Saturday, May 31, 2014

Site Seeing

So yesterday (Saturday May 31) another Chapman Law student who is out here interning as well, Hamza, met up with Anna and I to spend the day exploring Phnom Penh.  

Psar Tol Tom Poung (Russian Market): We decided to go to Russian market which is this huge indoor market near where I live where they sell everything from knock off Long Champs for $5 to meat that was mooing about an hour before.  It is a pretty insane place.  EVERYONE is trying to sell you something and its a total bargaining game.  They tell you a price, you offer half, they go down, you go up, you decide its not a good enough deal and walk away, they drop even lower as you walk away and you get an awesome deal.  Its extremely fun, overwhelming, and stinky all at once.  We all ended up with some awesome new sunglasses and a new appreciation for fresh air.


Recycling, Compost and Trash cans!!

Royal Palace, National Museum, Friendship Monument, and the Riverside: We decided to go see some of the fun, fancy, shiny historical buildings. In Cambodia if you are doing anything traditional in any way, or are at work or anything like that you must have your knees and shoulders covered and unfortunately Anna's shorts weren't long enough so we didn't go into any of the buildings but we did get to look at them in awe.  All of them have such incredible detail, and vibrant colors.  You can feel the history that happened there, its a weird and heavy feeling, something that I never felt at American monuments. While we were out I experienced my first rain of the trip.  While we were walking from the national museum to the Royal Palace the skies just opened up and it started to rain.  We found shelter in a bar/restaurant along the river and took advantage of cold beer, water, and free wifi. Once the rain stopped we continued our walking tour of the historic sites in the extreme heat.


Beers on the river
 Royal Palace
 Anna and I at the Royal Palace


 Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship statute

I cannot wait to see more of the epic history that this country has to share in the upcoming months and am eternally grateful for all of the people that made this opportunity possible.

xoxo

Thursday, May 29, 2014

I made it

Yesterday morning (Cambodia time) I landed in Phnom Penh, and will be here until I finish work on August 1st, then I will travel a bit until a return home on August 8th.  I figure a blog is the best way to update all of my friends and family in a mass way.  But to be quite honest, I have wifi where I am staying, which is also where I am working, so I can ichat (text with iphone users), facetime, Facebook, Instagram and all that stuff on a daily basis as if I were still home so feel free to contact me.  Just don't text me if you don't have an iphone or call me, that stuff is extremely expensive, plus my phone is on airplane mode so you wouldn't get through.  Also keep in mind I am 14 hours ahead of California.

Nothing majorly exciting has happened in the last 24 hours, I've just been settling in, running a couple errands, and attempting to get on their time zone but failing.  Today Anna, my classmate from law school who is also interning at Equitable Cambodia with me, is arriving which I'm excited about.  Other then that I don't have much to report.  I will do my best to update you all on how this trip is going.  Also I will try to take pictures, but I read this essay in an Environmental Studies class my senior year about how Americans tend to experience life through a lens by taking pictures and never really experiencing it, thus only forming memories of a picture not of the actual moment/scenery.  Since then I've stopped taking pictures as much and have been trying to live and experience life without the camera, buttt I know people want to see pictures so I'll do my best.

xoxo-elaime