Landing in the Far East...
on Meg's Cambodian Adventures (Cambodia), 01/Oct/2008 01:50, 34 days ago
23rd September 2008....I arrived in Cambodia on the 11thSeptember 2008... So I’ve been here for 12 day,in some ways it feels like a lifetime but I still have 13 months 2 weeks and 2 days to go! We arrived in Phnom Penh… a city full of tuk tuks, smiling people, crazy drivers and ‘ladies in prom dresses’ (more officially known a sex workers but with my naivety I thought they were all dressed up to go to proms for the first few days! It was a very hectic few days and I had my first little bout of illness… imp sure the first of many! During our training we went on cyclo tours of the city, learnt about Buddhism from a giggling monk, felt like celebrities because wherever you go you gain a following of children wanting to talk to you. We also made the most of city life by playing blind jenga, clubbing andtreating ourselves to a swim at the very swish hotel cambodiana!On the Wednesday we travelled to Kampong Cham for a language training because it’s a sleepy city and ‘Phnom Penhs night life is too good for effective language training!’Kampong Cham is beautiful, next to the river Mekong about 3 hours away from phnom penh it has floating villages, beautiful happy people, smiling monks and amazing temples and pagodas. The other side of it is that it can be very dirty, I have reverted to my vegetarianism due to seeing fly covered meat for sale in the market, a second reason is the type of meat eaten… fried ducklings complete with eyes and beaks and feet, frogs, cockroaches and boiled eggs containing foetuses are all on sale, the latter put me off eggs as well and therefore I am in affect a Vegan as dairy products are not very available in Cambodia.. A reluctant vegan at that as im missing cheese already!I don’t think I was prepared before I came for exactly how developing this country is, as its something vie not actually experienced before. The effects of the Khmer Rouge are all around and highly visible and obviously devastated the country and its citizens. I am only beginning to hear about the horrors that people have had to live through and it does not cease to amaze me how happy, warm and friendly people are despite this. So far my impression of Cambodia is a country full of potential and I am very excited to be working in it!