Week 5: Pchum Ben disruptions

As Tom mentioned in his last blog, this week we had Monday and Tuesday off because of Pchum Ben celebrations. So on Saturday morning we set off for Sihanoukville, a holiday town with beautiful beaches in SW Cambodia. We had a bit of difficulty getting there as our tuk-tuk broke down half way to Kampot (40 mins away) and we had to wait for over an hour in Kampot for someone to show up wanting to share a taxi with us to Sihanoukville ($5 each for a shared taxi as opposed to $25 each for a private taxi). Anyway, 4 hours after leaving Kep we arrived at the guesthouse where 6 of the PP volunteers who were standing outside (Seb was back in Singapore watching the F1). It was strangely surreal to see them again as it felt sort of like a family reunion which made us all laugh. We had a really great time seeing them all again, swapping stories of how our teaching is going, how it is to live in PP/Chamcar Bai as well as practising a bit of our Khmer with each other! It seems that everything is going well for them in PP and that they're all enjoying working at their placements. They were all really interested to see what we've been up to and what CB is like. In actual fact they've even already planned to come down and see it for themselves next weekend! Yay!! Now how to break it to Paa...

On the Sunday night we all went to a sports bar to watch the Singapore F1 night race which was awesome. Not only was it an exciting race but we also had fun pointing out "Hey! That's the Padang! The Esplanade! The Fullerton! The Singapore Flyer!". Quite bizarre. After a weekend of relaxing on the beach, jumping waves, entertaining beach vendors (including numerous episodes of Jamie very successfully ripping himself off even without their help) and enjoying the cheap food and drink, the others went back to PP and Tom and I returned back to Kep on Monday - involving another hour of hastly haggling taxi drivers.

We returned to Kep on Wednesday morning for literally less than 48 hours before coming back on Thursday evening again to work in the office on Friday so we in the end we didn't really do much teaching again this week. Even less so because this week all the public schools re-opened for the new term so on Wednesday CLC was closed and on Thursday only 4 students turned up to my 'middle' class. I taught the little kids with Tom instead although to be honest I prefer to teach the slightly older kids in my middle class because the little kids write so slowly that half of the 2 hour long lesson has to be spent by them copying a few new words from the board into their books before the lesson can really get started. It is all veeeeryyyy sloooooowwww.

We also only managed to get one teacher training session in this week so I started teaching the less advanced class how to give directions. They understood the vocab well enough but I think the concept of bird's-eye-view maps confused them even though I drew one as simply as possible. Change of tactics next lesson! Fortunately I still got to help out at the Coconut Project and teach them on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. I'm getting to know the girls who work there much better now and they can sometimes even understand what I'm saying in Khmer! Khmer classes are really awesome. This week we even started to learn how to pronounce and write some Khmer letters! Not easy I tell you. Not easy at all. Anyway, teaching the CP ladies to read is going reasonably well so far although I'm still teaching them really simple stuff like the sounds 'sh', 'th' and 'ch'. It's a bit boring for them so I think I'm going to start doing 2 vocab-orientated lessons and 2 reading/writing lessons per week to mix it up a bit more.

Back at the Red House the two cats who we named Darthvader and Unlucky have reappeared but we've decided to rename Darthvader as Ifya (I Fed You Already). We also had a small snake downstairs. We're going back to the Red House tomorrow morning and are meeting a new friend, Sarin in the afternoon because he invited us over to his house. Today we decided to go for a walk up a hill in Kep National Park which was a good idea although next time I think I'll bring a long stick to waft around infront of me while I'm walking to get rid of all the spiderwebs. I think we missed a turning or something because the walk was a bit longer than we expected but we got a great view of the sunset over the ocean and stopped for dinner at the Led Zep cafe on the way back. Weekends are going to be pretty full-on for the next 3 weeks because it's not only the 7 PP volunteers who are coming down next weekend - Tom's parents are coming to visit us the weekend after that and my parents and 2 brothers will do the same the following weekend! It's nice to know we're so popular - I just hope we'll still have enough energy to teach!