Return from Vacation-Land

My Christmas present to myself was a 4-day vacation to Siem Reap town to hang out with my Peace Corps buddies and stuff myself full of Western food. I managed to blow nearly an entire month's salary in 4 days, 1.5 of which were spent on a bus. Go me! (Incidentally, I have discovered what must be one of the least desirable jobs in Cambodia: bus driver on the Siem Reap-Battambang route. My butt has yet to forgive me for doing this twice ever. Imagine if it was your job...? To be sure, there are worse roads in Cambodia, but I'll venture that few are as bad for as long.)

I'll say more on Siem Reap later, and commence with the weekend rundown. It mostly involved long periods of internet-gazing punctuated by large Western meals (and beers). Kevin, Sarah, and I also discovered a swimming pool, which may be the best place to spend Christmas Eve, ever. Sarah and I forgot our swimsuits, so we swam Khmer style, in our clothes.



And the sun, how it shone.



I also managed to get into the Angkor Wat complex for a quick sunset photo op (entry is free for foreigners after 5:30 pm) on my friend's rickety bike (no offense, Sarah). I couldn't make it up any temple stairs before twilight really set in, so I didn't get any spectacular photos. But now I can at least say that I have laid my eyes on Angkor Wat, and this less than 11 months after arriving in Cambodia. Again, go me! I nearly got lost in the complex in the twilight but managed to find the road back to town in time for a hamburger.



For now, I'm back at my site, back to speaking Khmer, back to eating rice. Damn, it feels good.

Merry Christmas, all!

The Post, It Works!

Thank you so much to all of you who sent cards and letters to the new post office box! It does work, and it's fast. You made my day. :-)

Wishing You a Merry Christmas

On Wednesday afternoon last week, I was given the task of teaching one of my 10th grade classes alone (my co-teacher was sick). I decided that since it was so close to Christmas and I could not for the life of me remember what chapter we were studying, we would learn a Christmas song.

Now I'm certainly not trying to convert these devout Buddhists, so I chose a fairly secular song: We Wish You a Merry Christmas. This one also has the advantage of being repetitive, so its total word count is low. (We wish you a merry Christmas/We wish you a merry Christmas/We wish you a merry Christmas/And a happy New Year. How many words is that, total? Ten.)

I wrote it all up on the board and had the students copy it down. I had them practice pronouncing "Christmas" (Cambodians tend to say Chris-mack) and defined all the strange words (merry, tidings, kin). We said all the lines together to get the rhythm. Then, right at the end of the class, the devil planted a fateful seed in my brain. Despite my sore throat, impending cold, and history of complete tone-deafness, I should sing this song to the students! So they can hear what it really sounds like, in America.

I opened my mouth, and out it came. I would say butcher is not exactly the right word for what I did to that song. More like I was Crazy Horse, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas was General Custer et al.

I realized quickly how badly it was going, but I couldn't very well stop in the middle, so I finished that whole darn song. And then fled the classroom: "Time's up!" I was worried I would never be able to show my face in there again. I had started off with a fun activity and turned it into a face-losing karaoke experience. Afterwards, two of my students came up to me in the teachers' room/vice principal's office and commented on "how strange" I had been at the end of class. But they had clearly forgiven any voice cracks, any pain I had inflicted on them. They only wanted to chat.

And with that I felt redeemed. Of course I can go back to that class. I will see them next Wednesday. And maybe one day, when they are graduating from 11th grade and I am preparing to return to the States, we will all reminisce with fondness about "that time Teacher sang We Wish You a Merry Christmas." Maybe they'll even ask me to do it again. Maybe I should start practicing now, just in case...

Ek Phnom

Back in November, Kevin, Rennie and I took a little bike journey to Ek Phnom. Ek (pronounced Ike) Phnom is a pre-Angkorean ruin just outside the main town of Battambang. I hear that it pales in comparison with Angkor Wat, which I have yet to set my eyes on, so I can say only this: Ek Phnom is freakin adorable. It's a mini-ruin, tucked back behind a modern temple and a huge statue of the Buddha, that most tourists never manage to see (a large part of the appeal). Parts of the temple are in the grip of the same trees with the gnarled roots that are so famous at Angkor Wat, only on a much smaller scale. The road to the ruin is charming, along the banks of what I assume is the Sangker River. Any visitors to Battambang should take the time to do this.

Here's a picture of the old temple in the foreground and a more modern temple in the background. The old temple is covered not only in trees but also in beautiful purple flowers.



Here are the trees, crafting their wily plans for stationary world domination...



Here are the boys, surely contemplating Shelley's sonnet (or else calculating exactly how many gallons of sweat we have shed this day).



And here is the largest Buddha I have ever seen.

Teachin

When Peace Corps staffers came to visit my site, they took some action photos. Here's class 12B. Aren't the students just precious in their uniforms? The classroom itself is one of the school's older classrooms (our school has built several new buildings within the last year, but the old buildings date from the early 90s). Every classroom at the school has a board of some kind (the new ones have whiteboards!), desks, and pictures of the Cambodian monarchs. Class size is generally between 30 and 50, although at the junior highs it can be as high as 60 or 70. Students don't change rooms like they do in the States. They sit in the same desk for 4 hours each morning or afternoon while teachers rotate through. There are no advanced or remedial classes. If a student is at a lower or higher level than his or her classmates, it must simply be accepted.



The concept I'm getting ready to teach here is past perfect progressive, nearly the most useless verb tense in the English language (had been [verb]-ing). Possibly surpassed only by future perfect progressive (will have been [verb]-ing).

But the students must learn all the tenses, so we teach the common ones and the uncommon ones. English sure has a lot of tenses. Do we need them all? Discuss.

The Calm Before the Storm

Soooo, I haven't been posting much lately because all of my recent attempts to get at the internet have been thwarted. The (ridiculously expensive) internet place in my town has had connection problems, and I haven't gone to my provincial town where I can sit down and type for hours. The good news is that for the holidays I have a connection and time to spare. Yay internet!

My last few weeks have been one of the more intense periods of teaching since I've arrived at my site. My co-teachers and I have actually done things like finish chapters, play review games, and give tests. During my outside-of-school teaching, I've started working on the grammatical concept of nouns and the compositional concept of the body of an essay.

I've also attended the wedding of a good Khmer friend of mine, and a couple of bons (I have no idea what the English word for bon is. I would guess somewhere between ceremony and party.). A real teacher is trying to teach me to read Khmer. And I'm on the 300-somethingth page of The Brothers Karamazov. Only 600 left to go!

Whoops!

Angelina Jolie, aka JoJo the Puppy, is not actually a male puppy. She is a female puppy. Which just makes her prima donna-ness even cuter. She's a little bigger now, and still fuzzy, and she barks playfully at all the mysterious animals that live around our house. Also my sarong. One of my new games is throwing her the carcasses of dried-out toads, which she will attack in the most adorable puppy way. I'm worried that I'm turning her into a vicious killer. I hope this is not true. Look at those eyes....