Thursday, 29 January 2015
ជំរាបសួរ ... Chomreabsuor!
Hello world! After weeks of preparation (and 5 days of flights!) we finally made it to Phnom Penh, Cambodia! We have spent the last few days recovering, meeting people, exploring the area, finding what we need and getting our heads around the fact that we live here now!
We arrived midday on the 24th Jan, stumbling out of the plane to a humid airport where an hour saw us getting visas and baggage sorted. Our official visas allowed us to stand in a different line to the backpacking tourists, and we got through relatively quickly. We were met by Dan, the Principle of Logos International School, who helped us get SIM cards for our phones and drove us through the chaos that was traffic to our part time accommodation. Some lovely teachers and parents had left us a ‘welcome package’ full of basic necessities for our first night, such as soap, some pasta and UHT milk and cereal for the morning. We slept the rest of that day and had a traditional Khmer dinner with a lady downstairs that evening.
The flat we are currently in belongs to an ex-teacher who is back in the UK for a while. It has one bedroom with a mattress on the floor and a fan, a small living room with 2 rattan chairs, and a tiny kitchen that has a sink, a fridge and a stove and that is pretty much it! Apparently it’s a running joke that this said teacher was quite the bachelor haha! The bathroom in the bedroom is basically a toilet with a shower head just next to it that drains onto the floor, and the one in the kitchen in almost unusable because it has a washing machine crammed behind the door so it can’t really open properly! The whole flat is the middle of 3 that share the stairs and entrance, and is above 4 Khmer-style houses underneath. This building is behind another block of flats that is on the main road. It is quite confusing at first! We are completely surrounded by Khmer families and it does get very noisy at times, but the kids are gorgeous and love to say ‘hello!’ to us.
Our first full day, Ben and I took a tuk tuk to the ‘Lucky Supermarket’ a few blocks away and bought some essential food items. We then came back and went for an explore down our own street, and discovered a ‘psar’ (market). Remembering a little Khmer from many years ago, I managed to buy a basket, a tacky plastic woven mat (it’s beautiful) for our lounge floor AKA the ‘dinner table’, and even a bag of fresh vegetables for 50cents! Ben was very impressed. That evening we found our way to Logos International School for church, and afterwards were introduced to many teachers who were very welcoming. That evening we were up quite late to the sounds of Khmer karaoke blaring at an extraordinary decibel next door. Poor Ben started school the next day! He was off on the back of a ‘motodup’ (motorbike taxi) at 7am Monday morning, and who knows what he got up to at the school- he must have liked it, because he’s been back every day since! Yes I’m hilarious. So he’s been at school all this week from 7- 4.30pm, mostly sitting in on his classes with another teacher until he learns the ropes. He is very happy that he gets a free cooked lunch every day, sometimes Khmer, sometimes western food, making me jealous! He has taught 2 classes so far as I’m aware, for he needed my handheld blender (which I’d brought from Australia- I knew it would come in handy) to run a ‘pea’ experiment?! I don’t know. Scientists, huh!
I on the other hand have been running around town doing all sorts of things. Finding ‘the internet’ was interesting, I must have walked a mile to find a shop that sold a dongle for the computer, only to be turned away because I didn’t have my passport?! Didn’t think I’d need it to buy a USB, so I trudged home again, found it, and set off again. I was obviously successful the second time round because you are reading this now. I’ve also been looking around at different language schools, but have been mostly focused on finding us our own home, for this bare ‘bachelor pad’, whilst lovely, is only temporary. I’ve been through ads and classifieds trying to find the right one for us, and must have visited at least 4 different houses in 3 days. Many ‘barangs’ (westerners, foreigners) here now live in serviced apartments, but we didn’t like that idea. A traditional Khmer house is a ‘pteah lvang’, which is a 2-3 story ‘skinny house’, often one of a row of at least 4, that has lots of tiny stairs inside, small rooms and a nice open roof top.
It is quite rare to get a whole one with a budget like ours, which means sharing with another family, or 2! Many also open out onto noisy main roads and are quite dark inside, so we definitely have to consider these things. Logos is quite far from the centre of town, and with Ben commuting there every day, we’d like to find a quiet place closer to the school.
So that is what we’ve been up to. It’s been a busy week for the both of us, and neither of us have really had time to sit and think about where we are or what is actually going on around us. The world outside this little flat is crazy- it is noisy and busy and always moving, there is so much to take in! But after all, we have a few years to do that don’t we? ;)
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