School Days - Our Kids

We will try to write tales about our time at school but until then we have posted some photos of some of our wonderful students.

Check out February

Now that March is wrapping up, we've added a couple more posts/pics to February. Enjoy!

Images of Cambodia

Tasty street-side dining


Outdoor haircuts


The latest styles


Ice delivery


Buying fresh mango (here eaten green with chili and salt)


Angkor Wat (the most famous of the Angkor temples) at sunrise


Our favorite Apsara dancer (on Bayon temple)


Typical gas station where motorbike drivers buy a liter or two (petrol in pop bottles)


Typical house near the school where we taught

School Days - Getting There is Half the Fun

At noon we get geared up for our ride to school. We've got our lesson plans, pens, whiteboard markers, and dictionary.

We're each wearing
-a cotton face mask to protect from the sun; dust; moto (scooters, a common mode of transport), car, and truck exhaust; and unpleasant odors
-a sun hat with dorky chin strap
-foreigner sunglasses
-gobs of sunscreen.

Thus outfitted, we mount our rickety one-speeds and navigate the rutted dead-end dirt road outside our guesthouse, stop to buy a hefty supply of water, and set forth on our 20-minute ride. Once we negotiate the center of town, we merge onto the road following the river. Now that the dry hot season is in full swing, the river (resembling a stagnant puddle) is not at its most picturesque but it's lined with coconut trees, other greenery and people fishing in the mud. The traffic is slow, which is a good thing. Food stands, moto repair stalls, and other small businesses crowd what would be the shoulder, if the road had one. We pass droves of uniformed school kids on bikes returning from their 2-hour lunch break, little bridges over the river to our left, and construction (?) projects that sometime take up half the road. We hear the toots of horns letting us know something faster than us is there and snippets of music playing (on Friday, a funeral dirge and today, a Cambodian cover of Hotel California). Eventually we pass under a white stone arch (presumably announcing the village) onto a quiet lane past typical Khmer stilt houses through the grounds of a Wat (Buddhist monastery) containing ancient Angkor stone ruins to the Krorsang Rolang Primary School.

Breakfast of Champions

Since we're in Siem Reap for awhile (three weeks in one place being awhile at this point), we have been investigating our many different dining options. Looking for a local (and cheap) breakfast spot, we headed to the Samaki market not far from our guesthouse. We wandered for a bit through the outside fruit stands (tables shielded from the sun by plastic sheeting) into the relative cool of the inside part of the market (think warehouse). Here there are aisles full of everything from flashy gold bling and used fans to pyramids of fruits and vegetables. Among the squirming buckets of fish and the pungent stacks of dried fish, we see a table with plates and bowls of prepared food items that we suspect of being sweet and tasty. First, we pause and stare at the customers to try to determine what they are purchasing and how much they are paying. Then we take the plunge ourselves hoping we aren't buying something filled with meat or durian (a tropical fruit that has the smell and taste of something sweet but very rotten). We score! We enjoyed a breakfast of glutinous rice balls (tastier than it might sound) with fresh shredded coconut, a flat banana leaf-wrapped packet filled with sticky rice and sweet squash, and a banana leaf-wrapped roll of glutinous rice with banana.

Afterwards we headed to the market's cafe stalls in search of coffee. As in Vietnam and Laos, coffee is typically served strong over ice with a dollop of sweetened condensed milk though we opted for the extremely strong hot black coffee. The cafe we patronized was flanked by two identical ones -- each included a television installed in a metal cage playing the exact same program, Wrestling Smackdown! Truly a breakfast of champions!

Schools for Children of Cambodia

We are in Siem Reap, Cambodia, gateway to the ancient Khmer temples of Angkor Wat.

We will be here until early April volunteering teaching English to children in a public school in a nearby village, Krorsang Rolerng. We are working through a British charity called Schools for the Children of Cambodia - check out their website (you can even sponsor a student!) at http://www.sccambodia.org/

We hope to post something about our wonderful students soon.

Phnom Penh's Central Market

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We are enjoying wandering the streets of this city. Today we visited Psar Thmei, this yellow Art Deco market. You can't really get a sense of the size from this photo but it is quite large and is said to have one the largest domes in the world. From the center, there are four wings radiating in each direction. The afternoon light through the windows was lovely.

Just as fascinating was our visit to the modern shopping center down the street for Pnomh Penh's wealthy. This tall silver multi-level mall looks like a western version from the outside, but once inside you see it is set up like other markets here with each floor split among rows of stalls selling almost identical items.

We'll share these English language gems from the mall's grocery store:

On a candy package: After taste without end. Unable dispute. Hot sell the good taste

On package of apple candy called Good: Melting in your mouth with endless aftertaste. Aroma and dainty without end. Full-bodied, milky and romantic sweet.

On package of Chinese Soup: Flavor: Drive Out Irrascibility Soup

Cambodia

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We crossed the border from Laos into Cambodia a few days ago and have been enjoying our first experiences with Khmer culture, language, and food. Kratie is a beautiful town sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, full of decaying colonial buildings and wonderful examples of Khmer architecture. (will post photos soon) This afternoon we arrived in the capital city of Phnom Phen and will see the sights here before continuing next week to Siem Riep.