Things I've Been Up To

Let me try and give you a little bit more meat in this post than the last one. This past weekend Shanti and I decided to take a tour of the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, a huge complex with beautiful buildings, temples, and Khmer artifacts. However, upon arriving we learned that the price had recently been hiked up from a reasonable $3 to a much less reasonable $6.25. We figured that there'll be enough people coming through that we'd be better off waiting on the Palace.

Instead of the Palace, we trekked over to the Central Market (Psar Thmei), the busiest and most organized of Phnom Penh's bustling markets. Still filling in on housewares, we ended up with an interesting variety of goods including: a small pot, a cutting board, a strainer, and perhaps most importantly, some plants for our large terrace.

Sunday was a day of errands as well, including a run to the grocery store (we're working on doing more shopping in the markets), a hair cut for Shanti, which is a story in and of itself, and looking at motorbikes without having any idea what we were looking it. One of Shanti's Cambodian coworkers may come to help us out this weekend.

Sunday night we hosted Shanti's coworkers at our apartment for an American-style barbeque. We got hot dogs, ketchup, pickles and potato chips, made hamburgers, and grilled (my first time using charcoal). It was good fun and I think Shanti's coworkers, Vuth and Vichhra, enjoyed themselves and did a pretty good job preventing an overload of leftovers.

On Monday, Nick, an Aussie who worked in Phnom Penh a few years ago and overlapped with me a bit at CSIS, got in to town for a few days. I met him at a place called The Pavillion, which was a really nice boutique hotel we snuck in to to use the pool. It was glorious. Three were large gazebos with cushions to sit on and white (silk?) mosquito nets and, of course, the pool. I'm going to need to find a way to go swimming on a regular basis here...

One final note before I conclude: our "host" mother is awesome. One day when coming home, I said hello and, after flailing her arms motioning me to stay, she ran off only to return with a plate of steaming hot and delicious corn. We returned the plate with a leftover hamburger and hot dog. Yesterday, she again stopped me to offer a plate full of bananas (like 30 of them), so last night, we returned the plate with a bit of spaghetti and meatballs. We'll see how long the exchange continues, but it's been fun so far.

One final final note (promise). Yesterday Shanti and I had our first Khmer lesson. The teacher is very good and enthusiastic - he teaches the Peace Corps volunteers English. We're going to do an hour long session three mornings a week, focusing on the spoken language and, if all goes well, move on to writing.