Highlights of the past two weeks

*Disclaimer – since I’m without internet at my training village, I’ve been writing blog posts and have not been able to post them. I’m going to go ahead and post a few things for your enjoyment. Ready, set, enjoy!*

Hello again from Kampong Cham! It’s been almost two weeks since my last internet foray, but I’ve got the whole day off in the “big city” today, so I’m going to try and even upload some pictures. No promises. What do people want to see? Pictures of my host family and village, pictures of the other Peace Corps people, or maybe pictures of the giant horned beetle that was hanging out on my roof the other night? And what is interesting to hear about? Can I start taking requests?

A few highlights of the recent bit of training:

- Being on a bus that broke down for three hours on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. This might be more of an ‘important points’ highlight than a ‘best things ever’ highlight, but it turned out to be something of an adventure. About 8 of us were on the same bus coming back from our site visit, and we all found it at least moderately humorous to be stranded in the middle of nowhere in Cambodia. An elephant being walked down the main highway passed our bus. Like you do.
- The plate of crickets that showed up at my table at dinner the other night. Now, I’d actually eaten a cricket when I came to Thailand and Cambodia back in 2004. A bunch of Peace Corps-ers also tried them (along with palm-sized grilled tarantulas) the second day we were here at a bus stop. For some reason, though, having them put in front of me at dinner was still hilarious. They’re really not bad.
- The spider that was wandering our classroom on Wednesday carrying an egg sack the size of a silver dollar that hatched tiny little spiders all over the backpack of another PC-er. Let me tell you, those buggers are FAST.
- My trip last weekend (by ‘weekend’ I mean our day off on Sunday) out to the fields around our village. With my family on a series of motorbikes, I rode my PC-issue mountain bike out through the big rubber plantation just outside of town to a series of dirt paths winding through a massive set of corn, soybean, and pineapple fields. (Pineapple fields, by the way, just look like very tidy rows of spiky pineapple tops. The pineapples grow underground. Who knew?) Because the fields are built on a higher patch in mostly pancake-flat Cambodia, you could see for miles. The soil around this province is supposedly notoriously rich, and, at least last weekend, it was dark red-brown and very moist-looking. Not too shabby if my food is actually coming from there. Anyway, the fields were beautiful, but we were actually headed out to a temple back in the forest. It turned out to exceed my wildest dreams, emphasis on the wild. What seemed to be the main temple was built inside of a mock pirate ship in the middle of a lake/moat where some children were playing and some ladies were washing clothes. On one side, a series of giant lily pads created a walkway up to another temple, this one in a more traditional form outside. Also part of the complex were a giant statue with one figure pointed skyward and an even more giant statue of a rabbit. Why the rabbit? I have no idea, and my family couldn’t tell me either. But we have some excellent pictures to prove it.