14 hour flight to Taipei--2 hour layover--2 or 3 hour flight to Phnom Penh--I'm finally here!
Can I just say it's really hot and humid here? As in, I'm sitting in my hotel room, with the AC on full blast and the fan running, and I'm still sweating like crazy. I am resigned to that fact that we will all be sweaty and disgusting this whole trip. And no one will be allowed to judge each other. I haven't even brushed my teeth since I left the states. Or showered. But I'm going to be disgusting either way so why care so much?
Besides that, arriving in Phnom Penh was a pretty swank. We were greeted at the gate by a former survivor who works with our professor, then we were handed Cambodian leis of some sort, which was pretty much the icing on the cake. It's nice to have welcomes like that and it gave us a chance to practice our Cambodian greetings (which kinda failed, but whatever).
It felt like heaven to take a dip into the pool at the hotel afterwards. I don't really know how they disinfect their pool--I didn't get a chlorine scent at all from it--but so far I'm still alive, so I'm not going to complain. As for the hotel itself...well, it could be better, could be worse. There's no safe in here which bothers me, but funny story...I left the room in a hurry to go to dinner today, and had my wallet with two $50 bills sticking out of it on the bed. I thought, in the back of my mind, maybe it wasn't a good idea to leave it out--but I figured, why would room service come so late in the day? Well, they did, and I came back from dinner today to find the $50 missing. I freaked out...but turns out they just put it back in my wallet. So this hotel wins for honest service.
Dinner itself was not bad--we had some semi-authentic Cambodian food. Though I'm going to say the one thing that I've noticed about beef in other countries is that the quality just isn't as good as the US. I was trying to eat the beef today and it was like...chewing on rubber. And oh--frog really does taste like chicken. I was also told that I eat well--I'm not sure what that means, especially because there were other people who were eating just as much and the same things as I was. But I'll take it as a compliment...I guess. (I have a feeling I am going to get very, very fat on this trip)
After all of this it's hard to think that I am actually here for work. Tomorrow is another off day where we're apparently riding around on a boat and visiting an island the aforementioned survivor owns. What is this, like a Cambodian Oprah?! But I've definitely been thinking about what to write about, and it's coming to me more after discussing with the head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), Youk Chhang. I basically wanted to focus on the education as it pertains to the genocide--how much people know now, why do they know so little, why has education been delayed, what is being done now, and most importantly--why is educating current generations about the KR so important? But I've narrowed it down significantly after some suggestions that Youk threw out. So instead, I'm going to study how students were taught about the KR between 1979 and 1989 by looking through textbooks and interviewing people from the time period. From there I'm going to go into the bigger picture of education, why it matters, etc, but this at least gives me a better focus than just...well, education.
