In which I go on lots of adventures and am very happy and sad at the same time

Hello Everyone!

Today I want to tell you all about the bunches of adventures that I've had in the last month, starting from the most recent, and will also explain my long negligence from this blog.

First, last night was one of those emotion-packed evenings, filled with elated happiness mixed with sadness.  My dad left Cambodia after having visited for 10 days, all the way from America! (That's only 30 hours of flying.)  On his last day here, I told him to prepare 3 sentences for all the "How was Cambodia?!" questions that he was bound to receive upon his return, especially considering that he had never before left the country (excluding Canada).  (We Baers don't half-ass these things: My brother owns a golf course, my dad went almost 9000 miles for his first trip out of the country (again, Canada doesn't count), just mere examples of our awesomeness.)  Moving away from the parentheticals, his responses were as such:
1. It was great being with Emily.  (Awwwww)
2. Hot hot hot hot hot hot hot!!! (I guess that counts as a sentence.)  (It wasn't that hot, it's rainy season, so this is the colder half of the year.  Granted, it was pushing 90's everyday, with nearly 100% humidity, but I was wearing a sweatshirt and a scarf for half of our trip, because that's cold for Cambodia.)
3. The traffic is insane.  The way it runs so smoothly, I should have seen 20 accidents by now, but I haven't seen a single one!  Everybody is in everybody else's lanes, and there are no stop signs, and people are going both ways around roundabouts, it's crazy.  (This reminded me of my first reactions to traffic in Cambodia, and it made me chuckle, because after a year, I barely notice it anymore.)

I said we were moving away from parentheticals, but I fooled you, didn't I?

My dad arrived in Siem Reap at 10:30 at night on August 27th, with a giant duffel bag, and a tiny backpack.  We stayed in a wonderful hotel in Siem Reap, called Gloria Angkor, that was not too expensive, but also very fancy.  My favorite part was the bath tub.  I can't remember the last time I had taken a bath.  After getting squeaky clean, and sort of getting a good night's rest, (except not, thanks to jet lag) we toured the city of Siem Reap on our first day, visited tons of markets, all my favorite restaurants, a modern pagoda, some malls, and then more markets.  The next 3 days were all spent touring Angkor Wat.  I asked my dad which temple was his favorite, and he picked Angkor Wat itself, the most famous of the temples, because of its size and grandeur.  It is quite amazing.

We feasted!

And we saw a Cambodian family doing the Ice Bucket Challenge from my hotel window.

On the fifth day, we visited my site!  We got there around lunch time, so right away was eating rice time.  Then it was visiting time.  We visited my school, some houses, friends of mine, the local Wat, and finally stumbled back home in the rain, on my muddy road for more eating rice time.  We played several rounds of Uno with ChayNa and Srey Neeat, until everyone got tired of me winning.  Oops.

That night, we spent the night at my host family's house.  I was completely covered by blankets, while my dad was sweating in his sleep.  The next morning we rode the bus on to Battambang!

Two nights in Battambang, most of which were spent with much needed relaxing.  Lots of good feasting, as is wont whenever one goes to Battambang.  Roich howey, more bus rides, (in which I introduced my dad to the wonders of podcasts!) and back to Siem Reap we went!

Besides the traffic, my dad was also very impressed by the floating villages.

These villages are houses that float on the Tonle Sap lake, the biggest lake in Southeast Asia, all year round!  They make their living with selling fish and crocodiles, and they also have the benefit of no property taxes!  There are 3 major villages: the Vietnamese village, the Muslim village, and the regular old Khmer Village.  We visited the Khmer village, and then the Vietnamese village's school, where I was very surprised to hear everyone speaking, and learning in Vietnamese.  There were no secondary or high schools in the villages, only primary.

The villages, amazingly, flow with the ebb of the lake.  During the rainy season, which is nowadays, the lake is swellingly full, so the villages are near the mainland.  But, during the dry season, which starts in about December, the lake dries up like a sponge, causing the villages to move several kilometers away from the mainland.  This drastic change in the lake is also why the Tonle Sap river, which connects the lake to the Gulf of Thailand, is one of the only rivers in the world to change directions every year.

At last, after one more day of relaxing and ice cream eating, I had to send my dad off to the airport at 11pm last night, with his giant duffel bag and tiny backpack.  Google tells me that right now he is on his way to Atlanta, Georgia, flying very close to the North Pole, on a 15 hour flight from Korea.  Hopefully he finds his way back home again.  Athena and Scat miss him.

Just before this big adventure, I had just recently returned from another adventure, one equally filled with many emotions, which was a combination of vacationing with Emma, and sending off my dear site-mate, Meghan, back to America after 2 whole years.  Meghan left on August 9th from Phnom Penh, and it was heart-wrenching to see her go, but she is going back to a wonderful life in America.  Right now, she is traveling in Nepal and Italy, before she returns to her parents' house in New Jersey for about 5 days, and then continues on to Maine, where she will have a new job!  My first year of my service was greatly defined by Meghan, and I couldn't have asked for a better site-mate, or a better friend.  She brought out my good qualities, and all my sassiness, too.

Everyone in my village misses her dearly, and asks me about her all the time.  She really made a huge impact on the village.

After that sad departure, Emma and I went south, to the coast!  We visited Kampot, first, which is a beautiful little city on the river.  It's very quiet, and has a nice, cool breeze, delicious food, and a giant durian statue.

After Kampot, was Kep!

We only actually spent a few hours in Kep, because where we really wanted to go was a small, tropical island off the coast of Kep called Rabbit Island!

We spent 2 nights on this amazing tropical island.  The two of us stayed in a small, one room shack on the beach.

It's the classic tropical island.  Ocean, palm trees, hammocks, the whole shebang.  

The island had about a 6 kilometer circumference, and it took us a little over 2 hours to walk around the whole thing.  

Besides that, we spent a lot of time relaxing in hammocks, and reading.  There was no internet or electricity in our shacks, so I read a whole book in 2 days!

We had a spectacular time on Rabbit Island, and I hope that someday I will have the chance to return.

What's next?  On Wednesday, I head back into Phnom Penh to meet the newest volunteers, the K8s!!!  They will swear-in as official volunteers on Friday, and Saturday they will all be dropped off at their prospective sites, to start their 2 year journey that is Peace Corps Cambodia. 

In which tharrrrrrrr be more maps

My goal was to finish not just one map, but TWO before Meghan deserted me forever, and WE DID IT!!!

This map is of Southeast Asia, because everybody's immediate reaction upon seeing Cambodia on the world map was "It's so tiny!!!"  So, we blew it up a bit.  By this point, we were all old hats at map-making, so it took about four work days to finish the whole thing.  They did the grid and drew the whole thing in one day, painted the countries on the second day, painted another coat on day three, and for the last day they labelled and sprayed on some finish.  This time we labelled in Khmer and English, because why not?

In other news, Srey Neeat is back yayyyyyyyyyyyyy!!! She came home a couple days ago, and just walked into my room all nonchalant like she wasn't in a hospital for the past week or anything.  She's got to take some medicine every day for a long time, but other than that she's as spry as ever.  

And here is Chay Na in his shnazzy PJs.  

Meghan is 'jet deu winh howey' (soon to be abandon us forever)  and she has been giving me a lot of her stuff, in waves.  She has also started to give some gifts to her host family, seen here.

Later this week I am headed to Phnom Penh with Meghan and all of her stuff.  I will talk more about how Meghan is forsaking me in a later post.

In which I update you on everything

     The theme today is going to be another "What has Emily been doing for the last month or so?"

So, here goes.

In June, one of the volunteers, Joel, held a health fair at the secondary school at his site.  Meghan and I did a class together about brushing your teeth.  There were five, twenty minute classes, each with about 20-30 students.  I got to demonstrate brushing my teeth five times that day.  My teeth have never felt cleaner!

Everyone's got a bike now! Some are fancier than mine...

I visited the Upper Market in Siem Reap for the first time a few weeks ago.  It's a huge, Cambodian-style, open-air market that is on the international road, making it very busy.  I spotted some Khmer guys playing chess.

Then, the 4th of July happened!! For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to sign up to sing at the US Embassy with some other volunteers?!?  Anyway, despite my temporary lax in judgement, it was still a pretty fun weekend.  It rained just a little bit...

There was live music and delicious food, we sang some national anthems, I found a John Deere, and the Obamas, and the American Ambassador got dunked!

Ploughing Season has begun!! Rice is being planted, fields are being ploughed, and farmers are getting busy!

I bought a new book shelf!!! I have been wanting one for awhile, but they don't sell them in my village, and all of my books were in messy piles all over my bed.  But, one day when I was walking along the road, a truck full of these book shelves pulled over to get some gas.  I asked them if I could buy one, not expecting them to answer positively, but lo' and behold, they gave me one for $5!  Then, in exchange for helping me haul all of my books from my bed to the shelf, I helped my host brother with his English homework.

Since vacation has finally begun, I have been struggling to keep myself occupied lately.  Some days I study, some days I visit friends and family, some days I lay on a hammock all day reading a book, and some days I tag along with Meghan to visit some of her friends!  This particular day, we visited the family of one of my students, where we learned how to cut up pig food, among other things.

 

I had some visitors in my room.  This little one is my host cousin, Pitsey, the youngest daughter of my CoTeacher, who is married to my host mom's little sister.  Complex family systems.  Here, I believe she is trying to do "Sty", which is short for 'style'.

Kitties love me, as usual.  The one on the right is mine.  She's getting so big!!

Last week, my little host sister, Srey Neeat, fell in the bathroom.  It must have been a really hard fall, because she was bleeding a lot, inside and out.  She stopped bleeding after a few hours, but then the next day she started bleeding again when she peed, so they took her to the hospital.  I went to visit her for a couple days.  My host mom and grandma have been there with her the whole time.  They're not brave enough to ask the doctors what is going on, but they have taken a few X-Rays of her stomach, and she is on an IV and a soft diet right now.  The bleeding has stopped, but her stomach still hurts a little.  Unsure what is going on, but she seems to improve a little bit every day.  Hopefully soon she can come home!!

Home

In which we paint the world

     I would have to say that, secondary project-wise, this project is the biggest that I have yet done in Peace Corps.  I am very proud of it, because Meghan, many of our students, and I put a lot of hard work into this project, and because it turned out to be more spectacular than I could have imagined.  It began with a blank wall, a lot of math, hardware store frequenting, and coloring.  After that was a lot of measuring, and patience.  Trying to make a perfect rectangle of about 13 by 7 feet, and then dividing that into 52 by 28 squares to make the grid.  We used a chalk line to snap the lines for the grid.  Then, the drawing began.  First, we had a session in the classroom, where we got everybody used to what it's like to draw in a grid.  We made copies of sections of the world with a grid, for reference, and had the students practice a little on paper.  Then, once we were ready, we started on the wall.  My artistic abilities are certainly lacking, but with the grid, it wasn't as hard as you might think it would be to draw the world.  With that, our students are much better artists than I am, so although I helped a bit, I let them (and Meghan) do a lot of the drawing.  Those students who felt like I did, would then trace over the pencil drawings with permanent marker.

     That went on for a couple months, meticulously drawing each country every Monday through Wednesday afternoon.  With the sun blazing on our backs, everyone always remembered to bring their hats.  It took a long time, and we had to redo a couple of areas, including most of Africa, but that didn't deter us!

     Then came the painting!  We used nine different colors, and mixed them ourselves.  Before painting, some of the students helped me to color the paper copies of the map, so that it would be easier to tell which countries were what color.  Painting went very smoothly, and rather quickly, too; maybe only a couple weeks to paint all of the countries.  The islands were the worst, but they got the hang of it pretty quickly, using the tip of the paintbrush to paint each individual island.  After that were just a few retouches, some research on my part, figuring out what the newest countries were that weren't on our map, which was from 1994.  There have been about a dozen new countries since then, and thanks to Jason and Molly, who sent me a globe for my birthday, I was able to find all of them!  We also wanted to label all of the countries.  Usually, most volunteers label in English, but both Meghan and I decided that we would rather have it so that everybody could read the map, even those who didn't know English.  We thought it was more important for them to understand it, than to learn English from it.  We also figured that we will have time to teach those who want to learn about English geography later.  Thus, we had to find all of the names of the countries in Khmer.  Well, it turns out that there has never been a map with the labels in Khmer made before, so we didn't have just one map to reference.  Usually the maps that you find at schools are labeled in Vietnamese or English.  We had to ask various sources, Peace Corps staff, my tutor, and various dictionaries, in order to find the names of nearly 300 countries.  It was a process, but I think this map could possibly be the first ever that is labeled in Khmer, which is super exciting!  So, we (and by we, I mean our students, because although Meghan and I can write a little Khmer, it's nothing like a native speaker) labeled all the countries with permanent marker, and then stuck on a compass, a scale, some flags, and then just spray painted some finish at the end, and voila!  Roich howey! (That means "all done" in Khmer)

     Just like in my last post, I wanted to give you lots of pictures, and couldn't choose just a few, so I made another web album, called World Map Project.  You can click here, or on your right under the "Various Web Albums" tab.  Only 85 photos this time, and don't forget to check out the captions!

In which I have my first visitor

     May was quite the hectic month.  The highlights of which were when my dear friend Punch visited me from Thailand.  She had never been to Cambodia, even though it is only an 8 hour bus ride from Bangkok, so we crammed all that we possibly could into two full weeks of adventuring.  We visited Siem Reap, Angkor Wat, my lovely little village, and Battambang.  I took over one thousand pictures while Punch was here, so I couldn't possibly pick only a handful to post on here.  Instead, I created a web album on Google Plus, and manage to cut it down to only 346 pictures.  The link is on the bottom of this blog post.

     The first several days were spent in Siem Reap, visiting some modern pagodas first, and then getting the 3-day pass to Angkor Wat.  We saw nearly all the temples, except for only a few of the really tiny ones that we just didn't possibly have time to fit in.  After that was a stretch spent at my site, which Punch enjoyed very much.  She was quite enchanted by my family, especially my little host brother and sister.  (They are quite enchanting, though sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's not.)  She also went to school with me, and many of my students who have been learning Thai got the chance to practice their Thai with her.  From there we visited Battambang for a couple days. There we rode the Bamboo train, climbed a few mountains, saw lots of bats, a neat fishing village, and some more pretty pagodas.  Then, to end it all, we headed back to Siem Reap and saw the circus.  The circus is run by an NGO, (non-government organization) that takes children from orphanages and other unfortunate circumstances, and helps them out by giving them a place to live, sending them to school, and teaching them how to be awesome circus performers.

     I really liked to take pictures of the following:  trees, doorways, bats, clouds, and stairs.  I am not your average tourist.  Otherwise, I hope that you enjoy this album, and I look forward to showing you even more of the wonders of Cambodia in the next coming year.


My Web Album   <-- Click on it!

PS.  Don't forget to look at the captions.

In which I show you the wonders of the open market

Happy Labor Day!

In honor of this international Labor Day, I would like to share with you what an open market in Cambodia is like, with pictures from none other than my own village!  (Which shall remain unnamed due to legal purposes.)

The market in my village is generally open from about 6:30am-9:30am, weather pending.  Everything is freshly cut/plucked/picked/butchered, and at least one member from every family usually makes a market stop once every morning, making it a very bustling place.

First, there is the entrance, a long, brick-walled alleyway that leads to the back of the market.

And you usually run into someone familiar.

Here we see the parking lot, not free of charge.  Many people walk to the market, and some even attempt to drive the bikes or moto's through the market.  There must not be any rules against that...

First stop for us upon entering the market, is breakfast.  

This, my friends, is Meghan's new enriched baw-baw. (rice porridge) Much healthier than normal baw-baw, and so much tastier, too!  It's got rice, egg, squash, morning glory, and just a little bit of meat mixed in there.  Meghan got a grant in order to give 3 different baw-baw sellers the start-up costs for selling the enriched stuff, and with enough advertising, hopefully these sellers will make a big profit, and everybody will be eating this nutritious concoction.  

After this scrumptious meal, it's time to explore.  Next stop is a line of sellers that sell... various goods.

It's an everything store!

Afterwards we have some fruit and vegetables.

 So many watermelons.

Remember, girls and boys, to always wash your veggies before consumption.  You never know where they've been!

Next up: Clothes!

 Clothes Clothes Clothes

 For the kiddies!

Lots of clothes. A little difficult to find any in my size, though.  Guess I'm curvier than the average Cambodian.  

Then there's the fish. Lots of fish.

These two are sister-in-laws, Voleak's mother and aunt.  They were pretty embarrassed to have me taking their picture, but I got it, muahaha.  

It's that time of year again, you guessed it, mango season!

So many mangoes, but they're sooo delicious.  I wish I could send them to you all.

Speaking of delicious, here's my waffle lady.

Thirteen cent waffles, you can't go wrong.

This, this is durian fruit.  Looks funny, smells funny, and tastes terrible.  But, Khmer people love it.  

Yuck.

Walking out towards the front entrance, you'll see the jewelry and electronics sellers.  Here you can buy your cellphone cards, to top-up your balance.

Finally, we walk back to Meghan's house, where I park my bike.

To go along with the market theme, I reviewed fruits and vegetables with my 10th graders last week.

In other news, we finally finished the world map project!!! Pictures to come soon. Promise.