking extra fast or anything - though I was told later that women in Cambodia don't drink nearly as much or even at all, as compared to Cambodian men - but having to drink as a group made me feel responsible for setting the drinking pace and I prefer not to have that responsibility.  I like to drink at my own leisure without paying attention to the fact that I'm drinking.  It's like a reflex - the beer is there, it's by my hand, it goes down easy.....how can I be expected to account for (and call attention to) every sip?!  Don't get me wrong though, I did really appreciate the friendly gesture and opportunity to make that weird "ehhhhh" noise every few minutes....so I'm learning to get on board with this drinking philosophy.

Me and Vuthy on his moto

Also on the beer front (I promise this post doesn't only revolve around beer),  at most cambodian restaurants and bars there are these "beer girls" who come rushing over to you as you walk in to offer you different kinds of beer.  It seems that each restaurant/bar has several beer distributors and these bar girls walk around trying to sell their specific beer because they make commissions from it.  I've never been approached so aggressively by 5 women to drink a beer (well, maybe in college...I was in a sorority, after all.  Sorry, sisters).

This past week we have technically not been working and had some time off before we start up work on the Cambodian camp on Monday (tomorrow).  I decided to travel by myself to a small seaside town of Kep and stay in a garden/oceanview bungalow (I've really been testing out the bungalow scene this summer).  The thing I've noticed so far about traveling here, is that when you get a bus ticket - you sort of know what you're signing up for, and you hope the bus will show up when it is supposed to and that it'll take you where you want to go....but you have to be prepared to be flexible....they'll say it'll take 3 hours and it might really take 6.  Or they'll just pull over for an hour to hang out at a "rest stop" where you get bombarded by people looking to sell things to tourists.  I'm adjusting my flexibility level on many fronts here.....last-minute timing changes, electricity/water outages, sleeping with lizards/bats/beetles in my room (I may be done with the bungalow scene for awhile- there are no animal-free guarantees)....it all makes sitting in a clean, air-conditioned hotel room that much nicer.  And once we move over to the camp at the orphanage where we'll be staying - I'll REALLY be grateful for this.

My tuk tuk driver Lake

My time in Kep was really great - I had lots of time to explore and check out the Cambodian countryside.  There are so many rice paddies and people working in the fields - Cambodians work so hard!  I took my first tuk tuk ride, which is the general method of transportation in the cities and countryside.  Motos (motorbikes) and taxis are an option too - but taxis are much harder to find.  Westerners must really stand out here, because it seems that people always know when we're coming.  Everywhere I went in the tuk tuk or just walking around, passing by houses and stores, children would come running out yelling "Hello!  Hello!" - it's adorable.


I went to this old cave temple that is a few thousand years old in the mountains, and when I got there about 15 children came running up to me wanting to be my "tour guide."  I had read about the local kids giving tours there in my Lonely Planet book, but I wasn't prepared for them all coming up and reaching out to me saying "pick me!  pick me!"  I mean, how could I pick only one out of the group of adorable faces?  I picked two (for $1 each).  They gave me a fabulous tour (and made sure I stayed on the path because we were walking through old mine fields) and they even took me into the depths of the cave - in flip flops!  I wasn't sure I trusted them to get me out safely, but they scurried into these dark cave holes like monkeys so I figured if they could do it, so could I.  It worked out and we went deep into the caves on one side and came out alive on the other about 15 minutes later.  I was relieved.

My fantastic guides, Lin and Roary

And as cute as the children were, they are smart and know exactly what they're doing when it comes to tourists.  They were wheeling and dealing to get me to give them my flashlight and go buy a new one and pay all 15 of the children there.....I politely said, "aww...you're cute, but no."

The children- tugging on the American
girl's heartstrings with their cuteness

I also spent some time in the area exploring the riverfront town of Kampot where I got a "seeing hands" massage by a blind person.  There is a lot of that here - many blind people go to school to train to be masseuses and make a decent living in very reputable massage places like this.  I met some travelers as well along the way, and I love hearing their stories of how they ended up here.  I've met so many people that quit their high-paying jobs in finance, etc. to travel the world or come to Cambodia to work with NGO's here...it's pretty inspiring and reminds me why you have to seize the day and take care of yourself first and foremost.  It seems much healthier to have a low-paying job that you love or one that allows you to live your life the way you want rather than being stuck in a job that you hate and makes you miserable b/c you're beholding to that higher paycheck.  Luckily for me, I've maintained my lifestyle on a minimal salary all these years, so a life of luxury is one I've never had to "give up."  (although if anyone reading this has a high-paying job for me in California in October, I may be willing to partially sell out in order to afford a car and a place by the beach.  Great, thanks!)

I am learning much about Cambodian history too, especially during the years of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970's.  What occurred here is one of the most tragic, awful mass genocides I think the world has ever known.  I'm still learning, but the basic backstory is that the Khmer Rouge was a Communist guerilla group of Khmers (Cambodians) trained by the North Vietnamese to fight with them in the Vietnam War from the Cambodian side.  They basically took advantage of the corruption in their own government and the timing of the Vietnam War and resources they'd been given to take over their own country of Cambodia by "wiping the slate clean and starting fresh." That meaning that they wanted to wipe out the traditional family unit, create a national "famliy" unit where no one was emotionally connected to their actual families, and murder anyone who was educated or above the working-class.  They killed anyone from the cities or farms with any inkling of an education, people working in the arts, celebrities, people who wore glasses, those who loved their families - basically, no one was excluded.  It is insane that this was just barely over 30 years ago and the damage/destruction is still so evident in the landscape to this day.  For example - this beautiful old french colonial house across from the ocean (among many others) was burned to the ground and has been left in ruins since the Khmer Rouge period.  There are many buildings like this.

There are still many homeless people and beggars on the streets that have nothing, and in this case we've been told that we don't want to encourage them to beg by giving them money....but we should not treat them like pariahs (not that I ever would...but some people are terrible to beggars).  They've been through so much and literally have nothing, so we should be aware to be gentler with them even if their begging starts to wear on us because it happens so often.  It is hard to see the small children begging, they don't necessarily know better....but for me I think it is most difficult to see the elderly people begging, knowing what they've endured in their lifetime.  On the flip side of this, though, there are so many NGO's here in Cambodia trying to make a difference and offer the Cambodian people opportunities here to take control of their lives.

Me, Ella (who lives at the Village
where I'll be staying), and Antonia

So with all of these new adventures and cultural immersion experiences I've been having, I happily went out in Phnom Penh last night with some new friends that I'll be working with in the next 2 months.  We found an irish pub and I had a guinness and steak pie.  It was heaven!  I am going to soak up this next week while we're at a hotel and working at the office in the city to enjoy the access I have to lots of different kinds of food, shops, air-conditioning, electricity, internet, and running water.  All this will change when camp starts next week and I'll be spending my 6 weeks here at the Village.


Goodnight!
APT


p.s. Sousdey means "hello" - I will work on updating/sharing my vocab list once I start getting the children to teach me Khmer.