Normal life
It’s incredible how virtually any situation can become normal after a little while, even if it started off feeling very strange.
My normal day starts at around 7, waking up to the sound of the family below scuttling about in the front garden and washing. For washing they use, like most Khmers, a large iron water pump in the front garden, surrounded by a concrete basin. The sound of the pump creaking, water splashing out in time, has become very familiar. It’s not unlike the noise my roommate used to make in college in the mornings. While Cambodians are generally a reserved and polite people, they think nothing of washing out in the open, so when I walk out of my front door on to my balcony in the morning, I’m greeted by the sight of my landlady in the front garden, wearing a sarong, hair covered in shampoo, waving at me and chuckling. She’s a sweetie. I swear the world could be falling apart, famine and pestilence all around, and she’d still crack up laughing and say hello when she saw you.
The morning commute consists of a walk through the monks’ living quarters at Wat Bo, where I tell at least five monks that I’m English, I’m a teacher, and I’m going to work. The morning exchange of “soseday! sokh sabay! where you go?” is the same every day, but is very reassuring and makes me feel at home. Then it’s out on to the main road where a rabble of moto drivers shout “sir!” at me, before we negotiate the price for a moto ride to Teukville. Always $2.50.
The traffic is heavy, but my moto driver weaves in and out of cars, trucks and other motos with consummate ease, only occasionally scaring the crap out of me by driving like he’s Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. The road to the Sankheum Center has become familiar, so I know where to hold on extra tight to the moto to prevent myself from flying off the back when the moto driver throws the bike into a two foot deep pothole.
Any day at the Sangkheum Center is going to be different at any rate. Combine teaching my young adults with going on errands to buy chairs and playing monster to three hysterical four-year-olds, and ’sweaty’, ‘knackered’ and ‘contented’ are three words that come to mind.
Back into town at the end of the day, and it’s all about a cold beer, meeting friends, saying “no thank you” to thirty assorted tuk tuk drivers and masseurs, and finding food. Eating out here is cheaper than eating in, so eating in becomes the luxury, not the norm. If it’s a quiet night, it’s home for CSI on AXN, a movie on HBO, or a $3 knock-off DVD from the shop in town. I also have websites to work on at the moment, and I’m trying to read Vernon God Little, but it seems like at the moment, I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow.
This supposedly being a travel journal, I realise this may all come as a bit of a disappointment, but I’m enjoying it. In the next two weeks however I might be going to Laos, so I will try to be a bit more Palin and a bit less Sunday supplement.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
