Exotic

Our hotel is more than adequate, despite obvious shortcomings that are to be expected. For example, the mosquito nets do not close. Luckily the mosquitoes are only bad at sunset, and we are yet to find any in our room. The bugs are not too bad, although that may be because there are dozens of homeless cats all around the hotel. The shower doesn’t have a curtain, and the tile isn’t inclined, so the bathroom just becomes a swimming pool and Jessica (roommate) and I find ourselves scooting the water with our feet towards the drain after each shower.

The humidity is unreal. I have yet to straighten my hair and have instead taking to looking like some sort of swamp animal. We shower four to five times a day, and by that I mean rinse because there is literally no point in washing oneself as one will be filthy and drenched with sweat only minutes after toweling off.

So after checking into our hotel, we had a few hours of rest before we went to the Documentation Center in Cambodia (DC-Cam as I will refer to it throughout the rest of the trip). We are working for DC-Cam, and its literally one block from our hotel. We spoke to the director, who is one of the most intelligent and insightful people. While he has designed and led this center since its inception, as soon as the new center he has designed is underway, he will be stepping down because, as he puts it: Cambodians get too comfortable and are quick to point fingers and thus people do not step forward to lead here. He told us that while we may all personally take to their stories and their histories, it is not our place to fix them; the healing and the leadership and the change has to come from the Khmer people. I guess this took a load off to hear, although it made us all feel just as powerless at the same time.

Then we went to dinner with people at the center. A really really nice dinner that they set up in a private room on the top floor of this restaurant, like six stories up. However, they gave us a traditional Chinese- Cambodian dinner that consisted of: a chicken with face, heart, feet all on the tray. Pigeon with all of the same- in fact we watched the director eat the pigeon head and listened to the skull crunch in his mouth and then spit out the beak. Shrimp. PIG EARS- mine had a perfect ear bend. That was lovely.