Occurences

It’s funny how and when things occur to you.

When I think back to my first year in college as a music major and was deep into studying musical intervals and aural theory, I just couldn’t stop hearing the music all around me. I used to analyze the pitches and background music to commercials on TV for gosh sakes. As my father said, well it’s just a heightened sense of awareness; it’s what you’ve been studying, and now it’s all you see, hear or think about. It’s funny how that just doesn’t occur to you til it happens and you’re in it.

Well being over here, just recently…… not until it became the dry season again did it occur to us truly how much smoke there is in the air. I’d say the majority of it is from people burning garbage, and I suppose some of it is just the average cooking smoke, but I’d have to say it’s a daily affair, and it’s not just a small amount of smoke either. I suppose now that it doesn’t rain every day, it’s easier to burn everything, so we just as well burn every day. sigh. Nevertheless, neither of us really remembers it being this smoky before, but perhaps that’s because when we arrived, it’s just how it was, and well, we dealt with it. And now that we’ve been through the entire weather cycle, it didn’t occur to us until now--since the rainy season has stopped—that people are burning their piles everyday – and there’s just a lot of smoke in the air on a daily basis.

Or another example is having it occur to us how much we’ve actually grown and adapted to life in Cambodia. Having Will’s parents visit last month really made me take a step back. We have been here nearly 20 month already, and you’d hope that a person would’ve adjusted by then; but it’s nice to step back and realize it. Anyway, having them (fresh from American soil, frozen winter soil for that matter) realize all the little things that they thought were so different, strange or a nuisance made me realize how much those things are now truly part of our everyday lives and it’s really not a big deal to us anymore…. and that we really have adapted that much. I guess small things just don’t seem like that big of a deal or not even a big deal, but we just don’t notice things like the lizards & frogs making noises at night, or the roosters in the morning, or the fact that people don’t use toilet paper here or if you do, you have to burn it and not flush it, or how crazy traffic is, or how dirty the market is … and well I guess too – I need to keep in mind, that when we signed up for this, we signed up with the mindset that none of it was going to be easy, we WERE going to have to adapt and this was going to be a completely different lifestyle for us and we were pretty much ready to take on anything. I suppose the average tourist has a slightly different on look when going on vacation; but nonetheless; it was great to sort of look at how far we’ve come.

Anyway – soon to come, highlights from mom & dad bartsch’s trip to Cambodia!