nice to meet you, Ms. Ambassador

Last weekend I was in Siem Reap and saw a flyer advertising an event at Angkor Hospital for Children. The flyer just said, "expats come meet your ambassador" which was enough for me.
It was a little intimidating walking into the event, actually. Networking and making conversation used to be so easy, but I'm a little rusty after a year and a half. Also, I was there alone and didn't even really know what to expect from the event. It turned out to be a really interesting and worthwhile evening. I met several expats, most of whom live in Siem Reap, and a few based in Phnom Penh who were temporarily working up north. There were a number of RPCV's there (returned Peace Corps volunteers) who were really friendly and interested to hear about my experience.
Carol Rodley, the US Ambassador to Cambodia, answered some questions along with several staff from the embassy and then the mingling continued. It was a fairly small event, fewer than 30 people I'd guess, so everyone had a chance to speak one-on-one with the Ambassador! I patiently waited my turn, trying not to feel creepy about standing/lurking there while the Ambassador finished her previous conversations, and then got to introduce myself! Ambassador Rodley was so friendly and open, and very enthusiastic about Peace Corps. I asked her about her appointment to Cambodia (did she get to choose?) and her opinion on development in Afghanistan (where she worked prior to returning to Cambodia as Ambassador) and her answers were interesting and thoughtful. She told me when she got the phone call that she was chosen to be an Ambassador she thought it was a prank call because it was midnight her time!
I am really glad I made my way into Siem Reap for this event, and glad that I overcame my hesitancy and nervousness about going alone. I mean, if I can come to the other side of the world not knowing anyone it shouldn't be hard to walk into a room of strangers, right?
On a side note, it appears Cambodia has begun blocking blogs. For some reason I can still post, but I can't see my own blog. So my apologies for any type-o's which I usually catch by viewing the post after I finish it.

let me show you around

Since I haven't posted any pictures of my new house, I thought now would be a good time! I just cleaned the kitchen and bathroom :) I live in a room with an attached bathroom and a small kitchen area, both of which I get all to myself. It is really nice and usually pretty clean, unless I get busy and forget to scrub the floors for a week. My landlord lives in a big house at the front of the property with her family and a few renters. Behind the house there are individual "apartments" and that's where I live!

The view from my front door. Neighbors clothes drying and the trellis.

 Most of my neighbors are really nice. I live next door to a doctor who works at the Angkor Children's Hospital Satellite Clinic where I teach English twice a week. A lot of the other residents work at the Acleda bank in town.

My kitchen area. Not a lot of counter space, but it gets the job done.

 A giant cockroach just crawled out from under my bookshelf... nice.

storage for dishes

The kitchen sink... by which I mean a water spout and a hole in the ground.

 The room had just been built when I moved in. It was finished the day I moved actually. That means everything is as modern as you can get. I have a nice overhead fan hanging precariously from the ceiling that usually works.

The new desk my landlord just put in all the rooms.

  The house is basically right next to school, which is convenient. I spend a lot of time indoors because I like it so much. :) When I lived with a host family I was always trying to think of somewhere to go just to relax a little and be alone, but there isn't really anywhere. It is so much quieter here, and more peaceful. I love it. Also, my friend from the market lives a few doors down. She's usually working, but she told me this week she'd teach me how to make "cha gruen" or fried ingredients. It's just a stir fry with this delicious sauce on it. I'm excited about that.

desk and bookshelf

 Check out my awesome Cambodian pajama pants in the mirror in the above photo. Don't be too jealous.

my bed, mosquito net, and storage trunk

 Unfortunately there is no shower head, just a bucket and another water spout. But after a year and a half I'm quite used to the bucket showers so its not a big deal at all. The one bad thing is the water often comes out icy cold from the storage tank outside. In cold season it is pretty painful, but I always feel like I'm wasting gas if I boil some water for my shower. I just try to do some jumping jacks before bathing... and brace myself. I'd rather be chilly in the shower and enjoy cold season, than face the hot season again where you shower 18 times a day just to try and not be sweaty for a few seconds.

the bathroom

buckets for laundry and showering

There is plenty of space between the bed and the desk for me to do yoga, which I've been doing almost every day since I moved in. I can also jump rope in the yard area outside my door, which is nice. Usually the neighbors keep to themselves and don't stare too much when I do my weird foreigner exercises in the yard.

my digs!

So that's my place! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do. Not bad for only $50 a month plus utilities and water. No charge for garbage, of course. I just walk through the duck/chicken coop and throw it over the back fence where it will be burned later... oh Cambodia.

Three cheers for cold season!

First, apologies that my last post was riddled with minor grammar errors. I didn't proof read very well, apparently.
It is cold season here in Cambodia, and it is AMAZING! It's been cool in the mornings and evenings now for a number of weeks. I'm currently wearing a sweatshirt. A SWEATSHIRT!!!
Weather.com says it is 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but I think it feels a little cooler than that. Maybe my body has just adapted to the normal  scorching hot weather, so 70 feels pretty chilly.
I'm hoping this cool weather lasts as long as possible, until July maybe??? Unlikely, but a girl can dream.

"fine dining" a la Cambodge

Lately I've becoming more ambitious with my cooking. I made two batches of cookies from scratch last week using my "dutch oven" which is a pan elevated inside a larger pot holding water to basically create a convection oven. One batch was sugar cookies, which were missing vanilla extract, but still turned out ok. The second was peanut butter cookies. I had to try some different size cookies because they were kind of crumbly and fell apart but when I made it into more of a loaf, and just filled the pan with dough they cookie/bars turned out really well.

Peanut butter cookie bars.

This weekend I got more ambitious and made gnocchi from scratch! It was actually really easy. You just make plain, dry mashed potatoes with 4 potatoes and then mix/knead in 3-4 cups of flour until the dough is not sticky any more, but not hard either. The recipe said you should roll the dough into snakes and then cut 2cm pieces but my dough wasn't snakey, so I just rolled small balls of dough and boiled them until they floated. It was really tasty with some homemade tomato sauce on top. 

Gnocchi and tomato sauce, all made from scratch :)

Cruising to the market in Kampong Thom.

I'm hoping to pick up some groceries in town that I can't get in my village and try some new recipes. Maybe some hummus and flat bread! 

hardworking English learners

Here are some pictures of my English Club students! They try really hard and have improved since the beginning of the year. A few of them have been my students the whole time I've been in Cambodia. Seeing them improve makes it all worth it. Well, it keeps me here anyway...

My English Club! In case you were wondering what your name sake looks like, from left to right the back row is: Abraham Lincoln, Michael, Brad, Mr. Jackson (as in the pop star, but we already had a Michael), and Ryan. Middle row, the girls: Lindsay, Margaret, Diana, Lorissa, Davina, Brenda. The front row: Robert, Aaron, Andrew, Christian, Rosa, Stephanie, and Kelly. :)

All the girls! I don't know what that pose is when they put the Nike Swoosh in front of their chin... Kelly looks like a Korean pop star in the front row haha

And the boys... Mr. Andrew hamming it up in the front. For the record when I said I would take a picture of the girls they got into a picture formation in about ten seconds flat. It took the boys A LOT longer to figure it out...

TBIT: Thank Buddha it's Thursday

It has been a long week, and I'm glad it is Thursday. Actually, yesterday was just a long day since I teach the most hours on Wednesdays, so when I make it to Thursday I can relax. The worst hour of my Tuesdays and Wednesdays is always the lower-level English class I teach. It is so frustrating because I can't do the more complicated and fun exercises and discussions I do with all my other, more advanced classes. Also, I have to ask them every week to stop speaking Khmer in class. Now I know how my foreign language teachers felt in high school. I guess in college they didn't really care, because at that point its your own damn fault if you fail.
Anyway, today I only have to teach my advanced students. I spent a little longer than I had hoped "reviewing" the phrase "used to" in my grammar class. It says in the book that they should be reviewing the grammar point, but as usual they were never really taught it in the first place. So I explained the difference between "I used to go to Angkor Wat" and "I have been to Angkor Wat". It is confusing because in Khmer there isn't really a differentiation between the two, grammatically at least. I think the students were starting to understand by the end of the hour though. So that is progress.
We played pictionary yesterday in my conversation club. The kids were getting tired of the more serious topics/assignments I've been giving so we lightened it up a little bit. They all told me that, "when we play games like this, English club is so happy!". Of course the kids on the losing team may not have felt the same way. Then they all decided they wanted to take pictures with me on their cell phones. I was not looking my best, but then again, when am I in Cambodia??? The I heart NY shirt Robin sent me is going to be infamous as it has been immortalized in hundreds of pictures with me and various students.
So far today is better than yesterday, starting off right with a nice big plate of rice and pork. I wish I had my camera at the market, because it was a quite pleasant looking spread. Just the right amount of pork, sliced cucumbers, and egg. Instead, I've included some pictures of the backyard decorations my landlord has been working on. She put in a trelice (spelling???) and put some beautiful orchids on it. I told her it looked quite sa'at (beautiful). Then she added some bright orange fake leaves.... and some fake grapes. I guess it is sa'at jee-ung now (more beautiful) in the Cambodian sense...

Back on track

After much delay I am back online. Thanks to my parents my computer has been returned to Cambodia and I now have internet! I don't think I can possibly catch up on what has happened since my last post, as it has been months!!! But I had a wonderful summer full of visitors (see pictures, and for the record I wore a white shirt and green shorts that day with my parents too, and it was definitely an accident) and as this IS Cambodia not TOO much has really changed.

I'm starting to feel like I'm in the home stretch now, though I think that's wishful thinking as we still have about seven months left of service. I've been striving to spend as much time as possible just working with my students. I absorb their every free hour with English class, hoping to give them every opportunity to learn English for free while I am here. I teach a grammar and vocabulary review class during the lunch hour, I have an English conversation club four evenings a week with 19 dedicated students, and four students who come to my house for a sort of "book club" to read stories.
The hours I spend with my students really fly by, and I'm actually seeing some improvement. Whether or not that has anything to do with my teaching skills I don't know, but it is nice to see.

All the students in my club chose "American" names at the beginning of the school year either from a list I provided or one they knew of on their own. It is funny when the students' personalities align with that of their namesakes (all the names I gave were those of people I know, which makes it more fun for me). The two real odd-ball choices were Davina, whose real name is Mary. The only student with a name that was already American invented a totally random name, but if it works for her that's fine.
And then there is Abraham Lincoln. I can't tell if he thinks we know each other well enough to make jokes, or he really dislikes me. His vocabulary is quite extensive (although his pronunciation is HORRIBLE and I have no idea what he is saying half the time) and he always commits fully to the activities I assign in class. But then he makes these horribly off-color comments or says the most morbid things! I found out recently his mother was murdered a few years ago, so I've been trying to be more understanding of where his strange sense of humor comes from, but I've been tempted to kick him out a few times for being inappropriate, rude, or just saying freaky things. Unfortunately, there's no John Wilkes Booth in the class (history jokes!).
For the record, Margaret and Andrew are two of my favorite students and are both incredibly clever. Lindsay is one of the sweetest students I know, and she has a twin sister who chose the name Alyson (who was also in my health club). And of course, Lorissa is sassy. That's the best way to describe her. She's got sass for days.
I plan to post more often in case there's anyone out there who is still interested in my daily happenings (now that I have super internet at site!!!) so for now a brief catch-up will suffice.
Belated Happy Holidays and New Year to everyone! 2011 is looking good so far.