Kompong Cham

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So today we got back from the provincial town of Kompong Cham. It’s right on the Mekong River and is a 5 hour bus ride from Siem Reap. Not bad.

We went there to meet with 8 other volunteers from the nearby provinces for an in-service training (IST, yes, yet another acronym) with Peace Corps. It actually was a chance for us to discuss how things at site were going, how language was going and we also learned some more language and got clarification on tricky grammar things we didn’t understand from our Language & Cultural Facilitators. It was nice to go someplace new over the weekend and nice to see some of the other volunteers.

Kompong Cham was actually a pretty nice town. It was much larger than I thought and pretty well developed. There were many paved streets and all sorts of shops and stores, and many very new modern looking buildings as well. It’s off the national highway- so it doesn’t get a lot of traffic… and it was nice as it sort of reminded me of Siem Reap, but without all the tourists and not nearly as busy.

While we were there, MTV happened to have an awareness concert going on in that town. We were able to get in for free as one of the event staff workers is a former Peace Corps Volunteer from Thailand and he let all of the PCVs in for free. So that was pretty fun. The artists were all from Cambodia. They also set up a carnival on the fairgrounds (lots of games like throwing darts at balloons/ or cans. There were two Ferris wheels and a couple of small rides for kids, as well as many food stands and vendors.

A few of the volunteers braved the Ferris wheel; but after a quick glance of safety inspection done by yours truly, I decided that since I didn’t see them weld the thing, that I wouldn’t want to take my chances on the fast moving circle. It looked pretty rickety, and I guess I didn’t want to be part of the next headline, “Peace Corps volunteered injured in Ferris wheel accident.” Ha. So a few of us stood on the ground and watched brave Lydia, Janice, Rebecca and Vanny go on the first round, then Franz, James and Kim Kong go up for round two. Will, Mitch, Adrian and I kept our feet on the ground and contently watched our friends go round and round. They all made it down safe and sound. (Sorry, I’m really not trying to rhyme. Promise.)

Anyhoo, the more entertaining thing to observe was watching our main Language coordinator, Dara, do the game where you try to throw a ball at the cans and knock them down to win a prize. He was pretty enthusiastic about it all. It cost 500r for 3 tosses (500r is about 12.5 cents). When I joined the crowd that was watching him throw, he had already spent 5000r. The best thing about the whole game was that it even had an announcer giving play by play, over the microphone. So as you can imagine the pressure is on and the extra hype makes it fairly exciting to watch. He finally knocked over all the cans by 6000r, and picked the candy chocolate wafers as his prize.

One more thing worth mentioning which was somewhat amusing …were the prizes you could win at the various carnival games you could try your luck at. They had the typical stuffed animal that a young lad could win for his favorite gal. Or they had several cans of pop or many choices of cheap beer. There was a plethora of candy and sweets that one could choose from. But ALSO on the table of prizes…… were things such as drinking glasses, laundry detergent, baskets, dish soap, hangers and other household items. Gotta love it. Yet another one of those things that makes you think to yourself, ‘oh yea… I’m in Asia!’ Ha.

Anyhow, it was fun to walk around and more or less BE at a carnival of sorts.

A handful of us didn’t stay at the concert (as a few of us from the Siem Reap province will get to go Next weekend at their premier concert at Angkor Wat) so we decided to head back, grab some dinner and get to bed early for the 6:45am bus we had to catch this morning.

All in all – it was yet another weekend on the road, nonetheless a very fun one.
All for now until I have more later.