Change of plans

Work offered me the last week off from my internship if I wanted to travel. Seeing as I have more than enough employment left in the summer when I return -- if anything, I was working too much -- I accepted.

Right now it looks like I'm heading to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore across 8 days with nothing but my backpack. Hooray! More details to come.

I just left Freebird, a bar/grill that looked and felt distinctly American. It was weird to walk out on the street when I was done... I honestly felt like I was at home. Sadly, and happily too, I will be home in less than 3 weeks now: Wednesday the 16th.

Tomorrow I am catching the 8AM bus to Sihanoukville. All the rest of my friends are already there, so I'm stuck home alone. I bought a bus pass for Saturday before I realized work would've easily let me take a half day so I could go today. Oh well. So tonight I am all alone. I enjoyed my chicken sandwich @ Freebird and now just booked a flight to Bangkok! And I bought the Prestige today @ the DVD store so I could watch it tonight, so this is what I will do.

Plus, since I'm travelling alone tomorrow, this means I can get up early and indulge in something that probably only I would enjoy... USA DONUTS!!! Yes! Authentic, American-style donuts (cake with sprinkles) await me when I wake up tomorrow. Awesome. I'll almost more excited about this than I am about going to Sville.

- m

Plane crash stuff

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6243842.stm

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/6/27/worldupdates/2007-06-27T072714Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-281930-2&sec=Worldupdates

Turns out it had crashed a lot earlier in the day, which means we were definetly there when it happened. Don't know where we were in relation to the mountain it was found on.

Yikes.

- m

Weekend, Insanity (part 2)

Wanted to get this up but no time to do pictures. Sorry.

Sunday

Woke up the next morning bright and early, and I’m hoping to go to the beach. The rest of my group thought going to the beach at a beach town would be a bad idea (?) so we went on a five mile hike in the hills instead. It ended up being really invigorating and we got great views of the ocean from up high. I however, like my fear of water, also fear snakes and there were a few too many on the trail for my liking. But I got a good work out.

I was going to be working in nearby Kampot for the rest of the day/Monday so work picked me up in Kep around lunch time. We had another great seafood feast – more prawns, more squid, and this time, fish soup! – and then headed into the communes once again. Here, we encountered a.) the worst road I have ever, ever driven on; b.) a commune still ruled by Khmer Rouge. Neither was pleasant at all. It took an hour to go less than 3 km and I’m pretty positive the van’s undercarriage and shocks are just blown to hell. And Mr. KR didn’t want us telling his people about human rights and wanted us to fire a few of the citizen advisors we had hired in the area. Our director got diplomatic and we eventually appeased him but it was tense and disheartening and we were all a bit upset about it.

So after that meeting we headed back to Kampot where we had yet another fresh seafood feast and then retreated to our guest house for the night. I got my own room, which was awesome, and I watched about half of V for Vendetta and some CNN before I fell asleep.

Monday

More communes, more bumpy roads. No huge animosity from any village leaders this time, which was a good thing.

On the way home we got stopped for a bit because the bridge in front of us had gone out. So, we just waited as they fixed it. We didn’t have to wait long, which was sorta disconcerting. As we crossed, I was convinced we were going into the river. They had just thrown a few sheets of metal across the hole and hoped it stuck. Thankfully we made it across. This was not the first blown-out or untrustworthy bridge we had encountered all weekend – at one point, we almost began to cross a bridge before realizing it had collapsed (yikes). But we made it every time, thankfully.

About 35 minutes after leaving the last commune in Chhuk district, a parade of ambulances and military vehicles full of soldiers were heading the opposite way down the road towards Kampot, which puzzled us all. I honestly thought a coup was going on and we were in the midst of it. Turns out a passenger plane had crashed in Chhuk, right where we were, about 15-20 minutes after we left, killing the 22 passengers and crew on board. What’s weird is that they couldn’t find the plane for days, and just found it this morning (Wednesday morning) after a government search, a reward from the prime minister for any information about the plane’s whereabouts, and a donation from the U.S. government of the use of two spy satellites to track it down. A little bit odd for my tastes. Won’t be getting on any domestic Cambodian flights soon, that’s for sure.

We got home and I was exhausted and hungry and on sensory overload from everything I had experienced all weekend. So I stopped in at the new hit restaurant in town, Pizza World (yes!), ate a medium deep dish pepperoni pizza w/unlimited orange Fanta (one of my more expensive meals in PP at $6 total), grabbed a tuk-tuk home and watched House / read the Corrections all night.

- m

Weekend, Insanity (part 1)

Another multi-part update. Sorry. I've gotten lazy with this. As have you with the comments!!

So, my weekend update is long overdue. Here’s what I did.

Friday I went out with work to hold some meetings in the communes (a commune is the smallest administrative area recognized in Cambodia; they’re small villages and are in no way communist). We were commissioning Citizen Advisors, who, with our training, would teach the locals – who have no education and concept of law, human rights or democracy – about, well, law, human rights and democracy.

The communes are a trip. Often, the roads aren’t really roads -- they’re just piles of dirt that have been flattened by lots of use. Or, they're somewhat roads, just with unending amounts of potholes. So, we’d bump and jostle across the “road” for an hour or two, reach the meeting (which I’d suffer through since it was all in Khmer... sigh), and then repeat it. At one point in the afternoon we had to wait on the side of the road as a tractor “built” the road for us; the road was literally a huge series of dirt piles, and the tractor flattened them into a sort of plateau that we very slowly drove over. Probably took hours to go a matter of 10 km. And I almost barfed a couple times. We ate this totally sketchy lunch in Kampong Speu province that I was convinced was going to make me hurl instantly; it didn’t, but I was hungry all afternoon.

It’s insane to see this level of poverty and under-development. The houses were often literally shacks amongst rice fields. The schools were old and rotting. People stared at our truck and white skin like we were aliens that just landed in the mother ship. It was humbling, to say the least. At one place I was given an authentic scarf made in the design worn by all citizens in the area. The people were very gracious.

When we got back to PP I headed to Steve’s Steak House as it has the biggest burgers I knew of in town and I was starving. I order the big burger, and doused it in ketchup... or so I thought. I had actually grabbed the chili sauce bottle, which looked just like – and was sitting right next to – the ketchup bottle. Hottest burger I’ve ever eaten, but I was starving so I just got through it. I got home so late that all my housemates had already left to go out so I just chilled at home and fell asleep really early.

Saturday

Woke up way too early again to catch the bus to Kep. Kep is a beach town on the south coast of Cambodia that just got ravaged during the war in the 1970’s and really hasn’t been rebuilt much. Really, it was pretty much a ghost town and we were one of the few hundred people there. But it is beautiful, and it is the ocean, so it was alright in my book.

The bus ride was another four hours of dust and constant jostling, despite the fact that it was only a 120 km trip. Lovely. I do around 130-140 km/hr in Ontario. They didn’t want to run A/C so they just kept all the doors to the bus open the whole time. The smells were nice. The bus itself was falling apart as we drove. I sat in the back listening to Wilco and dreaming about moving to Chicago and had a sort of zen-like peace for an hour or two.

So we get to Kep and decide to take a boat across to Rabbit Island, which lays off the shore of Kep in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand. It’s about a few km across the open sea to get there. In true Cambodian fashion, our moto driver “had a friend with a boat” who magically appeared after a twenty second phone call and the mention of $20 in payment. Soon, we’re on some complete stranger’s rickety old, tiny rowboat – which had thankfully been juiced up with an absolutely pitiful offboard motor – a few miles off the coast of Cambodia and I’m just freaking out. I hate water. I’m watching him pump water out of the bottom of the boat. Fish are flying in the air and hit Erin in the face. Really, it was fun, but I hate deep water, as I said. We could see into Vietnam from the boat, and in the gulf there were all these small islands all around... it really was beautiful.

We get to Rabit Island, it’s a secluded beach, really beautiful. Too bad it is raining. We swim in the ocean any way, and it was totally warm, which was awesome. We quickly forgot about the rain. I’m glad to say I’ve now swam in three of the four oceans (and I hope I never swim in the Arctic, honestly).

The trip back across the Gulf was even scarier than the way there because now there was a storm passing in the distance and we were hitting some waves pretty hard. Thought we might have bit it a few times but we didn’t. Everyone made fun of my fear.

Back on stable ground, we had an amazing seafood dinner – grilled crab, deep fried battered squid, and prawns in pepper sauce – and then we all sorta gave up on the night early. There’s zero night life in Kep so I ended up in our little bungalow in the hills (which, I should add, only had electricity from 6PM to 6AM... just like the rest of Kep, which runs on generator). I finished White Noise and Bobby and I went to the guest house patio for a beer a bit later, but that was about it.

Angkor What (part 3)

Sunday

No sunrise today. Woke up and had a normal breakfast at the hotel: pancake with chocolate. Read an old issue of Elle as I waited for it to come. It was surprisingly really good.

We made it out to the Wats (in Khmer, Wat = temple) around 9:30. We didn’t see too much remarkable, but it was a really fun day. We made friends with some local kids, I have some really cute pictures. The kids here are, admittedly, pretty adorable. The sad thing is that as soon as your tuk-tuk stops, they swarm it, trying to sell you postcards, bracelets, drinks. If you give to one, or buy from one, the rest expect you to give / buy from them. I made this mistake at one point and two boys almost started fighting each other. They walk up to you with the standard routine, almost every one:

“What country from?” “U.S.” “Capitol Washington D.C. You buy postcard, ten for one dolla?”

Or, the worst, hands clenched in a praying position, eyes dropped, lips pouty, and in a quiet tone:

“Sir, sir ... sir ... money ... sir ... please ... sir ... money ... sir, sir ....”

I always tried to talk to them about school or something, to try to be friendly, but of course, they just wanted my money, which is understandable. I don’t understand this level of desperation. Very sad. Many of the kids are forced into this profession by a parent or a "beggar pimp"; they know Westerners are disturbed by the site of desparate kids and send them out for money, collecting usually all of it from the kids when they get home, often to support addictions, etc. It's a problem in Cambodia, as is the child sex trade in general.

And it's not just kids. It's adults running food stands, book shops, t-shirt shops, all around the main entrances and exits of the temples. Literally, as soon as I walked out on the street, and they saw my white skin, I was swamped. Like, at times up to 20-30 people screaming at the four of us. My favorite exchange, which I got a lot:

“Sir, you want some cold drink?” “No, no thank you.” “Yes thank you why no thank you? Why no buy?”

I think they all learned English from the same person. I had the same exchange like 20 times this weekend.

So we saw a ton of minor temples today, and the temples took a backseat to us just generally enjoying the forests, the jungles, the countryside, and hanging out. Things are intense in PP and it was great to get out of the city and see something else. We headed back to Angkor Wat one last time, where Jordan pissed off a monkey – they have monkeys just chilling here – and it chased him 50 feet across a bridge, causing all the Cambodians to laugh at the stupid, silly American boy.

Exhausted, we left the temples around 4 or 5, did dinner in town, slept.

Monday

We took the bus home. 5.5 hours. No Titanic. I read half of White Noise by Don DeLillo and almost passed out from a lack of protein. Back in PP at 3:30 and I was sad. A great weekend was over.

I was sad to see it end. I can’t wait to show you all the pictures.

Photos of me in Cambodia

So I still haven't taken the initiative to figure out how to get my photos onto the internet, but for now, here are two unexciting photos I stole from my co-worker's Facebook album. This should serve as photographic documentation that I, in fact, am in Cambodia.

Here's me at work, at my desk, sitting in front of the computer I am now typing on, looking like a goofball. My hat says "clean hands" in Khmer and it's advertising a big anti-corruption campaign a lot of NGO's are partaking in right now. I am making the standard "Asian tourist" pose, which caused my co-workers to laugh, in turn causing me to laugh.

Here's me (in the upper left hand corner) out to dinner at One Fish Two Fish a few weekends ago with the American college students crew. We all just sorta found each other around town and all did dinner together.

Oh the excitement! Two whole crappy pictures.

I'll get the third part of my Angkor Wat saga up soon. I finished all my assignments for work last week and have now asked multiple times for more work and have not been given any. My director is so busy with other programs that she has yet to read or comment on either of the memos I have completed, or obviously come up with a new assignment for me. So, I'm sitting here in an office in Cambodia from 8-5 doing nothing when I could very easily be travelling. I'm using my time to work on my Cambodia paper for class so I can get the grade on my transcript before interviewing and to research firms for interviewing. After that, I might just not come in anymore until they give me work to do. I'm frustrated. I didn't fly 8,000 miles to surf the internet.

Thankfully tomorrow, Sunday and Monday I will be in the provinces observing human rights development and training sessions. That will be good.

Yesterday we ate pizza at the Pizza Company downtown, which was the most American -- and expensive -- meal I have had yet. I spent $6 and got a personal pan pepperoni pizza (pretty good, but no distinguishing taste), breadsticks, a couple buffalo wings, and a large coke. Mmmmmmmmm. And then I fell into a food coma the rest of the afternoon.

- m

Angkor What (part 2)

Saturday

We woke up at 4 am to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. We specifically saved the big temple for this setting. We got to the site just as the sun was starting to light up the sky – 4:30/4:40ish local time. Welcome to the Equator.

It was eerie. We were some of the first at the temple that day. It’s never empty; in fact, there are so many tourists there that you can hardly walk. But now, the temple was almost exclusively ours. We found one other couple there, and thankfully they had a flashlight so they guided us through. We climbed through the tombs and inner rooms of the temple in near total darkness.

Then we sat on the edge of the reflecting pool and watched the sun come up over the towers of the temple. To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed with the sunrise – it was really just sorta blah. Nothing great. But it was cool to be there, in that setting.

With the sun pretty much up around 6AM, we decided to fully explore Angkor Wat. We made it to the second highest level of the temple (~25 feet off the ground) and had one more to go. I looked up. The “steps” into the tower were probably about 30-40 feet in height, at least at a 60 degree angle, and they were big enough for me to get my toes on, at best. Essentially, it was like climbing a rock climbing wall with small grips for your hands and feet... except without a harness or rope. If I fell, I was going to be seriously, seriously messed up.


I watched some little girls climb up and figured I’d be fine. I made it about half way up before panic set in. I scrambled to the top. Once there, a huge feeling of dread came up on me as I realized I had to go back down. For a few moments I enjoyed the view, but then it was time to go back.

As I lowered myself over the top, the wall truly felt vertical. I looked down and couldn’t really see a slope. It just seemed like a drop off. I was, admittedly, really scared. I went down four steps, reached my foot for the fifth and.... it wasn’t there! There was a hole where I had stepped. I kept myself from panicking, because if I would’ve slipped then I would’ve fallen off. I made it to the side and lowered myself down. It scared the living crap out of me but I felt accomplished.

Until I found out a few minutes later that there was a "proper" staircase (for Cambodian standards) with a handrail on the other side. I just hadn’t seen it. All that risk-taking for nothing, and still, it was not even 7:30 am.


Next up was breakfast and then Ta Prohm, the Tomb Raider temple. Here, the trees – and their roots – have quickened the ruination process. Whole segments of the temple city have been knocked down by outwardly expanding roots and trunks. Certain parts of the temple have been engulfed by nature. It was quite a sight. Really, it's worthless to try to describe. The words don't do the pictures any justice.

Honestly, the whole place felt like Disney world. I suppose that's the best way I could describe it. It was hard to look at this stuff and believe it was real. That at one point it was a city. That it was nearly 1,000 years old. It just looked like a movie set (which, ironically, I suppose it was at one point.)

We eventually headed back to sleep at some point in town. We were just all destroyed. Made it back to the park by 4, headed to Angkor Thom / the other part of Bayon, which is just a temple made up of all these eerie faces.

The faces are the king, some guy Jamalagaaaayas or something that I don’t remember. This temple absolutely blew my mind. I honestly felt like an explorer, or a contest on Legends of the Hidden Temple. I swear Bayon was the influence behind Ole Mec.

We headed to Angkor Wat to watch the sunset but this idea sucked, we left early and exhausted, back to Bar Street. I had an amazing bacon cheeseburger and two Anchor drafts for $4.50 total and called it a night early. I passed out around 9:30.

To be concluded...

- m

Angkor What (part 1)

Note: This is the first part in what will be a series of entries documenting my weekend in Siam Reap and visiting temples around Angkor Wat. There's so much to remember and document that it would be too big to do it all at once.

This was the weekend of the Angkor Wat/Siam Reap spectacular. For those of you not versed in Cambodian history and/or culture, you should know that Angkor Wat is a massive Buddhist temple – in fact, it’s the largest religious building in the world. It – and the temples surrounding it – date from the height of the Khmer empire, between 1150-1200 AD. They were used for religious and royal purposes. Some are as large as small cities. They’re ruins now, some with nature growing right in the midst of them. The setting is so unique and exotic that this is where they filmed Tomb Raider (as such, Angelina Jolie is quite the celebrity around town). It was a little odd that here, in the middle of the jungle, I could purchase Tomb Raider on DVD for a reasonable price.

No hyperbole: Angkor Wat is Cambodia. It’s on the flag. It’s on the cans of the national beer, not surprisingly named “Angkor.” What the Statute of Liberty, White House, Mt. Rushmore, etc. are combined to the U.S. cannot even touch the significance of this temple to the Cambodian people. Wars have been fought over it. No movies from Thailand are shown on Cambodian television because once a Thai actor said that Angkor Wat was really owned by Thailand. The name of the city nearby – Siam Reap – literally means “fall of the Siamese,” the Siamese being the ancient name of the Thai people.

I was told by someone here that if you visit Cambodia, but don't see Angkor Wat, you haven't truly visited Cambodia. After going, I understand why.

Friday

We headed up Friday in a bus where they played Mr. Bean in English. Titanic in Khmer, and Karaoke (in Khmer of course). The trip took about six hours, we were in by 1:30. We wandered around Siam Reap for a while – and it’s a truly nice town. Much more green and lush than PP. Parts of it actually reminded me of Hilton Head. It is, after all, a major SE Asian tourist destination.

We went to the Angkor complex around 5:30 to catch the sunset from the top of Bayon (sp?), a hilltop temple. I say “Angkor complex” because it’s really a huge mass of temples, ruins, and cities – probably thousands of square kilometers big. Massive. You’d need weeks to see it all. The sheer productivity of the Khmer empire in such a small period of time is incredible.

We climbed the hilltop, where we were afforded quite a view – the landscape of Cambodia stretched on for miles beneath us. I could see so far, and the countryside was beautiful: lush, green, dotted with lakes. In pure Indian Jones-ian fashion, I climbed all over the ruins of the temple, half playing, half in awe of the view and my surroundings. A massive storm drove us off the temple; we made it to our tuk-tuk just in time: the downpour was on. We drove home in the rain, just getting bombarded. Soaked to the bone. We laughed like crazy people because it was the first time in Cambodia we’d ever felt cold. Our drivers aimed for the puddles to soak us, cracking up the whole time. It was fun. Then we went into town, had some beers on Bar Street with some boys from Brainerd, MN, of all places.

More to come.

- m

Progress

This morning I went to the courthouse for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the extremely awkward name for the venue of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal) for a somewhat historic and important press conference.
Finally, after over a year, the internal rules have been agreed upon (there had been quite a lot of disagreement). The trials have, I suppose, officially "begun."

Preliminary indictments and conferences will begin in a few weeks. The rest of the pre-trial stuff will take about six months. The actual courtroom litigation is set to begin in January, 2008.

What does this mean?

It's unclear. The rules have yet to be distributed to the public. There have been some complaints from the defense support staff, but nothing particular. Thus, I can't comment on the content or quality of the rules until they're circulated.

What is clear is that time is running out. The ECCC is under a strict three-year mandate, and the clock began running in February 2006. That means, from the time the first defendant enters the courtroom in January, there will be a little over a year to hear and try the cases of the remaining KR leaders (~5-10 defendants).

A little over a year to hear, try, and do any appeals work for 5-10 of the top perpetrators of one of the worst acts of genocide in recorded history. Almost thirty years after the fact.

It's hard to be satisfied.

Rupert Skillbeck, one of the leader defense team members, told me over lunch last week that the likelihood of an extension is slim to none. The only hope is that all the defendants could be rushed in early to the chambers, allowing for the glimmer of hope that if all trials aren't completed by February 2009, the UN will allow extra time to finish up (but this isn't guaranteed at all). But there will be no likelihood of new complaints being heard or new trials being initated after February 2009.

It's a bit of a mess.

Here's the Yahoo story.

In other news, I'm going to a mock trial for the KRT tomorrow, and then Friday morning it is off to Siam Reap! Likely no posting until I get back Monday afternoon / evening. It's sure to be a ridiculously awesome weekend, hopefully as sweet as Justin Verlander no-hitter:


- m

Weekend in Cambodia

It's 9AM. I'm at work dead tired cause I slept like crap last night. I had my fan up to near full blast and was still sweating. I don't know if it was the heat that kept me up. I feel asleep around 4:00AM and woke up at 6:30AM for work. It's super hot here as well, plus my computer is broken, so I'm sitting here on another computer without my work trying to figure out how to keep busy.

Friday night we went to the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) after work for happy hour. The FCC was supposedly the place where journalists used to hang out but now it's a very touristy place that caters to fashionable (and cheesy) westerners and ex-pats. This is just my personal opinion. Also, the beer and food is twice as much as it is elsewhere in the city -- a cheeseburger costs $8. But the people in my group like it a lot for some reason so I go to be social. Then we hit up this excellent and cheap Indonesian restaurant called Bali's on the riverfront. It was great. I try to be adventurous with food but there's not much description on the menus and somehow I always end up with meat and rice on my plate, maybe a few vegetables, no matter what I order. Anyway it was good.

Saturday we did lunch at a western-style bar and grill on 240. I had fish and chips. Tasted like fish and chips, Asian style. Like, Almond Boneless Fish and Chips. Then Bobby and I saw the Royal Palace. The architecture is cool here -- unlike the Chinese, who use a lot of reds and dragons and such to decorate, there is a distinct SE Asian flair here. Elephants replace dragons. Yellows and blues replace reds. Yet there are still tons of huge gold buddhas everywhere (I mean, everywhere), some with psychedelic lights behind their heads that go a long way in explaining why many buddhists are hippies.


Saturday night we met up with a lot of students in town at One Fish Two Fish on 278; there were about 10 of us there, most of us from Michigan, Harvard or Georgetown. My stir fry was tiny and left me hungry, sad.

Yesterday I woke up and grabbed some donuts from Del Gusto on Sihanouk. The donuts here generally suck -- no glaze at all. Then I worked off the donut with an hour long bike ride through the city. I got the bike from KiD; some people get cell phones from their jobs, I got a bike. So I biked all the way to the other end of Phnom Penh and back. I got destroyed by the heat (it was in the 40's yesterday... like 100+ farenheit) and I also got an amazing farmer's/sunglasses tan. The farmer's tan might be the best I've ever had. Ended up around Wat Phnom (see picture) later in the day; WP is a 600-year old temple (literally means "hill temple") and is the supposed namesake for Phnom Penh. Here, I saw some monkeys, an elephant, more buddhas, then went to Sorya for some gelato, which I ate in about 20 seconds to cool my body down.


Home to chill / listen to a Kensington message. At night we went to Pat, Tiffany and Jordan's apartment for pizza from Happy Herb's. As the name implies, it's pizza with weed as the topping. A few of us (including myself) opted for the un-happy pizza, and it generally sucked. I should've had the weed pizza, perhaps I wouldn't have noticed how bad it tasted.

Came home later, and didn't sleep. This entry has come full circle. Great.

- m

A day in the life

So some of you might be wondering what my daily life is like here. Or, maybe I just hope to remember it. So here's what happens:

6:30AM(ish): Because my body hates my guts, I usually wake up well before 6:30AM, but can't convince myself to get out of bed until then. I climb out of bed a bit sweaty because we don't run the A/C in our house. I sleep with a fan on but it's still hot, even at 6:30AM. I then take a freezing cold shower; we have a water heater but don't run it because we don't want to pay for it. You get used to not having hot water pretty quickly, actually. Then I get dressed, apply my morning layer of bug spray, and head out the door.

7:00AM: I eat breakfast now, at one of two places (so far). If I want a full breakfast, I go to Sweet on Street 294. Here, I get two pieces of toast with jam, a fried egg, two pieces of bacon, two pieces of Canadian bacon, and unlimited tea for $1.50US. Or, if I don't feel like having heart burn, I go to Java Cafe on Sihanouk Blvd, and get a muffin or bagel for $1.50US.

Then I walk about ten minutes to work, get harassed by ~10 moto or tuk-tuk drivers who keep trying to get me to buy a moto ride to work. I choke on the smell of rotting garbage/food that wafts my way every 500 feet or so and do my best to avoid the dirty, flea-ridden (and probably rabid) dogs that roam the streets. My thrill of the day occurs when I try to cross Norodom Blvd in morning rush hour: it's like a human game of Frogger. Believe me, it's disconcerting to just walk out in front of cars, but that's how it works in Cambodia -- you just walk into the street and make people stop. I've gotten used to it, partly due to the fact that the driving is so chaotic here that people can only drive 10-15 mph, so getting them to stop is easy. Dodging the speeding motobikes is tougher, but not so bad.

I buy a bottled water from the same street vendor everyday for $.50USD and head into work.

7:30AM-9:45AM: I'm at work now at the Khmer Institute for Democracy, a human rights NGO. For the first hour or so I usually catch up on e-mail and things at home; it's pretty loose around here so it's no big deal. My work usually entails researching and writing memos about legal issues. It gets really hard to just sit there and research / write for 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week. Consequently, I do a lot of web surfing. I still get my work done.

9:45AM: Coffee break. The coffee is disgusting so I drink Ovaltine. Yes, Ovaltine. Here I usually joke around with the guys I work with; most of the staff members here are male, around the age of 24. The female staff members are very much "seen but not heard." I suppose it is cultural. They get the coffee and tea ready, set it out on a table on the outdoor patio attached to our building, and then drink their's in the kitchen by themselves, indoors. Strange.

10:00-12:00PM: More of the same; working, etc.

12:00-1:30PM: Lunch break. Me and Ting, my fellow intern from Harvard Law School, go grab lunch somewhere around KID. KID is situated in Bong Keng Kang 1 (I think I came close to spelling that right) which is dubbed NGO-land; it's full of foreigners and ex-pats and has lots of decent restaurants. Sometimes we go get Khmer food, or Thai food, other times I eat Western food (such as at the Herb Cafe, in the picture), even fast food at Lucky Burger, the Khmer version of McDonald's. I spend $2-3.50US on lunch, which is average; some of my fellow Michigan students eat street food for lunch, running them around 3000riel ($.75US) but I don't have either a.) the courage or b.) the stomach to eat that stuff everyday (I've done it once or twice with not-so-hot results), even though they do save a TON of money that way.

The portions are pretty small here so after we eat Ting and I often go to the Friendly Mart at the intersection of Street 278 and Street 63. This is a Western style convenience store and the only place in town I've found that sells Mountain Dew (I haven't had a can since I left the U.S., however). I usually get Chewy granola bars to complete my lunch. We usually try to make bets with the store clerk to get free food; there's not a ton of accountability here so you can barter and bet your way into discounts and food (it's never worked at Friendly Mart though). Sometimes we go to the DVD store on 63 as well.

1:30PM - 5:00PM: More work. Around 4 PM my ability to sit still in a quiet room and work on research projects drops percipitously and I find myself counting minutes until I go home. I like my work, but as I said before, you can only do so much quiet research (with no human interaction) before it just gets old.

5:00PM: Hopefully the usual afternoon downpour hasn't occurred. Like clockwork, it rains in Phnom Penh a good amount of days. It always occurs between 3:30-4:30 and lasts a while, although it goes on and off in that period. It can be torential and the lightning is just out of control. Even after it stops raining, there's just a ton of heat lightining for the rest of the night -- it can be incredible to sit outside on a balcony and watch it over the Tonle Sap river.

If it hasn't rained, I walk home, facing the same challenges as in the morning. If it's raining, I have to pay for a tuk-tuk ride. When I get home, I change and usually veg out for a half hour with whoever's home; we usually watch the Simpsons at 5 and then Friends at 5:30.


6:00PM: This is when I call home to Ashley / mom and dad from an internet cafe. The cafes here generally blow and I spend a while trying to get a signal or finding one that actually works. Often, I'm stuck inside a small glass box with no cooling system and trying to wipe the sweat off my forehead so that it doesn't drip into my eyes. It's a sacrifice, friends, and I hope you realize this (just kidding). It costs 100-200riel/minute ($.2-$.4US) and I usually spend about 20-30 minutes on the phone, running me about $1US a day.

6:30PM: Since we're so close to the equator it starts getting really dark right about now. It's not entirely safe to be out alone past dark so I wrap things up as close to 6:30PM as I can. I'm generally okay since I am bigger than most of the men here, so I don't worry about it too much, but still, it's not a good idea to be alone so I get home as soon as I can.

7:00PM-8:30PM: We go to dinner now as a group -- Lindsey, Erin, Bobby and I (the four of us share our apartment). We have a few good places by our house: the Boat Noodle (Khmer/Thai) and Sweet (Khmer/Thai/Western), which is where I also do breakfast. Or sometimes we'll all get on a tuk-tuk and go up to the riverside, which is the heart of the city and the general tourist-y area. There are a ton of great places to eat; we went to the Cantina for Mexican on Tuesday and it was delicious. If we stay close to home dinner usually isn't anymore than $1.50-2US, and it's really good; if we go to the riverside, it's hard to eat for less than $3 and we each spend about a dollar on transportation (it's about a 10 minute moto ride and a 30 minute walk). Dinner takes a long time; they're a lot more laid back here. You might sit for 10 minutes without getting menus. They might not bring your bill for a really, really long time, and eventually you often just have to get up and ask the manager. So it can be a time-intensive experience.

Sometimes we just stick around home and eat take-out; there's an okay (all things considered) pizza place at the end of Street 308 (we live at the intersection of Street 9 & Street 308) that I occasionally get a small pepperoni pizza from for $4. Pizza here is expensive because Cambodians as a whole hate cheese, thus it has to be imported almost exclusively for foreigners. They have a cheese substitute made from fish. It's odd.

If we stay in we usually watch a DVD on somebody's laptop. The other night we watched Shrek 3, which is available on DVD here even though it's still in theaters in the States. It might seem boring to spend nights overseas holed up in an apartment watching DVD's but it's sorta sketchy here at night and there's not much nightlife on weeknights. It's a third-world country, and an impoverished one at that.

9:00PM: I start getting incredibly tired around now because a.) I am usually up before 6; b.) the 95-105 degree heat just destroys me; c.) my body is on heightened-sensory mode all day because I am perpetually out of my comfort zone. I can't break the cycle. I take my second freezing-cold shower of the day, and then relax for a bit. I have my own huge bedroom and bathroom. I lay down on my bed (king size), listen to my iPod a bit. I usually try to journal for around 10 minutes a day just to remember what went on. Then I read for about 20 minutes until my eyes start closing. Usually, we're all asleep by 10:00 or 10:30.

So there you have it. My weekday life in Cambodia. Weekends are obviously different but too scattered to really describe.

- m

It's June (long post)

First off, some of you have left me comments and I don't have your e-mail addresses. I'd like to stay in contact with you. So, if you've left me a comment and we don't normally correspond, please e-mail me at mpaulv@umich.edu or leave another comment with your e-mail so we can keep in touch.

Second, I'll try to work on getting some pictures posted soon. It's tough because it's difficult / expensive to get my laptop hooked up to internet.

Third, my mom said I don't talk enough about the work I'm doing here, so part of this will be about that. It'll probably bore most of you so feel free to skip it, but I'm sure at least someone is interested.

Friday I went to a prison to deliver food with a mixed group of do-gooders: people from a variety of charities and human rights groups, church folks, and evil Western people from the US Embassy (believe me, all the Western-born NGO folks here have done their best to convince me that America is indeed evil, whereas all the Cambodian-born NGO folks tend to think of it as a nice, albeit rich, place). The prison was for women and juveniles only. In Cambodia, women can have their children in the prison with them until the age of five, and then the children have to leave (hopefully they have somewhere to go?). Most in the prisons are malnourished... the government pays 1500riel (about $.20US) a day to feed them; I spend 6000riel ($1.50US) on my (remarkably cheap) breakfast everyday, and probably close to 30,000riel ($7.50US) a day for food. So, it was pretty humbling to hand out food to the prisoners (some of which tore right into it), but I almost feel bad getting anything personally edifying out of it considering just how rough the prison situation was. Not to sound too trite, but the world needs love a lot more than I think we realize on a daily basis.

I got dehydrated after that and skipped the afternoon at work. At night we went to this yuppie ex-pat bar that was very fashionable and trendy, and I sort of felt weird being there, and I was generally run down from my trip earlier, so I called it a night after one Beerlao (probably the best beer I've had so far in PP) and went home to relax.

Saturday and Sunday were just general wandering around town days. We saw the National Museum, which was essentially a ton of Buddha statutes and old crumbly bits from Angkor Wat.

As for work, it's very discouraging. The Khmer Rouge tribunal is crap. Imagine a country with improving but weak infrastructure, with lots of poverty and malnourishment, etc. etc. Then imagine spending $60M in that country (most of which will come out of Cambodian funds) for a trial of maybe 4 old, greying dudes, some of which are senile. Then, consider these facts: a.) it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to effectively bring justice to Cambodia, so while $60M is large enough to make a difference elsewhere in Cambodia, it is simply too little of an amount to be effective in the trials; b.) the trials are being manipulated behind the scenes by government officials who don't want them to happen. It's a joke. Why not feed some of the starving kids I see on the street everyday instead?

Everybody here has some part of their family tree distorted by the Khmer Rouge, and 95% of the population wants the trials. But with the corrupt state of the judicial system here, and the fact that most of the accused will be dead in five years anyway, why not just use the money on something else?

It's frustrating. I believe in the cause of justice - especially for crimes like genocide - in the abstract. But this isn't justice.

So there you go, my first really serious post about Cambodia.

- m