Traffic and travelling

The other day I sat on the back of a motorcycle for the first time. I knew I had to do it at some point, but I wasn`t prepared for it. Ingrid and I were with two nice Cambodians, and they asked if we wanted to join them at a café. Sure I said, but then they rolled out their bikes. I was unable to hide my nervousness, and they asked if I was sure I wanted to come. They all looked at me, and I felt like I was almost going to cry. That would probably have been a huge loss of face in Cambodian culture! Luckily, white people have no pride. (Except for the White Pride people, and we certainly don’t like them.)

I held on very tight to Alex, the guy who was driving. I tried not to cut of his oxygen supply completely though, that can’t be safe. When I sat there, I wondered if there really is a Buddha. Would my karma be good enough to survive Cambodian traffic? A monk passed us on the street, and it struck me that I really should get a monk driver. His karma must be super! But they’re not supposed to earn money, and my karma would probably get really bad if I corrupt monks with US dollars for my own safety concerns. So how could I get a monk to drive me around without paying him? Maybe pay him in English lessons? Give him a Norwegian cooking course? (I’d have to take one first, then.) Or I could make a monk my best friend! How do you befriend a monk? Possible ways must be:


Be a nice person. Check! I’m nice, at least when I’m not hot and dehydrated and sunburnt.


Shave my head. I can’t do that, I’ll look stupid or diseased or both.

Wear a lot of orange. No. I wore a lot of yellow when I was about twelve. I’ve seen photos, and I should stay away from this end of the colour scale.

Know a lot about Buddhism. I have read and loved “Siddartha” by Herman Hesse and “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac. This should count for something?

Jumribsu to you too, buddy! Let's hang out!

Well, this random girl on google images have made it. What does she have that I don't?

Freaky painting, "Cursed mountain monk". I'll stay away from the cursed ones.

Photos from site 1, 2 and 3.

I was nervous on the bike, but it went fine. Afterwards I wanted Ingrid to agree with me in the fact that Phnom Penh traffic is scary and unpredictable. She just sipped her Mai Tai and was annoyingly calm, but then what happened? On the street right in front of us, an elephant comes walking around the corner, between all the cars and motorcycles! A real, live one! I don’t know if my insurance covers sudden meetings with elephants in traffic. It was wearing a beer commercial, which is just wrong on several levels, but that didn’t make it any less absurd.

I got another e-mail from my mother, telling me that they have taken the vaccines they need to come and visit me in april. She also informed me that my stepfather and little sister are ”very worried about THE MOSQUITO ISSUE”  with capital letters. I guess these nerves run in the family? We’re not hypochondriacs, the world is just a scary place filled with germs! The crisis of the week is that I seemed to have developed an allergy against my mosquito repellant, I turn pink when I put it on. As if I wasn’t pink enough already. I will try to put on less, I might have overdone it.

I was at the bookstore the other day, and I picked up “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” by Robert Pirsig. Someone had mentioned it to me, and I thought it was an interesting title. Already on page 2, I started liking it very much. He talks about his son:

At age eleven you don’t get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds. You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn’t have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. … Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold.

I went to Koh Rong this weekend, a beautiful Island by Sihanoukville. Here are some photos:

The view from my bungalow 

Treehouse bungalows on the beach 

Nice looking beach

The goose and the rooster kept hogging the hammocks, pretty rude. I find that you should always have low expectations to poultry, that way you wont be disappointed. 

Locals on Koh Rong

Pot smoking slobs on Koh Rong 

The view from Paradise Café

The great escape

A few days ago I had a few too many spring rolls for dinner, and then sat on the 2nd floor of a hotel writing an e-mail. All of a sudden a bat comes flying in the window. "Can't bats have rabies?" I had time to wonder, before it headed straight towards me. I jumped out of my chair and ran for my life. What should I do, what should I do, I asked myself while running around in circles with the bat after me. Sometimes it would go away the other side of the room, giving me time to catch my breath and look for escape routes, before it started chasing me again. (It must have looked funny for someone just coming up the stairs.) In retrospect, I see that I might have scared it as well, making it fly around even more. Girl imitating bat or bat imitating girl, what would Oscar Wilde have said? A scary and exhausting experience. I probably burnt off the spring rolls, though.

Ingrid and I held a workshop last Saturday at the Youth to Business Forum in Phnom Penh. Our theme was education, and we talked about our experiences going abroad. There were several interesting workshops there, and we had 11 students coming to ours. I was impressed by the students' English level, and they were very nice to talk to and have discussions with! I was a bit nervous about holding it, but it was a good experience.

I will try to write a new blog post once a week (Thursday, I suppose), so that those of you who want to can get the news of my stay here. So what's new. I got another e-mail from my mother, saying that the skiing trip was successful: "After the first 30 minutes, which were rough, your little sister also enjoyed the trip." Nice!

Also, I'm no longer working for SCAO. They are a great organization, but I could only work a couple of hours per day there, so now I will live in Phnom Penh and work full time on a project called Let's do it. We will spread awareness about waste disposal and the benefits of clean surroundings to the Cambodians. I was surprised at SCAO, when I asked where I should put a trash bag. They just brought it to the lawn by the house:

They said that a group of kids came about once a week to pick out some plastic and metal to sell, and then they burnt the rest. This creates smoke with a lot of dioxin in it, which is dangerous to your health if you're exposed to too much of it. It's a very interesting topic to learn more about, you can read a good article about people making a living out of selling trash here.

The first days

So! I am here in Cambodia as a part of the exchange project Open Your Eyes, a cooperation between the international organisation AIESEC and Fredskorpset, which is a governmental body under the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (financed over Norway's state budget). The NGO I’ll be working for here is called SCAO, and it's located in the village Boeng Chhouk, 15 minutes north of Phnom Penh.


When I left Norway a couple of days ago, it was snowing in my hometown Oslo. Before leaving I took a few quick photos in my neighbourhood with my cell phone, just to have a memory of the norwegian winter in the warm and humid cambodian climate:

Frogner

The Oslo Fjord

Oscars gate

Vestre Gravlund

My street in Oslo

And now: my street in Boeng Chhouk

My new alarm clock

This is where I work 

This is where I live 

My sweet boss Samith 

 My cambodian colleague Sreylat and Norwegian colleague Ingrid

Laundry in a bucket

I received an e-mail from my mother today, saying that they were going cross country skiing. "We will trick/force your little sister to come with us", she says. Ah, the beauty of coerced winter sports. Pretty absurd to think about them in the snow, when I'm sitting here sweating in at least 30 degrees hot weather. There's no shower here, but a nice little bucket I can use to pour water over me. The animals I can hear right now around me are crickets, dogs barking, ducks quacking, a bird twirping and a gekko...gekkoing. Exotic! I wonder if there are snakes out there.

In our room, there is a shabby looking cat who refuses to leave. I've never been so good with cats. My family has a dog, and I think cats can be unpredictable and hard to understand. I tried to give the cat a special look, as if to say: Hello cat. I have not had my rabies vaccine. Please respect that. But the look can not have worked (it's probably different in Khmer), it spends all its time right under my bed, and sometimes jumps up on my pillow. I am of course just as surprised every time.

On the plane to Cambodia, I thought of a friend of mine. She is sometimes struck by the question, if all of a sudden I was on the North Pole now, what would I have done? What things do I have in my backpack that could help me in the cold climate? Maybe I could light a fire with my school books, or make a small tent out of my jacket and umbrella? How would I react to the challenges, how long would I survive?

I of course thought about my luggage, and the possibility that I might not get it at Phnom Penh airport. And what if no one was there to meet me? What was I carrying with me that could help me survive in Cambodia on my own? I had enough clothes from Norway, that’s for sure. It would have been useful to have my guide book to Cambodia, if I hadn’t conveniently forgotten it on my desk at home. I also got a nice book for Christmas about Cambodian culture and customs, but I ended up trading it in for a high tech mosquito net. Both because I was going to bring (but didn’t bring) the guidebook which had a lot of the same content, and because it’s heavy to bring a lot of books, and because I will admit that I’m nervous about Cambodian mosquitos.

I mean, what’s the use of being an expert in Cambodian traditions if you’re lying there itching all over, with a second round of dengue fever and a hint of malaria? You will regret it. So I had a mosquito net, a pocket with Norwegian money, my iPod, a medical book where you can look up different illnesses, some grenola and a book by Pierre Bordieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. (A very intellectual gift given to me before I left.) I’m not sure how far this would get me in Cambodia. I would most likely panic, wrap myself in the net, eat grenola and look up diseases in the book.

Yesterday my grenola was attacked by an army of tiny small ants, I thought that was very rude and unnecessary. (They fortunately didn't touch A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.) The Cambodians, on the other hand, are incredibly sweet people! Always smiling and laughing and being helpful and understanding. I think I will enjoy my stay here in the Khmer Kingdom very much.