Still on hiatus from the yearbook, so here we go! I'm a vegetarian. By association. Sort of. Unless there is bacon or a delicious caesar chicken salad, I am living a veggie life here in the Kingdom. There are several reasons for this. I live with a vegetarian and she has slowly inceptioned my brain into never wanting to buy meat. It's ok, though, because the things that I've seen out and about the streets of this bustling city make me not want to buy meat, anyway. So this vegetarian diet has actually been pretty great for me because I have to, you know, eat vegetables every day.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the veggie quesadilla:
All it takes is some delicious fresh-baked tortillas, a little oil, and all the veggies and cheese your little heart desires. The special ingredient: Taco Bell seasoning. Man oh man, it's good.
Speaking of healthy eating, one of my students brought me some candy from "Chinese!"
Things have been a little dusty lately in the Penh, and this is partly due to the construction happening near our school. It's almost done, thank goodness! Here's Kim and I trying to preserve the cleanliness of our lungs on the way home:
This is an extremely busy road that was completely blocked off for ten days. No big.
In my last post, I talked about the gloriousness of Brown Coffee opening on our side of town, well guess what y'all! A Gloria Jeans opened up just down the street! It's like the Australian Starbucks. I think. Anyway, Toul Kork is really coming along. We hardly have to fight crazy traffic and go into town anymore, and it's wonderful.
For spelling practice, we made a trilingual visual dictionary! The kids love it, I love it, and it works. Hooray! The second is Korean, and the third is Khmer. Also, how cute are those pictures? I love third grade.
Lately, our journey home has included walking through a business/people's yards because it was too difficult for our tuk tuk to get to our school. We also buy our water from the school, so Kim was a beast one day and carried it all the way to the street.
Never a dull moment, y'all. On Thursday afternoons Becca and I have the same planning hour, so we spend it in her peaceful, quiet, cold classroom. We had just sat down to get started when I noticed water dripping down her wall. I should also take a moment to explain that, due to the construction, the water at school had been turned off all day. We were making do with the water reserves on the roof. Ok back to the present. Water then began to drip down all of her walls and even out of the ceiling. She ran to get Mr. Pov, and as soon as she left it started pouring out of everywhere! We were all scrambling trying to get as much stuff as we could out of her room, but most of it got soaked. We couldn't believe what just happened, but we just had to laugh. It's Cambo, and things rarely go as planned.
Vacation time! We went to Kep (pronounced Kipe) for four days of rest and relaxation. I spent a lot of time lying around, reading, and breathing in clean air. It was wonderful. We stayed in a bungalow right on the water. I watched the sunrise and sunset every day, and that was awesome in itself because I never see that in Phnom Penh.
On the last night, we had dinner at this wonderful little place I can't remember the name of. It was in an old French colonial-style house and had a beautiful view. The food was absolutely delicious, and there was even a ping pong table!
It was a great trip, although we felt more tired than we did before! Oh well. I suppose the rest of this school year is going to be crazy.
10 weeks and counting,
M
