WE ARE HEREEEE

From Catonsville, Maryland, to Dulles airport in Dulles, Virginia, to JFK airport in New York, to Taipei, Taiwan, and finally to Phnom Penh, Cambodia (with a few questionable airplane meals thrown in there) WE MADE IT!!! WE ARE HERE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA!!! CHELSEA IS SO EXCITED!!!!

 Immediately as we step out of the airplane in Cambodia we are met with a rush of hot air. I mean hot. I honestly forgot what it felt like to be drenched in sweat considering Maryland's winter seems to be continuing until April, but I was reminded pretty quickly.

This was the moment Chelsea finally decided she in fact did not need the four pairs of jeans she brought.

We spot the man holding a sign that says Language Corps who is there to pick us up and he takes our suitcases and loads them into a tuk tuk (basically a carriage with a motor bike attached) . We then pile into another tuk tuk with a few other people from our program and off we go on the most terrifying ride of my life. Picture the game Frogger where you try to get from one side of the street to the other side without getting squashed by a car. That is how people in Cambodia "drive". Streets filled with motos, tuk tuks, no sorts of stop signs, speed limits, or even identifiable sides of the road you are supposed to drive on. There actually aren't even roads, it's mostly a dirt ground. We did see one intersection that had stop lights but people did not pay any attention to them. I believe they are mostly there for decoration.

The first thing I noticed about Cambodia was the smell. Nothing will quite prepare you for the smells that greet your nose. Imagine rotten meat, mixed with month old trash, mixed with how my hedgehog's cage smells after I don't clean it for a week, and then multiply that by three. Those were some of the smells that greeted my nostril. Just taking it in like a fine wine.

The next thing I noticed about Cambodia was that my feet looked like I was on my third trimester of pregnancy. They were so swollen from the heat and from flying that it hurt to even wiggle my toes. Thankfully that has gone away now.

Here's a pic of Chelsea's pregnant feet. It looks like she has webbed feet like my brother.

After a few years of my life were shaved off with the tuk tuk drive, we made it to the hotel we are staying at. We settled in and decided to fight our jet lag by exploring, even though all I desperately wanted was a beer and to go to sleep and never wake up (even though I'm technically still unemployed, I already miss being able to lay in my bed all day and watch Netflix. Forget I said that, Mom.)

View from our hotel room!

Our tuk tuk driver told us about a museum we should visit, and since we knew nothing about Cambodia, we agreed. After another tuk tuk ride and a loss of a few more years of my life, we had reached our destination.

The Killing Fields of Cambodia.

Well that was unexpected.

Not entirely sure what we are getting ourselves into, we step into the museum and get an audio guide. 

Wow.

Two of my friends here actually wrote an amazing blog post (click here) explaining the history of 

Cambodia, and the genocide that occurred here less than 50 years ago. It is definitely worth the read, and I think will surprise most people reading it. All I can say is, while I was not expecting to be walking through killing fields in the first hour of being in Cambodia, where there are still places you can see bone and teeth sticking up from the ground, it was such an eye-opening experience and explains so much about the culture and the people here. Being in Phnom Penh for the past two weeks, I noticed that most people are under the age of 30, which makes sense considering 25% of the entire population was murdered. However, every single person I have seen and interacted with has such a happy and genuine aura about them, even though they have almost nothing compared to our standards of living. It is amazing to see people be so happy and full of life, with having so little. Their smiles are so infectious that you can't help but smile back, even though neither of you know what the other is saying. I'll get into more of the culture of Cambodia and why I love it so much in later posts, but if you ever have the opportunity to visit, I highly recommend it!!! It is an amazing and wonderful place.

                                                                                                                                                                   

Once we got back to the hotel we realized we hadn't eaten anything all day, so we ventured out in search of sustenance. After walking for over an hour past multiple questionable looking food stands, with Megan McCawley's warning ringing in my head, "DON'T YOU DARE EAT DOG. DON'T YOU DARE", we finally wandered upon an actual sit down restaurant with an English menu. Naturally we all ordered fried rice, sans any meat. It was our first meal, give us a break. The rice did have black specks in it that I was convinced were fried bugs, but I just had to reassure myself that they probably weren't. Probably.

After dinner and a quick hour walk back to our hotel in the blazing sun, breathing in the lovely smells of Cambodia, we got back to our hotel room. Lo and behold, ants. Everywhere. And you know what ants love? MY ALMOND BUTTER. I already lost my beloved peanut butter to the still really hot peanut butter hating TSA agent, I couldn't stand to lose my almond butter too (honestly Laura how many nut butters did you need to bring? Three. I brought three) Thankfully I had sealed it in two plastic bags, but those little shits were still crawling on the outside of the bag, just waiting to get their little feelers in there. After spraying almost half my bottle of mosquito repellent on the ants (does this even help?) and contemplating carrying around my almond butter in my purse so the ants had less chance to sneak in there, I put it in the refrigerator, thinking they definitely would not be able to get in there.

By this point we had been up for almost two full days and karaoke was calling our name. We finally met the director of Language Corps, Rick Barnes, who Chelsea had emailed non-stop every day every hour every minute making sure we weren't getting scammed again a few times. I'm not sure why we pictured we were corresponding with a late twenties frat guy when in reality we were corresponding with a sixty year old bald man with a gnarly beard, but at least he is not PHILLIP DUNNE FROM ISLAND TEFL.



After a few one dollar beers and some sloppy rendition of pop star Britney Britney's Hit Me Baby One More Time, we finally stumbled up to our rooms and fell into a deep slumber.

^Chelsea tried so hard to be a part of the group

^lead singer right there