April 18th

I got back from Cambodia the other day and I have about a couple hundred pictures I have to upload onto ofoto. I just have to find two hours when I can go to the internet café and use the memory card reader I don’t have.

It was surprising to see how much more impoverished Siem Riep was compared to any part of Thailand I've seen so far. And yet, those people were sooo charming. No joke, I half wanted to take a picture of this one woman holding her hands out begging for money because something about her, despite her age and raggedy clothes, was so gentle and warm, one can only help but at least smile back at her. The children pulling the sleeves of tourists, insisting that everyone buy books or post cards from them spoke English so well. I don’t get how they learned it! And they’re clever; they’ll ask you. “Where do you come from?” and you could respond, “Egypt,” and they’d say back to you “Egypt. Capital: Cairo.” I know this because I tested a small group of them at lunch after they said, “Capital: Washington,” when I told them I was from America.

There are people missing limbs everywhere, evidently from the landmines, some of which are still planted on Cambodia’s soil today. There are NGOs to train blind people how to administer massages. There were three parlors on the block of my guesthouse, all staffed by the blind.

For three days we explored the temples of Angkor Wat and I’d like to say I remembered everything we were told about each temple (the people involved and the centuries they were built in, etc) but the fact is, I’d forget about one temple by the time we’d arrive at the next one. And now, the only thing I remember, aside from what those temples look like, is that Tomb Raider was filmed there.

April 20th

A while ago….maybe two months ago at this point? I’m not really sure when, but Cindy showed me her cell phone which was a little bit damaged. It looked like someone had taken a razor and sliced off the top half of the buttons on the dial pad. Then she explained to me that a mouse had chewed it all off during the night. Sure enough, I looked a little closer and there were tiny teeth marks all over the thing: that cell phone must have been tasty. In that same week, Cindy had mildly complained about that mouse eating through three pairs of her pants. There stopped being mention of this said mouse within the last month or so AT LEAST, so I figured this problem was taken care of LONG before I moved in there. I was wrong. I hadn’t even spent a night in my new house yet, I had moved in one day last week and gone to Cambodia. Then I came back home, went through the door and walked to the refrigerator to pour myself some water. Then I saw the mouse dart to the wall and through a hole I had never noticed leading to the outdoors. One by one, I found each of the following items had been eaten by the mouse:

An unopened box of cornflakes.
A jar of peanut butter: the mouse managed to eat THROUGH the lid.
A plastic bag full of overpriced vitamins I bought in the states. I don’t wanna talk about it.
I should also mention that I had bought a nice looking cheap blue rug a while ago, and since moving it into the house, along with the damaged food supply, I’ve found pieces of dark blue fabric everywhere, including inside the jar of peanut butter where the mouse looked like it was making a nest.

After discovering all of these things one by one, I started getting nervous about the other things I left on the floor: my laundry bag, my suitcases, a stack of papers with lesson plans. I was about to throw my suitcases ontop of this tall wardrobe in my room when I stood on a chair and looked on top and saw the entire surface covered in mouse crap. MEGH!

So there’s the start of my problems with the house. Problem number 2: My bathroom.

Two days before I left for Cambodia (when the house was not yet “my” house) the sink’s faucet started to leak. Cindy had called the landlady to tell them about this and a repairman was scheduled to come and look at it the next day, but he never showed up. This is actually typical of appointments and rendez-vous of any nature in this town. I didn’t think this was that big of a deal, thinking I’d just deal with it when I came back. But not only had I forgotten about the leak entirely in my absence, I failed to realize this would somehow attract an entire swarm of mosquitoes to live and breed in my bathroom.

This is my first house and home of my own. I barely moved in and I already have to go to my landlord and plead with her to fix these things. Not in English, in Thai. MAH!!