Two Weeks Away

At the Royal Palace

Today was our “break” day, when we were able to act like tourists and visit Wat Phnom, The Royal Palace, and the Central Markets. Unfortunately, it also seemed to be the day a lot of people started getting sick. Might have been the seafood last night, might be we’re getting a bit laissez faire with the antibacterial, or maybe it was just enough time for all the bugs to incubate nicely! So unfortunately some of us (including moi) weren’t in a really good state to appreciate the sights, even though we decided to soldier through it, determined to have our tourist day!

wrought iron gates

I think I want this door at my place…

First stop was at the Royal Palace. The buildings are amazing here, really ornate carvings and dripping with gilt. The topiary and gardens were also beautiful, with the expected plants like bougainvillea and frangipani, but also huge bowls of gorgeous purple waterlillies and topiaries shaped into such forms as elephants!

Elephant topiary

Scale model of Angkor Wat at the Royal Palace

Next was Friends Restaurant, another charity group who offers the people in need opportunities for training and vocational education. Good food, but I couldn’t really appreciate it properly since I was feeling a little under the weather still!

Sweet potato and taro chips

Pomelo and Mint Freeze

The sweet potato and taro chips helped a bit though – some stodge to help the tummy feel less unsettled! The shop next to Friends has lots of recycled materials goods to help raise money for the group, like twirled paper placemats and coasters, bracelets, recycled cutlery jewellery, tyre rubber wallets and computer cases. I was dithering between the two Friends Restaurant cookbooks, which focused on Khmer cooking, but I was dithering so much I didn’t end up with either, thinking I might go back afterwards.

Statue at Wat Phnom

After lunch we visited Wat Phnom, a temple on the biggest hill in the city. There’s been a temple on that spot for 650 years, but the current temple was rebuilt in 1926. The walls on the inside are decorated with scenes from the Buddha’s life, including pretty freaky ones like people being stabbed and bitten by animals!

Central Markets

Next stop, the Central Markets. These were like most large markets, with repetition of the same shops: knockoff bag shops, tshirt shops, jewellery shops, etc etc, ut laid out in a circular design with many snaking passageways filled with people and shops. The students were all pretty keen to try their hand at haggling with the merchants, and some did amazing deals! I picked up a couple of pieces of ‘turquoise’ jewellery (it may or may not be!), and a couple of little things for kids back home. Not a lot of shopping, but keeping an eye on the students meant I didn’t have my shopping eyes on!

We had a bit of time back at the hotel before dinner, so H and I took some of the students up to the massage place, where they spread the seven of us across two rooms. Communal massage!

Dinner was back at the Khmer Surin where we had tried tarantula on the first night. The group was a much more subdued one this evening, with lots of people feeling under the weather. I took a couple of kids back to the hotel early so they could go to bed, and did so myself, so hopefully I’ll be feeling better in the morning, too!

The wedding we saw the preparations for last night must have started at about 5 this morning! Luckily my room doesn’t have a window, so I wasn’t awoken with a rude shock to traditional Khmer music blaring along the length of the street like others were! It sounded pleasantly muffled from my room – one of the good things about no window!

The students don’t have proper school on Saturdays at most of the CCFs, but they do a sports/fun activities day instead, with some groups playing games in the classroom and some going downstairs to play basketball.

This morning we were with combination of kids we’d met in the morning classes, the littlies and some of the slightly older kids. They were all very cuddly today and one of the girls we’d seen every day came up and told me “I love you”. Awwwww 🙂

We started off teaching the kids a version of leader ball and tunnel ball, which they enjoyed, but the teacher said they usually play a form of dodge, using a rolled up piece of paper as the ball. Thank goodness it’s only paper, not a real ball, as they sometimes throw it really hard!!

We joined the rest of our group for lunch at the Star Restaurant today, rather than staying at the CCF, since most of the groups were situated at CCF5 and didn’t want to put too much pressure on their food services. Again, they provided a really tasty meal, this time consisting of seafood salad, steamed fish and seaweed and pork rib soup (which was really nice, even if it sounds weird).

After lunch we went back to join another class for afternoon activities, which included games of dodge, basketball and a new game we hadn’t seen before called ‘hide the paper’, where the teacher hid laminated cards around the classroom for the students to find, giving clues occasionally. We also played a game of 4 on 4 basketball in the yard, which made me appreciate how much these kids walk around barefoot, because I left my shoes upstairs and was suffering on the hot concrete! The girls were really good at basketball! I’m really not, so unfortunately my team lost this game, but I did manage to land a few baskets when we were taking turns to shoot.

Today brought home to me even more what a difference there is between our worlds of schooling. I’m not sure our kids would see the fun that could be had with a simple piece of paper or two, or take a basketball game so seriously when it’s not on a proper court with lines drawn out and wearing team bibs, or even shoes! These kids really value every single opportunity they’ve been offered – not that ours don’t appreciate what they have, but that things we think of as so small are so important.

sign on the waterfront

The evening brought increasing humidity and even a few spatters of rain! We had a couple of hours at the hotel before heading out to the river cruise dinner we had planned, so a couple of us walked the kids to Lucky supermarket and then had some quality pool time. Unfortunately my hotel room was having some issues, so I was talking to the front office instead of swimming. It was all soon sorted out though, and off we drove to the riverfront to board our boat.

Our cruise boat

The cruise was lovely – dinner started with baby octopus and prawns on skewers, then graduated to the ubiquitous (but very tasty) curry and rice, and then there was more delicious tropical fruit for dessert, made even tastier by being out on the water.

Seafood onna stick! Party time!

It was pretty dark on the water, but the twinkling lights of PP on the shoreline made it seem very different from the Phnom Penh we have come to know – it seemed a city of fluorescence rather than the raw humanity we’ve seen.

Skyline

A pretty fabulous and much less stressful day today. To start with, we had an extra hour in the morning back at the hotel to prepare lessons for the day, which meant that we all felt much more confident and happy.

Kids learning

When we got to the centre, my little group was split up into two pairs, and we worked with different classes. J and M worked with P from yesterday morning which left L and I to work with S who we had met in the afternoon. I presented the lesson on ‘what you do after school’ that I’d prepared, using a poster on Australian sports. Then we did a reading activity from their textbook, before taking the kids downstairs to the ‘library’ to look up the Australian sports on YouTube. The kids would much rather play games, but they did look up some of the activities from the poster, and enjoyed watching ballet and karate videos in between playing games and watching music videos (Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ and Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ were firm favourites!)

Teaching, teaching teaching…

Lunch was another ‘soup surprise’ with some mushrooms/fungus, chicken stock and a couple of unidentifiable offal pieces. The broth was really tasty today, with a yummy mix of herbs. We weren’t 100% sure on the offal, but at least I tried some of it…

and some more teaching…

The afternoon all four of us worked with S’s class who we had met yesterday. He was caught up in a meeting, so we started with the same sports/after school activity that we had done with the other class, but since we didn’t have access to the computers we broke into groups and used the iPads to practise spelling, writing and pronouncing the words (no wifi to access the internet on the iPads.)

Apparently on Fridays this class spends the last hour watching some comic tv shows/movies and writing a sentence about the funny scenes. Today was a comparison between Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and The Trouble with Mr Bean. Many giggles ensued!

I piked on the evening dance class, supervising ‘passively’ rather than ‘actively’, as my hands are still sore from last night’s efforts. One of the girls from another group wanted to swap in, so all good!

Khmer Curry (in a coconut!)

Dinner was at another restaurant close to the hotel, the Samaky. After being terribly envious of J’s curry served in a coconut the other night, I decided I needed my own, which was delicious! There were whole spices enlivening the soup, including a chunk of cinnamon bark and a few star anise. They also did really yummy fruit mocktails, so I had a mango refresher, which involved mango, lime, lemonade and all things nice.

Wedding street party

As we walked back to the hotel, we noticed a strange thing on the street outside. A large pink tent was blocking the road. Apparently for weddings here, they just set up a marquee in the middle of the street, no matter if it’s busy or quiet, and party on! Sounds like a lot less trouble than all the paperwork you’d need to do the same thing in Australia!

Today was our first day actually working in the community centres. We were up at 6am so we could leave the hotel by 7, to be at the centres by 8 when the first session of classes start. I was on wakeup duty, so my body clock decided to go haywire to make sure I woke up in time to wake all the kids up and so I ended up waking up at 4am and 5am before finally deciding to give up on this sleep caper!

My little group is on their own at our centre, working with littlies: lower primary in the morning and upper primary in the afternoon. They’re very intense, but very loving. Within thirty seconds of sitting on the floor to play some alphabet games on the iPad, we all had limpets stuck to us and clambering in our laps, eager to play.

Lunchtime

It seems that some of the communication channels are a bit strained (which is of course completely understandable when there’s such a large organisation, plus the language differences!) When we arrived, the teacher was under the impression that we had prepared lessons to deliver, and we were under the impression that the teacher would tell us which way they wanted us to help out in his/her classroom. The students looked at me and blinked. So a classic “doorknob lesson” ensued – uhhhh let’s break the kids into small groups and play with the iPad apps we’d downloaded. As I alluded to earlier, this broke the ice pretty thoroughly! We had just reached the “computer lab” for a computer session when the power went out. Whoops!

We ate lunch at the centre, sharing the same meal as the kids, a bowl of rice with a vegie and “surprise” soup – I couldn’t identify a lot of what was in there! The fact we were staying for lunch also caused a bit of consternation and confusion, but we were treated like very honoured guests, having our bowls of rice and soup brought out to us. As soon as we’d finished eating, the kids all came up to play with us, and some of the older girls helped me to learn Khmer pronunciation by reading from my Lonely Planet phrase book – them reading the Khmer, me reading the phonetic spelling. That worked really well, and my new word for today is “sohm”, meaning “please”.

lunchtime

After a very noisy and friendly lunchtime, we retired to the quiet of the upstairs classroom to spend a few minutes preparing some lessons for tomorrow – and on my part, worrying about whether we were supposed to have prepared for this afternoon, which is with a different teacher and group of kids.

The afternoon also contained an awkward bathroom story, but I’m not going to go into great detail: suffice to say that I think the entire centre including office staff and kids knew I needed to go to the loo once I’d asked one person very discreetly where the toilet was!

lunchtime

Our afternoon class was a lot more structured than the morning. Since the kids were a little older, they were learning grammar, vocab and spelling, so I personally felt a lot more comfortable teaching/assisting, even though they were still a lot younger than I’m used to! The teacher, S, who had been teaching for a year, ran with his usual lessons, but asked us to join in with things like helping the kids to learn their vocab. The kids then did a test, and then went to the computer room, where we gave the children some new vocab lists of words which they looked up on google images to define. Apparently tomorrow we will be presenting a “lecture”!!

Next up was a very long bus ride, as the driver got lost multiple times taking us to pick up another group and meet others at another centre for Cambodian dance lessons, mixed with three mystifying phone calls from someone at one of the CCF centres who for some reason thought the timetable for the evening had changed. After the dance class, I can now barely type, after the very unfamiliar hand/finger movements and gestures in the dance we were taught! The girls tried to teach us stretches that they do every day to keep their hand and foot joints flexible enough to bend their hands and toes back in the “more beautiful” sharply flexed poses. Needless to say, not terribly successful on my part, and even though I’ve been dancing in various forms all my life, this one made me feel incredibly ungraceful!

After a slightly less fraught bus ride, we ended up at the Star Restaurant again for dinner, where we had some delicious salads and that chicken curry again. Yum! A challenging day, but one with lots of positives.

Today was a much less sombre day than yesterday, but it certainly showed us more about the way people live here. We started with a bit of an introduction from some of the CCF people, who told us more about the organisation, before taking us on a bit of a tour of the facilities.

Near the satellite school

My group visited two of the centres, CCF5 and CCF6, plus a satellite school and the Bakery. The CCF centres are made up of classrooms (some open to the air, some more conventional to our way of thinking) and other areas like computer rooms, meeting rooms, dormitories and kitchens. The satellite school was in the old dumpsite area, in order to reach a greater number of students who otherwise couldn’t travel to the further away centres. The Bakery is a vocational school where older students can learn about food production and hospitality skills once they’ve left high school. The kids were really welcoming to us, calling out hellos, waving and giving us high fives as we walked past them.

Two gorgeous girls at CCF5

We stopped for lunch at Star Restaurant, a restaurant associated with CCF which provides work experience and job opportunities. The food was great, especially the stir fried Morning Glory with tofu (!) and the chicken curry.

Obligatory cat picture! Next door to Star restaurant

The afternoon was spent back in CCF6 where the kids from the CCF put on a bit of a show to welcome us. We found out more about what the CCF does and how it works, and the students (okay, maybe some teachers too) played some dancing games to get to know you. While dancing like a loony in front of students doesn’t faze me, I was happily surprised when one of the girls grabbed my and one of the other teacher’s hands to pull us into the circle to be part of the dancing together. While our students are all mature and lovely, this girl who looked about twelve (who was actually around 18) showed the community-mindedness that seems to characterise both children and adults alike here.

The founder of CCF, Scott Neeson arrived partway through the afternoon, much to the delight of the children who were palpably happy to see him, coming up for hugs and trading jokes.

Mangoes!

After a quick pitstop at the hotel, including a quick walk down to the shops (did I mention mangoes are really cheap and REALLY yummy???) we headed out for dinner at a restaurant down by the river, the Titanic. We had a much better ending to the evening than the original Titanic thankfully, with some really tasty food (water buffalo stir fried with eggplant anyone? Yum!! Other interesting meals were flambee’d eel and a chicken curry dish which arrived in a coconut!) and the usual raucous conversation amongst the staff. Highly recommended, even if they had trouble keeping up with us – bringing 33 orders out together is pretty tricky, but we all got our food and drink orders and settled down for a great evening.

coconut curry!

Wow, what a day. We started out at Toul Sleng, the S21 prison which used to be a school before the Khmer Rouge turned it into a torture and interrogation prison. The classrooms (which were breezy and large originally) were made into cells 2m x0.8m for prisoners to be incarcerated, and barbed wire laced the walls of the buildings so inmates couldn’t throw themselves off the balconies to escape their fate.

Whole buildings were filled with row after row of photographs of those who had been taken to this prison to be tortured and killed, adults and children, men and women. It was a sickening sight, especially when you considered the irony of the setting – a place which should have been filled with children’s laughter but instead heard screams.

Things weren’t completely gloom and doom though. Those of you who’ve been following my blog for a while will know my penchant for candid kitty photos wherever I go. Today obliged by providing me with a teeny weeny black kitty:

Then we moved on to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek. While this memorial didn’t have the same visceral imagery that the previous museum did, it made up for it in emotion. We listened to the audio guide as we walked the paths, going past the Killing Tree where young children were murdered, and pits where hundreds of people were bludgeoned to death and left.

The place is at once beautiful and terrifying, much like the S-21 prison showed two sides of humanity. There were beautiful views across the lake, of fruit trees and paddy fields juxtaposed with this horror.

We were a subdued group returning from our day’s explorations, and spent time debriefing and discussing our thoughts about the day’s discoveries.

Not all was heavy and dark though. On our way to the supermarket in the morning, we had passed a place which advertised massage for $6, and one of the other teachers, H and I wandered back in the afternoon in our free time to see if we could squeeze some pampering in. They were open, even though it is a public holiday in Cambodia today to celebrate Human Rights Day (and I just found out they have a public holiday on my birthday, 7th Jan, for Victory Day to commemorate the end of the Khmer Rouge rule in 1979! Knew it was a great date…) and were very happy to slot us in for a quick half hour of back massage. And the price, I hear you ask? $4.50US! What a bargain!

Then it was out to dinner at a restaurant around the corner which offered a fabulous buffet of traditional Cambodian and South East Asian delicacies… including deep fried bugs! The kids were rapt at the idea of consuming tarantulas, and the bug (heh heh) spread rapidly throughout the group, with the teachers all having a little nibble of at least one hairy leg. It wasn’t that bad, tasting a bit like deep fried soft-shell crab, but the texture was a bit weird, and I don’t think I need to repeat the experience! Other interesting items on the “for the tourists” table included unhatched duck eggs (embryos), crickets, water beetles (which looked a little too close to cockroaches for my comfort!) and silk worm cocoons. I rested on my laurels with Spidey.

It wasn’t all tourist curiosities though – fabulous fresh spring rolls, green papaya salad, Pad Thai, gorgeous little packets of chicken or fish wrapped in leaves, rice paper crepes, lemongrass seafood salad… I wish I could have tried it all!