Motorbike roadtrips, 8-yr-old hustling, and siamese cab drivers: the mega-Cambodia post

Oh where to start – I guess here: I was successfully hustled by an 8-yr old while in Cambodia. I have a bracelet to prove it.

Here’s something about me: I’m ruthless and arguably a bit heartless in my level of unresponsiveness to people trying to sell me things on the street. My general response to anyone whose first two words are “Hello Miss,” is simply to ignore them. And I heard that in Cambodia they cry to give you an extra little guilt trip, so I was well-prepared to stand my ground. Really.

But I’m sitting on the beach, and this 8-yr-old selling bracelets came up to me. She speaks stellar English (this being a relative term here in southeast asia), and I could tell she was just a bit of a rock star, so I engaged her a little more than I normally would have. If she had cried, I could have handled it. If she had said “but teacha, we are poor,” I could have handled it. Instead, she challenged me to a game of tic-tac-toe in the sand. “I win, you buy bracelet. You win, not buy.” I agreed whole-heartedly. This is entirely fair enough. And also, what kind of 24-yr-old can’t beat an 8-yr-old in tic-tac-toe anyway?

So now I have a new $2 bracelet. Below is the photo proof of the whooping I received.

Finished teacha. Which bracelet would you like?

Like I said, she was super groovy.

So I suppose a little background is in order before I continue chronicling.

This week was Tet – the lunar new year – in Vietnam, and it’s the biggest holiday of the year. But it’s a holiday like Thanksgiving is a holiday. It’s huge and exciting if you have a family to gather with, and there’s a little bit for everyone else to enjoy. But mostly it’s a time for people to travel to visit their extended families and such. Point B is that I, along with my fellow expat teachers, do not have family here. So there wasn’t much for us in Vietnam last week.

So I went to Cambodia with three buddies from school, Natalie, Nicole, and Archie. We took a Sunday morning bus to Phnom Penh, where we promptly caught a “taxi” to Sihanoukville, a beach town on the southern coast. Finding anyone trustworthy offering transportation in the heart of Phnom Penh turned out to be an adventure in itself. Below are some of my traveling buddies on a tuk tuk taking us to a van that was about 1,000 years old with 17 people and all their luggage in it. This same tuk tuk promptly turned around and returned us to the bus station when we decided that our lives and legs were not worth risking that day.

Look! Cars and well-paved roads! We must have left Saigon.

The irony here is that, by many smart people’s definitions, Cambodia is much poorer than Vietnam. I’ve even heard of lots and lots of English teachers in Vietnam who would move to Cambodia in heartbeat if only they would start hiring expat English teachers, the natural conclusion being than no one there wants to pay for us. Fair enough. But I can tell you this: the roads are nicer, the bathrooms are nicer, and the English of almost anyone you see is much much better, in Cambodia. Please Explain.

After our beach time in Sihanoukville, we took a taxi to an old, old (and very cool) sleepy little town called Kampot.

What's the most unsettling thing about this photo?

So three hours later we were in Kampot, alive and kicking. We checked into our guesthouse, rented 2 motorbikes (for $2 a day) and took off to go wandering.

This motorbike wandering was probably the high point of my time on this continent thus far. We really had no idea where we were going, just driving where the road took us. But there is something so wonderful about doing that kind of aimless wandering on a motorbike as opposed to a car. You feel so much closer to the world that’s passing by, albeit at a rather rapid pace. You can smell everything and hear everybody. I could think of no better way to show you this part than to take a couple of small videos. If you don’t watch any others, just watch the first one. But if you want more, there are, of course, more.

And here’s the thing. I’ve lived in a lot of places where I was something of a novelty to the people around me. Namely, a rural village in South Africa where my traveling companions and I were likely the first white people these people had ever seen besides pictures of Jesus. How’s that for pressure? However, I have never felt like such a spectacle as I did on the rural roads of Cambodia. At least not in quite the same way. South Africans would just scream “Umlungu!!” and come running. Vietnamese people often give you the once-over that can come off as highly offensive to the untrained eye. Cambodians don’t say much, except that they just start beaming and shout “HELLO!!” almost without exception. And they stare. A lot. But I’ve never found staring to be so durn cute. They’re a little timid, but so fricking happy to be staring.

If you are stationary, you notice that their neighbors are slowly arriving to join in the staring. And you end up with a scene like the ones below, and you feel entirely comfortable taking pictures because they are more entertaining to the people in them than they are to you.

Mom gains confidence, or at least gives in to curiosity. And what did I tell you about southeast asia and peace signs in photos?

Now that I’ve officially written the longest post in the history of this humble blog, here’s a final random slideshow. You can provide your own narrative.

Some practical updates: moves and travels and roommies

Well, I haven’t written in a while. And not all that much write-worthy has been happening this week. But a lot’s been happening nontheless, so here’s a brief update:

• I moved out of my old apartment two days ago and said farewell to my roommie Daniel. He’s off to roam the rest of southeast asia. Our paths will probably cross again, but mostly he’s off.
• My friend Ali and I decided last weekend that we would look for new apartments together. She hadn’t entirely been planning on looking to move, and I was looking to move fast, so it was potentially a risky decision. But, she’s fabulous and there’s actually no one I’d rather live with, and we have BIG plans for wall-decorating and Scrabble nights. AND . . .
• The very next day we found a big, fabulous, cozy, 20th floor apartment with a balcony overlooking the city and we TOOK it the next day.
• We’re moving in on February 1st
• I moved out 2 days ago: HENCE
• I’m currently in my temporary abode, which is my friend Emily’s couch.
• Next Sunday (and sort of now) starts the biggest holiday of the Vietnamese calendar: Tet. Sooo, next Sunday I’m going to Cambodia for the week with 3 buddies from school.
• As soon as we get back, we move into the new digs!
• I don’t think I could last another day without a break if I had to. It’s been a looooong month.
• Apologies for the scattered and logistically minded post. It’s been a scattered and logistically minded week, and I just woke up.

Much love!

The one thing that helped . . .

There are some things you hear too much about on this blog. Two of those things are: my apartment drama, and my job.

So here’s my question: Why stop now?

You may notice that it’s the 10th now and I still haven’t moved, as I was supposed to on the 28th, and then on the second, and then on the 9th. I’ll spare you the gory, maddening details, but this is the background for the coming story. Any move has a million factors, and this one has a million and one, and the whole thing has left me feeling like something of a dump truck who’s here to bear burdens that shouldn’t really be mine. It sounds dramatic, but it’s how I feel . . . today at least.

This kind of problem may have been a moderate issue back in the States, though it almost surely wouldn’t have gone on this long. But I’ve found that little frustrations like this become much bigger from an emotional standpoint when you feel like such a foreigner in a place. This is, after all, stemming from the fact that I desire to return home. after midnight. on occasion. So it’s not just that I have to hope to be allowed into my building at night. It’s that I’m getting stared at suspiciously on those occasions for being a girl who’s out after midnight . . . you know what kind of mischief girls can get up to at night, right? And you generally get laughed at at least once a day for simply going about your business in this city as a westerner. There’s something just very humorous about that for people. These things tend to exacerbate minor-to-moderate frustrations in my internal world when they come along.

So this afternoon was terrible. I was in such a self-pittying funk that I was ready to look for the next ticket to Hanoi or DaNang or Atlanta . . . or Chicago . . . or Charlotte . . . . now that you’ve got me naming specifics. ANYWAY.

So I tried one thing that almost always makes me feel better and less stressed . . . reading Barbara Kingsolver. Didn’t work. Couldn’t concentrate. Still stressed.

I tried sitting around and talking with other teachers who always make me laugh. Mostly just got questions about why I seemed so distracted today. Questions I didn’t particularly want to answer.

Then I went, after this long and mildly awful afternoon “break,” to teach my babies. The little ones I’ve told you about before. Out of everything I did today, that was the only thing that made me feel all better and like all of this apartment nonsense just doesn’t matter that much. They were hilarious today, and I think the big thing for me is I feel like they make progress, and lots of it, every single day. We’re moving in a forward direction. That clearly doesn’t always happen in this country. (It doesn’t always happen in any country, but please allow me just that one moment. A girl’s gotta vent.)

Barbara Kingsolver couldn’t make me feel better today. And if you know me, you know about me and Barbara Kingsolver.

The only thing that worked was . . . ahem . . . doing my job? That’s good to realize. That’s what I’ll sleep on tonight.

Let’s just be honest . . .

I love that the Backstreet Boys are still cool in this country.

There I said it.

Let’s Talk Gender

I haven’t blogged very much in the way of trying to analyze this new world I’m living in. Mostly because I’m almost certainly wrong about a lot of it. If I had attempted such writing 3 months ago, I know for a fact I would be reading it now going “oh how little I knew.” I’ll probably look at my today’s self in 3 more months and say the same thing, but you have to start somewhere, right?

This may turn out to be the first of several installments on gender in Vietnam. There’s certainly too much to write in one post. I’ll do it until I start sounding like an “angry feminist.” Or maybe until I’m finished sounding like one.

I was having an after-school beer tonight not far from backpacker central in Ho Chi Minh as I was waiting on my dinner buddy. If you want to see a lot of westerners, or vendors, or souvenir shops, or travel agencies, or prostitutes, or those who are here to take them to faraway lands, this is the place to go.

It’s easy to get so used to that world that you stop seeing it sometimes.

Anyway, I’m having my beer, trying not to stare too much at this couple sitting across from me – there’s nothing much distinguishing them from hundreds of others. An old western man with a young Vietnamese girl, the pair of them having an extremely limited overlap of language skills. I guess I noticed them because they were holding hands across the table. You see lots from couples like this in the way of physical relations, but hand-holding, as far as I’ve seen, isn’t high on the list. It seems that’s generally reserved for relationships with at least some emotional substance.

So maybe I was staring because I wanted them to be different. Some actually are, I’ve seen it.

But I stared enough to know this: he was looking right through her, and she right through him. They couldn’t have talked to each other even if they had had something to say, and who knows, maybe they did. I actually sat there and thought that I would love to read an honest book written by either of them, just to know what was going on in their heads right then, and what got them to this place. Because I can speculate about that, but I’ll never know.

I never know how I’m going to react to these couples. Sometimes I get mad at everyone involved, including peripheral players like Vietnamese men. Sometimes I feel sorry for everyone involved, including the periphery. Sometimes I don’t notice. Sometimes I don’t care. But with these guys I just wanted to know.

But the thing that’s amazing to me is how very average this kind of thing is here. And generally it seems the result of desperation on both sides. Hers is economic. Everyone who lives and breathes here sees it, and no one seems bothered by it. It’s only taboo in the sense that people don’t generally explicitly talk about it. Beyond that it seems no more significant than if she were selling him a t-shirt.

Also, I might be wrong about anything that’s in the previous paragraph. I don’t speak Vietnamese, remember. Just some stuff I’ve been thinking about.

Anyway, that’s enough of that for one night.

—————–

In other news, I just got back on Thursday from a lovely New Year’s at a beach called Mui Ne with some teachers from my school. I don’t know why I’ve never tried New Year’s on the beach before, but I’d highly recommend it. I’ll try to post photos soon.

Love you much!