Oh My...

... would you believe me if I say I SWEAR that I have been meaning to do this forever?  I have.  The other day I spent nearly two full hours writing a blog entry.  The entire thing is about Cambodia.  Or it is until I read my last blog entry that I made, that was about Cambodia, so I stopped writing.  I am going to include this incomplete repeat of information below so that you know I'm for real.  Sometime this week I am going to do a complete entry on my two week adventure in Vietnam.  I also owe you the week the boy was here as well as the week I went to detox on an island.  Coming ASAP.
                          Work has begun again, so I am back to normal life and a normal schedule and teaching adorable little Thai kids some English.  During my second class at Super English (M-F 5:30-6:30) I have little kids, ages 4-6.  On Monday and Tuesday of this week one of them (but not the same both days) shit his pants in class.  For real.  On Monday it was this adorable little one named Java (pronounced Jawa) who didn't even blink after said event.  He went on as if everything were normal while the 4 girls in class gagged and gave me pleading looks for the last 20 minutes of class.  He didn't want to go to the toilet and even volunteered to come up to the board, visible load in pants and all.  This was terrible, because it was obvious and very very stinky.  Yesterday, it was not as apparent.  Burn asked to go to the toilet, and after his second time asking I said yes.  He was in there, no lie, for 15 full minutes.  I figure, the kid's four years old.  He probably took off all his clothes to poop and then had to navigate the butt hose himself.  He came back in the room and continued on as if nothing were the matter.  After class ended and all of the students were sent to go home, I was sitting at my desk in the Teacher Office.  Burn's older brother Pleum came to the door and said "Teacher Jessica," then pointed to the band of his underwear and said, "Burn, no."  I told him to go look in the toilet.  Sure enough within 5 minutes the cleaning lady was up here with a bucket, a sponge, and a pair of gloves.  I didn't have the stomach or the heart to examine the scene.  I just felt lucky that they had remained in the bathroom.  Brian had Burn for summer camp and he did the same thing, but was throwing his soiled underwear at the other kids, who were running away screaming.  So, win on that one I guess.  I am hoping that we don't go 3 for 3 today.  Amazing enough, it's still waaaay less stressful to have a kid shit himself in class than it is to have a teenager curse you out.  So, Thai students still winning.
                                          That lovely story being told, I have to go and prepare for today's classes.  As I said above, I will include what I did write about Cambodia below.  And I will try to do Vietnam ASAP.  I'm sorry!!!!
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So I have been REALLY bad at this.  I know that.  I am really sorry.  There was just so much travelling and so little internet access, that I never got the chance.  And as time went by and the experiences piled up it became more and more overwhelming to think about updating the blog.  A new school year has begun, however, so now my life is back to normal.  Now that the busy summer vacation has ended I am attempting to make up for what was lost, and then to continue on a regular schedule of updates.  I am going to start with Cambodia… as with the last blog entry, I am so so sorry for how long this is!  It’s kind of ridiculous; I know that.  But I just really want to tell you about Cambodia.

CAMBODIA – A really late recount 2 months later…

            I must start this entry with a short story about how small the world is and how crazy life is.  When I was getting my TESOL certification in San Francisco during the summer of 2009, I met a friend named Christine from Long Island.  Christine moved to Thailand shortly after we completed the course.  She lives in a town about 2 or 3 hours North of Bangkok, so since I have been in Thailand I have been talking with her here and there trying to figure out a time when we could visit with one another.  Just before my trip to Cambodia, when Anneliese, Liz and I were in Bangkok, I was meant to see Christine but it just didn’t work out.  I had no idea of her summer vacation plans.

                        I was not meant to go to Cambodia at all.  I was meant to go to an island called Koh Phangan to do a 10 day detox.  Because of the severe flooding in the South of Thailand, I was unable to get to said island, and unable to get back to Surat Thani.  I literally decided the day before leaving that I would go to Cambodia with Anneliese.  So pretty much no one but Liz, Anneliese, Joe, and my parents knew that was the plan.  So anyway, that next day we go to the airport and we’re waiting in the international terminal for our flight to leave.  I’m sitting at this bomb little bistro eating a delicious Caprese sandwich when I look up and walking into the café is Christine.  It took a minute to register, then I was like “CHRISTINE?!?!?!”  And alas, it was her.  It was amazing.  We were on the same flight to Phnom Penh.  The same freaking flight.  So I got to meet her boyfriend and hang out with her a bit in Cambodia.  I met her in San Francisco, we both live in Thailand, but we finally got to hang out in Cambodia.  Life is crazy.

● Sunday, April 3^rd: flew Air Asia from Bangkok to Phnom Penh.  Getting off of the plane was my first shock.  You hand $25 (US dollars) and your passport to a guy behind a counter.  As does everyone else who just got off of the plane.  As they finish placing visa stickers they just hold up the passports and when you see yours you go up and get it.  Anneliese had arranged for the hostel we were staying at to send a tuk tuk to the airport to pick us up.  Phnom Penh is the wild west; driving from the airport to the hostel was totally insane.  I couldn’t believe it.  By the time we got there we had been traveling all day, so we just kind of hung out at the hostel and went out for dinner at a hotel nearby.  I was pretty excited because I got to eat a Greek salad, which was amazing.  There was a house band playing; a couple from the Philippines who spoke English and took requests.  The lady was totally a sassy diva.  We were almost the only people in the restaurant, so they gave us free dessert; some weird pumpkin-egg thing which looked and sounded totally weird and possibly gross but was actually really good.  Our hostel had some good TV channels, but no windows at all.  The cave.

● Monday, April 4^th:  We started with the serious stuff straight away.  First, we went to the Killing Fields; one of the places in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge murdered thousands of Cambodian people and threw their bodies into mass graves.  It’s about 15 km outside of the city, and the grounds themselves are eerily pleasant.  There were lots of trees and plenty of grass; truly ‘fields’.  The very first thing we saw was the small building with the multi-tiered glass case of bones.  All of the bones were found in the field, but did not include every excavated body.  Which kind of baffled me, as there seemed to be an endless amount of them.  They’re all organized by sex and age, and bone type.  There’s little labels that might read something like “the femurs of 50-67 year old males”.  Probably the most infamous and disturbing part was all of the skulls.  So many skulls.  And at an American museum that stuff would be in a sealed glass case, roped off with a guard posted up next to it.  But not here.  You could literally put your hand into the glass case and touch the bones and the skulls if you wanted, which I would never imagine to do but a Cambodian guy next to Anneliese and I seemed to find great entertainment in doing.  He had his cell phone’s video camera running and was poking the skulls and recording them rock back and forth while saying God knows what in Khmer.

                         After that disturbing display we went on to the little museum / informational part of it.  It was really sad and interesting.  It had all of these really crazy paintings of what happened at the killing fields, which at first I just found a bit morbid and strange.  But then I found out they are by this really famous man (I feel terrible for not remembering his name, but he’s written a book about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge) who was an artist but was kept alive by Pol Pot in order to paint renditions of the events and accomplishments of the Khmer Rouge.  There was one painting depicting how on one of the very large, beautiful trees outside the soldiers used to kill babies and small children by slamming their bodies against it.  It was horrible.  It was even worse to see the tree, and to find it looking normal and pretty, like any other tree.  We then walked outside and saw the fields themselves.  There’s all types of large ditches, which by now are naturally filled in a bit with grass, that were the mass graves that were excavated at the site. 

                        The whole experience of being at the killing fields was just kind of unreal.  It didn’t really sink in at all at the time.  I don’t think I wanted to let it sink in.  It was like I imagine it might be like if you were to visit Auschwitz or someplace like that.  You know what happened, you see the proof, but your brain still doesn’t want to totally believe it.  After that we decided to continue on the tour of misery and went to the S-21 Museum.   This is the place that used to be a school but was turned into a prison for holding, imprisoning, torturing, and killing various Cambodians and enemies of the Khmer Rouge.  It was odd to see, because it is in the exact architectural style of the Thai school where I work.  It really looked like a school, until you went into any of the many classrooms that had been converted into prison cells.  A lot of information and photographs there, all as serious and unbelievable as at the Killing Fields.  So sad.

                        After this nearly full day tour of the destruction brought on by Pol Pot and his ‘clique’, we went to the Russian Market for lunch and to check it out.  It doesn’t have anything Russian there; it’s just called that because I guess there were a lot of Russian tourists there in the late 80s and 90s so it took on that name.  It’s all right – kind of like all of the covered / indoor day markets that I have seen in Thailand and Vietnam—a lot of stuff, a lot of crap, a lot of people trying to sell you crap.  After that we went back to the hotel and decompressed for a little while.  Then we went to this rooftop restaurant for dinner, which had a legit pizza oven and views of the river.  From up there one could almost say that Phnom Penh was pretty.  Phnom Penh, by the way, might be the least attractive city I have ever been to.  Unless you’re intent on seeing the Killing Fields and the S-21 Museum, you could skip it all together.  After we ate dinner we found a frozen yogurt place… like Phileo!  I was in heaven.  And that was Monday.

● Tuesday, April 5^th:   In the morning we walked to the Royal Palace.  I think I have been too spoiled by the Grand Palace in Bangkok, because I was just kind of like meh about it.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was nice, but it doesn’t have anything on the Grand Palace.  That night we saw a movie about Pol Pot and then ate dinner.  There’s a really long story about an asshole German guy sitting at the table next to us that I’m just going to leave out, because it’ll just make me angry and probably bore you.  Instead, let me take a minute to describe the level of harassment in Phnom Penh.  First of all, tuk tuk drivers are incessant to the point of being ridiculous and making me livid.  They follow you and ask you about 500 damn times if you want a tuk tuk.  They make the Killing Fields and S-21 sound like Disney World and promise cheap prices.  They list off everywhere they could possibly bring you.  It’s kind of amazing.  Like, maybe if you follow me and don’t stop I’ll suddenly want to go somewhere? 

                 They start training the kids young too.  There’s tons of street children everywhere, selling anything from bootleg books to bootleg DVDs to bracelets or water.  They will harass you just as strong as the tuk tuk drivers.  They are, of course, harder to ignore because they are small, adorable, poor children with no shoes on.  It’s terrible.  Even if you buy something off of one of them, there’s 50 more where that kid came from and they want a dollar too.  Most all of them are working for some adult and don’t see the money anyway, but they make it so hard to say no.  They’ll come up to your table while you’re eating at a restaurant and not even say a word—just give you the most pathetic stare with their huge brown puppy dog eyes.  It’s terrible.

● Wednesday, April 6^th: We left Phnom Penh in the morning to take a bus to Siem Reap.  This bus ride was really long, and made even longer by the fact that it hosted one of the most annoying (although really cute) 3 year old boys in all of Cambodia.  The kid was a little terror.  Anyway, we finally did end up in Siem Reap.