A Typical Day During Training

A Typical Day During Training Sept. 24, 2008

Gosh I love the rain. It just started REALLy down pouring. I’ve been hanging out in my room enjoying the afternoon. The only thing that I really have to prepare for today is this music session thing me and a few friends are hosting at the wat tomorrow. My session will be teaching them how to sing a major scale – AND if I’m lucky, I’m gonna try and get them to sing some harmony. We shall see how that goes.

Anyhow… I thought I’d sit down and write how a typical day goes for me. I could write it in my phonetic version of Khmer: Chia toma da, knyom kraw pi-kaing prohail maung bram-muy goot. Krowie mok, knyom gnoo-tuk, howie nung knyom dtou p’saa nung teng nom-pang, chait, nung tuk-sun-dai ru knyom nyam mee no ptaya knyom. T’ngai ni, knyom nyam aha payl prruk no ptaya knyom nung knyom nyam mee.

I could go on like that – but really I’m the only one who’d be able to understand most of it- as those are MY own phonetic writings I’ve developed. What I said above was: Usually, I wake up around 6AM. After I wake I bathe and then I go to the market and buy bread, bananas and a soy-bean milk drink OR I eat breakfast at my house. Today I ate breakfast at my house and I ate noodles.

Actually I ate basically what everyone knows to be Rawmen noodles. Yep. Rawmen. Actually it’s not Rawmen brand here - it’s another brand – but that is basically what it is. It’s like the pop-tart of America. The very simple breakfast that’s quick and easy. Just boil some water over the fire out back, pour your salt packet full of msg and seasonings, and OH the noodles here also come with a small packet of some hot sauce that you can pour over everything as well. Eat it with some chopsticks and you’re good to go!

Actually I am still working on my chopsticks skills, but Rawmen is a good thing to practice on—the noodles are long and you can usually get a bunch up to your mouth before dropping anything.

I know, I know—it’s rawmen –and we shook our heads at it back in the states… and actually I think they kinda shake their heads at it here. It costs about the same- 12.5 cents here. But when- Ki-ki the dog won’t even finish my left-over rawmen soup (that’s when you know it’s bad.) But on the other hand it certainly does fix my salt cravings.

Sorry I tend to tangent into things sometimes. I think you’ll notice that a lot. Anyhow, if I don’t eat noodle-soup at home for breakfast, we usually head to the market and grab some fresh fruit, whether it be bananas, an apple, or ‘ply-meein’ (it’s similar texture of a grape BUT has a more gentle sweet taste, and not at all tart) OR some ‘sow mow’- which also has the same texture- but it almost tastes like bubble gum OR some dragon fruit (sraganiet)- which has the texture of a kiwi… but the meat is white instead of green and the little black seeds are all throughout the fruit instead of a nice lil circle. Hrmm… then I usually buy some bread; or last month I would buy some peanuts in the shell--- they are a little different as these ones aren’t roasted and salted, but rather boiled water poured over them (to kill the bad things) and were fresh. However those must be outta season now because no one sells them anywhere.

But the market is always a SUPER buzzing place in the morning. There are tons of people all going every which way… many noises and people ringing the bells on their bikes or honking the horns on their motos. (At least that’s how it is on the one road that is along the long stretch of the market.) You can also go into a more covered section where you can by most things that you need (from food to school supplies to clothing to shoes to soap and laundry detergent). The market usually opens up around 6am or so and most of it closes down around noon. So everyone goes there early to buy the freshest and best pick of vegetables as well as the best (cleanest) cuts of meat for the day. I can go into the details of the meat section of the market maybe another day… for instance all the smells that you endure if you can imagine are quite icky, (I mean, think of all that meat all around PLUS the warm temps. Ewwwww. Back to breakfast:
If we go to a restaurant we’ve ordered this sort of beef-stewy stuff with bread- which is pretty good along with some ‘café tuk gko, nung tuk-kaw’ which is coffee with sweet and condensed milk poured over ice. It’s pretty damn good. No need for sugar, the sweetened condensed milk is all you need. They love that stuff over here. OH- and more recently I have ordered Ovaltine w/ sweetened condensed milk – which I pretty much down in under 20 seconds, no joke. It is Sooooo tasty. So icy. So cold. Sooo good. (ya’ll know my love of chocolate!!!) Not to mention – vitamins and minerals right???

Time out. OOoof it’s really pouring down out there. SO loud and so wet everywhere! Will just sarcastically asked me if I wanted to go on a walk or a bike ride or something. I told him I don’t really feel like getting blasted and pelted with rain drops just yet, but maybe later.
THEN after breakfast our usual schedule has been to go to language class around 7:30am. We all power through it as it’s usually a 4 hour gig and boy do our heads hurt after that. While language classes are good AND I do really want to learn Khmer and get a good grasp of it; I really think a person’s brains can only take so much! We usually do our best to talk our teachers into letting us have long breaks- or going to the market to buy a snow cones or something (which works some of the time) but otherwise we just get through it, usually somewhat confused at the end of each session. Ha, sometimes I wish I could have the photos of our faces when we’re all stumped on some crazy backwards grammar concept. Good stuff.

After language we go back to our house- and if we’ve sweated enough – we bathe again and change into our ‘house’ clothes- which for me consists of my sarong and a t-shirt, and for Will – a t-shirt and his kroma (which is basically a scarf/fabric cloth thing he wraps around his waist- yes- looks like a skirt, but all the guys rock it here). (They do wear their boxers under it). Our host dad rocks it w/o a shirt. But you never wear that out into public,… only around the house!! (Same with the sarongs – which I think is crazy- b/c the sarongs are these beautifully patterned fabrics – but if you wore that out in public, I guess it’s sort of like wearing a bath robe to the mall or something.) The funny thing is that many of the other fabrics that a lot of the women wear around for their everyday clothes, I personally think, the patterns are really loud, gaudy and actually quite ugly. Not to be mean or anything… but it just seems funny to me that we can’t wear the sarongs out (which look very pretty in my opinion) yet – people wear all these other funny looking fabrics and everyone seems to be fine with it! Oh well. On the other end of the spectrum, the clothing worn for ceremonies and their teaching skirts are quite nice and really beautiful. It’s just the everyday clothes I haven’t come to terms with yet. Side tracked again. Sorry- back to lunch.

After that we sit down to some lunch (Nyam tngai trong). Typically its some sort of delicious stir fry served with rice with a side dish of soup and sometimes some other vegetables. I’ve noticed in their stir fry most of the base juicy broth stuff is fish sauce (instead of soy-sauce for me back in the states) and they use sugar a lot in their cooking; when I’d typically think of only using salt in pepper. Whatever the combo is, it is great. The whole fish sauce kind of concerned me at first as I’m not the hugest fan of fish; but surprisingly, the final dish doesn’t taste like fish at all. There are always Lots of veggies, with garlic, onions etc. – THEn when at the table if we want soy sauce we can have it OR some spicy pepper sauce which I have come to learn is like Cambodia’s version ketchup. They seem to put it on everything.

After lunch it becomes the hottest part of the day. We set our dishes aside and everyone just takes a ‘sombra’ (break) and sits in a hammock, or takes a nap, reads a book for an hour or two. They save their dish washing until right before dinner. I think they do that so that 1) the dishes are cleanest right before eating (nothing is really enclosed in kitchen cabinets or anything everything is done pretty much outside) and 2) because it’s too hot to do them right before lunch.

The break part of the day is always nice – if it’s super hot I’ll buzz up to my room and just lay directly underneath the fan. But if there’s an occasional breeze sweeping through, I’ll lay outside on the hammock.

Peace Corps typically has some sort of session or activity for the remainder of the afternoon starting at either 1:30 or 2pm – till about 5pm – so we get through that in the heat. (I always have my hand-held pretty flower fan in my purse on standby ready to use.)

And after our afternoon sessions we usually head back home where Sopeap is already preparing for the evening meal (called “Nyam a-ha payl lung-eeit). We like to kind of hang out in the back of the house (where the cooking area is) and just try and talk and practice our khmer, and spend time with Darro. Soon enough it’s finally time for dinner. After another delicious meal is served we scrape up any leftovers for the dogs (named Ki-ki and Nyoom) - and they happily eat it. We put the chairs away and bring the dishes to their spot as they cannot be done until morning because by this time it is already dark – and you don’t want to be doing dishes outside when it’s dark. (It usually gets dark around 6:30 here – like pitch black; there are not street lights around town – actually we’re sort of livin the high life because much of our training village does have electricity, but some of the other villages to not) – anyways- it’s super dark super early- so at 5pm mostly everyone is usually back to their house and they are in for the night.

After we clean up the kitchen area we head upstairs to the porch and lately we’ve been playing card games with our host brother Darro. We do that for a little while if we don’t have homework and simply just spend time with the fam till about 7:30 or so and then I take my final bath for the day. (Usually my favorite because I know that it has cooled down and I am going to be clean and hopefully not sweaty for maybe 10-12 hours or more!)

After we’ve said goodnight to the fam we crawl into our rooms and put things away and tuck our mosquito net into the bed. If we feel like reading – we’ll read for a little bit; OR since we live in the wonderful world of technology – and I happened to bring a lap top here – sometimes we watch movies or episodes of ‘The Office’ on my computer. Actually I was just thinking about that the other night – how I sort of feel a little wrong having access to these types of amenities while I’m here. I mean really, I never thought serving in the Peace Corps entailed me and Will watching “Planet Earth” (which we purchased in the market in Phnom Penh (you can get almost any DVD you want for about $2 here … let me mention there are no copyright laws in Cambodia- so there is a LOT of ripped media you can get really cheap. Side note.) But yes- the luxuries of modern technology- and the simple fact that we live in Asia. (Did I mention I got some nice iPod/computer speakers in the market for $10? But yea- who knew Peace Corps was gonna be like this! (Ha- I know it isn’t this nice for many people; some people are hard-core roughing it quite a bit more than we are; it depends on what part of the world you’re in… but in all honesty we don’t have it too bad. Good food. Asia & their gadgets and technology. What more could we ask for? – (I personally would ask to live next to the ocean, but that was outta my hands. I mean we will be living close to Angkor Wat, I really cannot complain).

After enough movie, book or talking we usually hit the light and go to sleep around 8:30 or 9pm to do all of the above written stuff all over again.

And that, my friends, is a typical day of training. I’m sure it’ll change somewhat when we move to our permanent site and especially once the school year starts and we begin teaching… but this is what I’ve come to experience in the first two months. Wow. It has been two months and one day since we landed in Phnom Penh. My how the time flies. My how it does most definitely NOT feel like September right now. Ha.

Over and out.