Channelling Mr Toad

The patisserie is just across the road from the school.

First thing in the morning they cook the cakes in special containers with burning wood on top and underneath.

The cook lifted the lid to show me the cakes sizzling away.

Then Grandma bags them all up and hangs them up and they sell them for 60 cents for a bag of five.

And jolly good they are too!

Next to the school there’s also a shop that sells the most delicious biscuits called caterpillar biscuits.

I think the name refers to the shape rather than any of the ingredients.

They are a delicate, crispy coconut biscuit, fatally moreish,

and only fifty cents a large bag – I have already discovered that resistance is futile.

 

 

It always surprises me what some people need to have spelled out for them.

I suppose the proprietors are covering their own butts by pointing out that if you slip inside whilst perched on the rim, you have only yourself to blame and no compensation will be coming your way.

I was unsure what the little hose in the picture, which is always on the wall next to each loo, was for at first …  although clearly not for my hair or my feet as the sign helpfully pointed out.

On enquiring, I discovered that it is known by expats as ‘the bum gun’.  The locals use it instead of loo paper, because the narrow pipes mean that all loo paper has to be put in a bin and not flushed away.

Ever curious, I pulled the trigger and a very forceful jet of water shot out.  I’m impressed that the locals can use it without:

• a) yelping in pain or
• b) emerging from the cubicle  dripping wet.

In some places there’s no bum gun and no flush mechanism, because there’s no running water.

In this case you scoop a potful of water from a container and pour it down the loo.

I wash my hands in it first, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re meant to do.  In some places, however, that’s quite tricky.

These are the facilities in our lunch cafe.  The only place to put the bowl is on top of the loo – luckily I always have my trusty bottle of hand gel with me.

 

No, not a description of me – although it comes pretty close at times over here – it’s an indication of some of the myriad types of rice to be found in Cambodia.

I’ve become a bit of a rice expert over the past four weeks, and I now know that the average Cambodian eats between 500g and 1kg of rice per day, depending on their size, and a family of five adults gets through 1.5 tonnes a year.

They eat rice for all three meals a day, and sometimes snack on rice between meals too.  Cambodian rice is of excellent quality and grown without pesticides; Thailand imports Cambodian rice to eat, while exporting its own rice to Europe.

There are rice paddies everywhere in the countryside around Siem Reap, making everything a beautiful, vibrant green, and this is now the season for transplanting the rice from the nursery to the main fields so people are out in force tending their crops.

These farmers are pulling the young rice out of the water by the roots.  They then bundle it up

and cut the tops off.

Then he takes it to the main paddy field, while she takes the trimmings off to be recycled.

They plant out the young rice plants in the traditional way; you push your thumb into the mud and then put three plants into each thumb hole, spacing them apart to leave room for growth.

This crop will be ready for harvesting in about another four months.

As the temperature is pretty constant here, it’s water supply that determines how many rice crops farmers can grow each year.  In the countryside away from the river, they can only grow one crop, during the rainy season.  Near the river, they can grow two crops a year, and if you’re lucky enough to have land near Tonle Sap Lake, you can grow three crops a year.  And 85% of Cambodians are farmers, so that adds up to an awful lot of rice.

Eating rice is such a fundamental part of life here that there are five different verbs meaning ‘to eat rice’ and it depends on who you are talking to, as to which one you use.

• To speak to a child, you use the word ‘see’ (don’t know how it’s spelt, but that is the pronunciation).
• For young adults the verb is ‘nyam’.
• To speak to an older person you must use ‘pisar’.
• To speak to a monk, it is ‘chan’.
• And in the unlikely event that you are ever speaking to the King about his rice-eating habits, the verb is ‘soy’.

Reflecting on this, the closest parallel I can come up with in England is alcohol.  Young people are unlikely to say to each other ‘would you care for an aperitif?’  And it would be considered highly inappropriate to say to the Queen, ‘get that down your neck, Ma’am’.  Different cultures, different priorities.

Leapt onto a vespa again yesterday … am now on first name terms with the owner of the company as I’m such a good customer.  We went out to explore the Cambodian countryside and I had a fantastic day, marred only by a slight social faux pas at lunchtime.

The day started with a visit to a family who collect sugar palm juice and make palm sugar.  One of the sons shinned up a tree and came down carrying a container full of palm juice.

The family either sell the fresh juice, which is sweet and slightly smoky because they smoke the wooden containers to keep the ants out, or they boil it down and make palm sugar.  It takes 20 litres of juice to make 3 kg of sugar, and the sugar sells at the local market for $1.25 a kg.

This family makes $7 a week from their sugar, and as there are 7 of them, this means that they are well below the povery threshold of $2 per person per day.  Their surroundings give an indication of their hand to mouth existence.

This woman makes her own baskets.  She goes into the forest to collect the rattan; she cleans it and strips it and then weaves baskets, which she sells for $1.  Apart from a distressing lack of teeth, she’s in a much better position than the sugar farmers.Her house is solidly built, and her husband wanders around smiling affably and showing off his well-turned ankles.

We went to a temple which also has a school – and there are more monks than you can shake a stick at.

These monks are learning a poem about the virtues of doing things thoroughly.

I just wish my afternoon class would be a quarter as attentive as this class.

I’ve decided that next time, I’m coming back as a monk.

We went inside the pagoda and there was a large crowd of local people receiving instruction from a monk.

But before their lesson, they had prepared lunch for the whole monastery.

When the bell rang the monks just wandered in and sat down to eat.

This is the chief monk, who kindly allowed me to photograph him.

I was impressed to see that he has not one, but two, mobile phones.  My tour guide was very disapproving.  ‘Things you can see on Facebook and Google aren’t suitable for monks,” he said.

The guide then took me to get my fortune told by a renowned local fortune teller, who told me that he had learned his art from his father.  He tells people’s fortunes and also sells atomisers full of special fragrance guaranteed to bring customers to your shop or bring your wayward husband back home.

I had to tell him the day and the date I was born and he stared at me and then made a series of signs on a whiteboard (a concession to modernity, I think) and told me some very accurate things about my past, which startled me, and predicted great success with a new venture from August to December this year … watch this space and I’ll report back on 1 January 2017, possibly from my yacht in the Bahamas.

We had lunch in a barbecue shack in a tiny village, prepared by a local cook, and started off with fried chicken which we ate with our fingers.  The cook then came out and poured some water into a bowl and put it on the table.  Oh good, a fingerbowl, I thought and promptly washed my fingers in it.  The cook looked rather surprised and went off to get another bowl for some more water.  It turned out that it wasn’t a finger bowl after all, but an ingredient for the fresh spring rolls which we were having next.  This is not quite as embarrassing as drinking out of the finger bowl, but it still marks you out as socially inept and unlikely to be invited to dinner by the upper echelons of Siem Reap.

My guide showed me how to roll a fresh spring roll, using the sticky rice paper wrap, soaked in the ‘finger bowl’and when he’d finished it looked neat and appetizing.

But the gods of table etiquette had it in for me by now, and I blame them entirely for sabotaging my attempt.

As we walked up the road after lunch, we were overtaken by an ox cart.

There were two oxen pulling it, and two bringing up the rear, and as it drew level with us, we could see that it was being driven by a very elderly man.

It seems incredible that these are still in use in the twenty-first century, but farming in Cambodia is not mechanised at all; everything is done by hand and without chemicals – not because they think that chemicals are bad, but because they can’t afford them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These posters can be found all over Siem Reap

and I’ve been approached three times so far by the so-called ‘baby milk mothers’.  They are usually around the busiest part of town in the evening with a baby strapped to them.  They approach and say ‘I don’t want money – just some milk for the baby.’  They persuade you to go to the supermarket to buy expensive powdered milk, and after you’ve left, feeling that you’ve nobly helped a mother and baby, she returns the milk to the shop and she and the shopkeeper share the money between them.  The babies are often drugged to keep them quiet, and local ex-pats believe that the women are being controlled by a mafia-style gang, who drop them off every evening to roam the streets.  The women don’t always have the same baby with them, giving rise to the suspicion that they rent the babies, and have to bring in enough money in an evening to pay the rental charge and to make a profit.

There’s a group of Australian students in the hotel at the moment who are studying sexual trafficking in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, including the ‘virginity price’.  Cambodian men believe that sex with a virgin will bring them good health and a woman’s virginity price is anywhere between $600 and $1,500.  Often the young women don’t want to do it, but their parents tell them to, and parents in Cambodia must always be obeyed.

The girls who sell their virginity often find that it’s not just a one-off transaction, and they find themselves working in the sex trade in the many bars and clubs in town.  Similarly, girls are sold into prostitution by their parents because they simply can’t afford to keep them.

Cambodia’s also well-known as a destination for child sex-offenders, and these tend to be foreigners, not Cambodians.  The British organisation that I came through insists on a police check for all their volunteers, but it would seem that not all organisations are so rigorous.

I went to the landmine museum yesterday, and learnt the story of the man who started it.  He was a child soldier with the Khmer Rouge, then defected to the Vietnamese army and laid thousands of mines throughout his military career.  Once the war was over, he made it his mission to clear as many mines as possible and to set up a home for children orphaned by land mines or maimed by them.

Land mines were laid over a period of twenty years by the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, and it is estimated that there could still be 5 million in the ground.  The number of people injured by land mines is decreasing every year, but Cambodia has the highest number of amputees per capita of any country in the world, and the presence of landmines prevents people from working the land, increasing poverty and hunger.

Some of the museum finds are displayed in cabinets with explanations, while others have been made into more artistic installations.

The Cambodian attitude to disability is that it is the result of bad karma, and something to turn your back on.  Grace House has the only disability unit in the province and the children there had often been locked up by their families before, and hidden away – and one child was found abandoned by the motorway.  These children are safe and cared-for at school, but I know that the staff worry about what will happen to them when they become adults.

The Big Luck Project trains disabled people to enable them to earn their own living, they have a series of workshops and a shop to sell the finished products.

This blind man works in the textiles workshop, with disabled women on the machines.

This man makes wooden statues.

This is a student painter who is learning by copying other artists’ work.

Western run and/or financed organisations can help to some extent, but the Cambodian attitude towards disability needs to change before significant progress can be made.

There have been quite a few torrential downpours this week.  They don’t last long and the sun soon comes out again, but things do get rather damp.  Tuk tuks in particular are not very waterproof – they roll plastic or fabric covers down the sides if it starts to rain, a bit like putting a cover over a buggy – but it doesn’t keep a monsoon out, and the seats are always damp.  So after you’ve been sitting down for a couple of minutes you start to feel decidedly moist, and even though you’re warm and moist, which has got to be better than cold and moist, it’s not particularly pleasant and is an unwelcome reminder of what may well be in store in years to come.

At school some children don’t come in when it’s raining hard, while others don’t seem to mind the rain at all.

Some go for conventional methods of staying dry

While others are a little more creative.

When the rain starts coming into the classroom, we simply move the desks out of the way and carry on.

The  children wade through the water to get into the classroom, and the teacher puts a cloth on the floor for them to dry their feet on before they sit down.

This water was well over ankle deep, but they just ploughed through it.

Ironically, we’re doing the topic of seas, rivers and lakes at the moment in the Incredible English textbook, so they have a lot of water-based vocabulary to draw on.

We had a typing lesson in the computer room on marine life, and everybody typed away about dolphins jumping and playing in the water.  All except one boy, and his dolphins were having much more fun.

At break time they dash out to buy snacks from a stall outside the gate.  One popular option looks like cellophane with red grains sprinkled on it.

But nobody seems able to explain exactly what it is; I only know that it’s not sweet, and is possibly made from rice.

The children in the reception class are given a snack at break, and watermelon is a popular option.

The boys love playing football at break – their hero is Ronaldo, pronounced in such a strange way that I didn’t know who they were talking about until they wrote it down.

Even the less sporty boys get in on the act by making their own table football sets.

You press the piece of paper down so that it unfolds and moves the ball … ingenious.

The American students left, and we had a class photo

Luckily this was the morning class and not the afternoon class, or there would have been a photo of a riot.

As an example of what I mean:

here is the morning class happily enjoying their week’s library lesson

and here is the afternoon class, the same day.

As usual, it had descended into a free-for-all, with half of them brawling and the other half cheering them on.

But they did work sensibly and make some lovely paper lanterns on Thursday

and I was hopeful that we might have turned the corner – but we were back to unarmed combat again on Friday, so I think that Thursday was just an aberration.

On Friday the monthy rice delivery came.  The school provides rice for families who can’t afford to buy enough to eat, and there are several in my class whose parents are on the rice list.  The school also provides bicycles for children who live too far away to walk – but not for those in the younger classes, who have to hitch a ride with their older siblings.

There are about ten parents who come to pick up their children after school.  All the rest, no matter how small they are, make their own way home.

 

 

 

There was great excitement at breakfast today – well from me, at any rate.  I walked into the dining room to be greeted by a brand, spanking new coffee machine … and it works perfectly!  Chay, the assistant manager, told me proudly that they’d spent $4,500 on it.

It’s the sort that grinds the beans before making the coffee, and it has an Italian-sounding name – a definite improvement on the urn that dispensed coffee in the mornings up until now.

Breakfasts are pretty good here in the hotel.  There’s always a selection of tropical fruit –

– the purple dragon fruit has become a favourite since I arrived.

And thanks to Cambodia being a former French colony, there are passable croissants

and sliced baguette.

This last item is the source of many early morning problems for me.

I am very fond of toast for breakfast – and they have a toaster here – a large 4-slice one made by a reputable manufacturer.

The problem with the toaster is that it shoots the bread out so powerfully when it’s cooked that the small slices of baguette ping all over the room.  Because this is not a throwaway society, the toaster has probably been repaired many times, and another ex-pat suggested that they may have put the spring from a motorbike kick-stand into it, which would explain the velocity with which the bread leaves the toaster.

I have tried several ways of dealing with this issue, and none are entirely successful.  Trying to catch the toast in mid-air is very difficult, especially if there are other guests milling around the buffet counter.  Jamming your plate down on top of the machine as soon as you hear it pop up is more successful, but it does occasionally backfire and the toast shoots off the bottom of the plate at an angle and ricochets off the walls.  It’s hard to look nonchalant while this is happening and other guests are staring at you, with their own breakfast lying meekly on their plate.  I’m wondering whether heavier bread might be a better solution – perhaps I could weigh it down with something, or jam two slices in together so that they’re too squashed to propel themselves skywards, or invest in a butterfly net to catch it in mid-air.

I was complaining to some other volunteers about the toaster, and was told in no uncertain terms that I should consider myself fortunate to have access to a toaster at all, even one that gives every impression of having been crossed with a catapult.  So great is the problem that the ex-pats page on Facebook is full of tips about how to make toast without a toaster – the favoured method being dry fried in a frying pan.  But I am assured that this tastes nothing like proper toast; the only advantage being that it does stay in the pan once it’s cooked and doesn’t hurl itself across the room, kamikaze-style, leaving a trail of crumbs behind it.

 

I’ve been to a cookery class.  A local hotel runs half-day classes which start with a visit to the market with the chef.

She bought some of the ingredients for the meal we were going to cook.

These are banana flowers, used to make a salad.

No part of the animal goes to waste – vegetarians, please look away now –

 

and I always thought pigs’ tails were curly – these look disturbingly like fingers.

With no refrigeration, flies are a problem and so the stall holders wave a bag on a stick around in a desultory way, trying to shoo them off the meat – but with a million flies and one bag, it’s not very effective.

What I thought was a washing up bowl –

– turned out to be a nifty device for shredding coconut.

You bring your coconut to the market and this smiley lady will crack it and grate it for you, whizzing it round and round on the protuberance in the middle of the bowl.  She’ll also soak it to make your coconut cream, or you can take the grated flesh home and do it yourself.

Shopping done, we went back to the hotel to cook lunch.

First we had to remove all the baby bananas from the banana flower, as we only wanted the leaves.

Then we assembled the ingredients for the banana flower, chicken and shrimp salad.

and for the fish and coconut curry

and then we chopped, sliced, peeled, grated and pounded.

This is the Khmer curry paste made from lemon grass, galangal, fresh turmeric, garlic, shallots and kaffir lime leaves.  My cooking partner and I had made a wimpish request for no chilli, otherwise it would have been much redder than this.

A chicken wandered through inquisitively as we were hard at work … she wouldn’t have done if she’d known what we were cooking.

The curry is called amok, and is one of the most famous Khmer dishes.

Here is the finished meal – the curry, the salad and a spectacular pyramid of rice.

Followed by sweet potato and coconut pudding.

We were very impressed with our meal – we’re either very talented Khmer cooks, or the chef did most of the work.

I have the recipes, a certificate rating my efforts as excellent and copious notes from the class – so you know what you’ll be getting for dinner the next time you come.

 

 

 

I decided to indulge in a massage, and the Khmer Relief Spa came highly recommended.

When I arrived I was given iced jasmine tea, with a lotus flower looking very zen in a little bowl on the tray.  I was then invited to choose my massage, and opted for the anti-stress release, advertised as ‘a healing therapy massage’ with a ‘therapeutic touch’.  Just what I need, I thought.

The massage room itself was even zenner, with low lights, soft music and a large massage bed.  There wasn’t simply a face-hole cut into the bed, like the beds I’m used to; there was an extension at the top of the bed with a large face-hole and a padded surround.  Very comfy, I thought as I lay face down.  Then I noticed the bowl of lotus flowers in water on the floor underneath the hole, so I could admire them during my massage.  How lovely, I thought – and that was the last positive thought I had for quite a while.

I realised that the masseuse was clambering up onto the bed with me, and while I couldn’t actually see what she was doing, I’m sure she was doing handstands up and down my back; I can’t see how else such a tiny woman could exert so much pressure.  I bit the padding and tried not whimper.

Then I felt oil on my back.  Ah, at last!  This must be the therapeutic touch I’ve been waiting for.  But no, she put all her weight on me again and started slithering up and down my back.  As she got closer to my shoulders, my neck was being pressed into the rim of the face-hole and I felt as though I was being garrotted.  If she slips, I thought, she’ll push my head right through the hole and they’ll have to call the fire brigade to get me out.

The lotus flowers failed to take my mind off the pain, in much the same way that the pictures of tropical fish stuck to the dentist’s ceiling never lull you into thinking that you’re snorkelling on a coral reef rather than having your teeth drilled.

Finally she pulled the towel right up to my shoulders and walked away.  Thank God, it’s over, I thought – but she was only retreating to take a run up and land on my back again for some more pummelling … and a towel is no protection against a determined onslaught, I can assure you.

She did eventually leave the room, after sixty very long minutes, and I staggered to my feet, put my clothes back on with trembling hands and tottered downstairs.  I was put into the recovery room with hot tea, fruit and more lotus flowers until I felt strong enough to walk unassisted to the door.

As I left, I suddenly realised the significance of the name Khmer Relief Spa … it refers to the feeling you get as you leave, having survived a Cambodian massage.

Whilst I was busy getting lost the other day, I happened upon a shadow puppet show being put on in the grounds of a local restaurant by some students.

They had written the show themselves, and were performing it to raise money for their school.

In a more conscious effort to learn more about the local culture, I went to the Cambodian Cultural Village, which turned out to be a cross between Legoland and Disneyland.  There are small villages in a variety of styles typical of the  different regions of the country, and a series of  cultural shows to watch throughout the day.

We saw a traditional wedding ceremony, where the bride looked less than thrilled with the choice of groom.

Followed by some well-toned and half-naked young men playing the Khmer drums.

We made sure we got a front seat for this show.

The grand finale is a tableau showing the battles of one of the most famous kings, with a backdrop of Angkor Wat which is dramatically revealed halfway through the show – although we did have a bit of an idea what was hidden behind the huge curtain.

The judgement tunnel featured a series of punishments, some of which I heartily agreed with –

– and others I wasn’t so sure about.

I managed to gatecrash an Apsara dance performance in a local hotel – cheaper than a visit to the Apsara dance theatre.

This is the golden mermaid dance.

And these are the fisherfolk, skipping about merrily with their fishing baskets.

Then the beautiful royal dancers.

I foolishly agreed to have my photo taken with them at the end –

– and if you’ve ever heard Joyce Grenfell’s sketch about Lumpy Latimer, you’ll know exactly how I felt.

A trip out has given me the idea for a new business in the UK … hammock bars.

I went out with some of the staff at the school, vaulting onto the back of a motorbike as if I was born to it, and we headed out of town for the day.

First stop was a fishing lake, with beautiful pink waterlilies.   

After you’ve caught your fish, you can relax in a shady hammock while they cook it for you for lunch.

I tried out the hammock

and very comfy it was too.  But we weren’t fishing and lunching, we were moving on to another popular local relaxation spot – West Baray.  A baray is a reservoir, and this one was built to siphon off the excess water from the moat around Angkor Wat, to stop the temples from flooding.

We settled ourselves into hammocks for a bit of R and R.

It costs approx 55 pence to rent a hammock for the day – obviously my prices will have to be a bit higher in England, but even so, I’m sure they’ll prove extremely popular and offer excellent value for money.

We lolled around admiring the view

until it was time for lunch.  There’s a barbecue stall just outside the hammock bar

and we ordered a whole chicken and some quail, with rice.  They come with chilli sauce, or pepper and lime to make your own sauce.

Then a fruit seller came around with coconut, watermelon and lots of other fruit that don’t seem to have names in English.

I went for a walk along the road after lunch and noticed a crowd gathered under a tree.  They were watching a monkey who was high up in the branches glaring at them.

A young boy started throwing ice cubes at it – perhaps it’s a local custom – so I moved away as I’ve heard several stories of people being bitten by monkeys and having to travel miles to get a rabies shot.

I went down to the lake and tested the temperature and it was like bath water; I’ve never been in such warm water that wasn’t artificially heated.

It’s a bit brown, but I think that’s the colour of the sand, rather than anything noxious.

Back at the hammock bar, the children of the owner were having fun.

The two little girls are in school uniform, because the government schools operate on a Saturday.  The uniform seems to be the same in every school – navy skirt or trousers, and white shirt.

There was even someone’s spare uniform drying on a pole among the trees.

The cost of the whole hammock experience – four hammocks for a day, plus barbecue lunch for four, was £9.13.

As we were leaving, a tuk tuk arrived loaded with monks –

– and the answer to the question is six.  We’ve only ever managed five, so they obviously don’t mind getting a bit cosy together.

 

 

 

 

 

As I finish school at three on a Friday, I decided to go on a jaunt afterwards and visit something nearby.  I was investigating the possibilities and came across the crocodile farm, which advertises ‘crocodiles of various sizes and dispositions’.  I found this intriguing because I’d been led to believe that all crocodiles were of the same disposition i.e. highly disposed to creep up on you, drown you and then eat you.

I was quite tempted to go – if only to see the friendly crocodile, the remorseful crocodile and the vegetarian crocodile – but it hadn’t been very well reviewed on Trip Advisor (perhaps the friendly, vegetarian crocodiles have all wasted away or been eaten by the remorseless, carnivorous ones), so I decided to go to the lotus farm instead.

After the usual ‘yes, I know where it is’, turning into ‘no, I don’t know where it is’, we eventually found it on the road out to Tonle Sap Lake.  Despite the lack of rain this week compared to last week, the river has risen considerably.

This house needs its stilts today, after a long spell of being on dry land.

We also passed quite a few cricket traps beside the road.

Some local entrepreneur obviously trying to corner the local market in fried crickets.

The lotus farm was set up to provide work for local women, and to bring poverty and the luxury goods market one step closer together.  Lotus fabric is soft, light and breathable – and it’s almost entirely wrinkle-free … excellent for someone like me suffering from ironphobia.

You can see the lotus fields from the window of the spinning room.

The stems are harvested by boat four times a day, and they pick one tonne a week.

Once the stems have been washed and had the thorns removed they are bundled up for the spinners to get to work on.

There’s a large room with about eight women sitting at long, low tables.

They take a handful of stems and cut around the edges, then pull them apart to extract the fibres.

They stick the fibres onto the table, and then repeat the process, sticking each set of fibres a little further along the table until they reach from one end to the other.

Once they have a full table’s length of fibres, they wet them and roll them to produce thread.

The thread is then coiled into a basket at the end of the table , all except a little bit which forms the beginning of the next section, and the next lot of fibres are stuck to it to make another length of thread.

Apparently the skill lies in joining the fibres so they make a regular, continuous thread with no imperfections, or it will break when it’s woven.

Each one of these ladies produces 250 metres of thread a day, and a jacket requires 1,200 metres, and will keep one spinner in work for two months, as it all has to be done by hand.

The weaver will then produce one metre of fabric a day, so it is a laborious process with a high price tag.  They currently employ 30 people and aim to give work to 500 within 5 years, supporting women’s empowerment in Cambodia.

I did a bit of research and found a jacket on sale for $5,600, so while these women are now above the poverty threshold here thanks to their spinning, the gulf between them and those who buy the jackets still seems immeasurable.

I thought you might like to hear the wedding music that’s started up again this morning, so have made a one-minute recording from my bedroom.

Turn your speakers up to full blast and play on a continuous loop for three days for the genuine experience.

 

You can see what look like small shrines on poles outside buildings all over Siem Reap and the surrounding villages.  These are called Neak Ta and the tradition dates from pre-Angkorian times ie before the 9th Century, when people had animist beliefs.

It is important to build one before you build your house, to ask the spirits if this is a good place for you to build … a sort of request for celestial planning permission.  Then you need to look after it and put out offerings to keep the spirits housed and happy.

 

Some, in the villages, are quite rough and ready, and obviously home-made –

– while others are very elaborate, and can cost up to $5,000 dollars, which is an absolute fortune over here.

It is important not to incur the wrath of the spirits, so some people try  to keep their Neak Ta dry in the rainy season.

Most people in town seem to buy theirs from the Neak Ta superstore, and there are quite a few on the road out to the school.

They come in a variety of colours, but yellow appears to be the Neak Ta choice among the cognoscenti.

Some people seem to have spent more on their Neak Ta than on their house.

and some people’s Neak Ta seems to last longer than their house.

This one is standing next to a pile of stones which are completely overgrown with creepers, but even the foliage seems wary of angering the spirits, and is staying away from the spirit house.

And, human nature being what it is, some people feel that a gold spirit house with carvings, statues, ornamental balustrades and four gold pillars is not enough, and add a few extra decorations of their own.

I’m sure that these people would be attaching a neon Santa in a hot-air balloon to the front of their house every December if they lived in England.

 

 

Today I made a disturbing discovery.

As if running the country wasn’t taxing enough, our esteemed Prime Minister has another job; she’s moonlighting as a teacher at Biff and Chip’s school.

All I can say say is that she makes a bit more of an effort when she’s in Parliament, and actually she scrubs up pretty well.

 

It’s not just me who finds the escapades of Biff and Chip tedious.  A boy fell asleep in the lesson today, which is a first for me.  He was so deeply asleep that when I picked up his arm and started tapping his head with it he didn’t stir.  After a bit more prodding he finally staggered groggily to his feet and stumbled outside to wash his face to wake himself up.

The children quite often disappear outside and then reappear a moment later with their head and face dripping.  I always thought that they were pouring water onto their heads to cool down, but now I realise that it’s a strategy to avoid being sent into a Biff and Chip induced catatonic stupor.

 

Much as Garrison Keillor always began, ‘Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon’, I could always start ‘Well, it’s been a hot week in Siem Reap.’

Despite the heat, the children race around just like children everywhere.

These girls play rope-jumping before school, and can jump it at incredible heights by flicking it with their toes and then twisting over it like a cartoon contortionist.

I’ve been more ambitious with my art teaching, and we progressed to paints this week to produce pictures of the fish in Tonle Sap lake.

 

And my maths is coming on a treat.  This week we tackled fractions

and while I’m fairly sure I got them all right (there’s no answer book!) I’m a bit hazy on explaining how to do it.  Luckily if I tell them their answer’s wrong, they just accept it and don’t ask why.

One of the brightest little boys in the morning class arrived with his head shaved on Monday.

This is the tradition when there’s a death in the family, and he explained that his 21 year-old brother was killed on his motorbike last week, when a car ran into the back of him.  I don’t know whether he was wearing a helmet or not, but a lot of them don’t.  This little chap has now taken to sitting with James, one of the American students visiting this week, so perhaps feels that James is a substitute older brother.

As the school was set up by a British couple, they have a child protection policy, which is apparently quite unusual over here.  They gave me a copy to sign, but it was rather difficult to decipher as it’s been produced by someone who obviously thinks that using the space bar is an unnecessary indulgence.

I’m starting to learn a few words of Khmer, and it’s a salutary lesson for a language teacher, as we can sometimes be a bit hard on kids who have trouble with pronunciation.

I wanted to learn a few essential phrases, like ‘be quiet’, ‘sit down’ and ‘don’t be silly’, particularly for use with the afternoon class, and some of the sounds are very difficult.  I can’t hear exactly what sound they’re making, and when I think I’m imitating them exactly, they howl with laughter at my mispronunciation.  One sound, which is like half a swallow right in the back of the throat, is totally impossible and I’ve given up on it, because it makes me look and sound like someone who’s just accidentally swallowed a gobstopper.

I took a trip out to the spice garden, where I was the only visitor and the staff were all far too busy to take any notice of me.

So I wandered around, enjoying the huge number of butterflies everywhere.  There were a lot of pepper vines – Cambodia is famous for producing very good quality pepper – and they were just coming into flower.

I’ve seen pepper growing in India, and I know that the vines creep up trees in the wild, so they’ve built them some shade here to replicate their natural habitat.

I saw some other very interesting plants

If anyone wants to make a plea or a swam leat, let me know and I’ll bring you some back.

Any guesses as to what this might be used for?

Finally I came to this rather strange contraption –

– it’s a cricket trap.  There’s a light fixed to the side which attracts the crickets at night.  They fly into the polythene and then drop down into a pool of water at the bottom and can’t get out again.

I am reliably informed that I could collect two kilos of crickets a night from one of these traps.  So if I invested in a wok and some oil, I’d be self-sufficent in fried crickets for the rest of my life – what a tempting prospect.

In full male midlife crisis mode again, I leapt onto a vespa and headed off to the temples at Angkor Wat.

Not Easyvespa, although the machines were all bright orange.

I turned out to be the only person on the tour, so I had a private guide for the day, which was wonderful – although he was distressingly fond of taking cheesy photographs.

As you may see from this photo, I have developed a new hair-related issue … helmet hair.  Due to the heat, sweat, chlorine and sunshine my hair could in no way be described as glossy, silky or sleek, and I can only manage one of three looks:

• helmet hair
• hat hair
• Worzel Gummidge hair

It’s quite a trial in the mornings, deciding which look I’m going to go for.

And it probably explains why I stood forlornly at my window in the tower

while all the handsome princes walking past thought ‘No way am I climbing up her hair.’

We visited several temples with huge carvings and fantastic tree roots, before finishing up at Angkor Wat itself.

The conical tops are shaped as lotus flowers, which symbolise many things for both Buddhists and Hindus, including purity, creation, strength and rebirth.

This is such an iconic place that even the monks were whipping out their mobiles to take photos.

The walls of the temple are covered in bas-reliefs in exquisite detail, mostly recounting the story of the many wars fought by King Suryavaman II.

There are also carvings of the Apsara, or royal dancers, which form the sort of Page Three light interludes amongst all the stories of death and glory.

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In today’s democratic Cambodia these dancers are no longer restricted to performing for royalty, and even plebs like me can pay to go and watch them.

Outside the temples there was a band playing.  All the musicians were landmine victims trying to earn a living.  Cambodia was so heavily mined that it still has no-go areas, particularly near the borders, and it will take years and years to detect and remove them all.

On the way home I was taken to see another musician who makes his own instruments.

This is a two-stringed vertical fiddle called a tro u.  He offered to play it for me, and immediately broke into Auld Lang Syne, somewhat bizarrely.  I wonder if that’s the first time it’s been played on a tro u, or whether it forms part of the regular repertoire of Khmer musicians.

 

 

 

 

I visited the pagoda across the road from the hotel today.

I’ve learnt that the difference between a temple and a pagoda is that there are monks at a pagoda and not at a temple.  I’m also starting to recognise some of the characters that appear on the temples and pagodas.

This is Naga, the seven-headed serpent who sheltered the Buddha from the rain when he went out to meditate for seven days and forgot his umbrella.

And this is Garuda – not an airline, as I thought – but the mount of Lord Vishnu, part man and part bird.

I wandered around the back of the pagoda and saw a pile of saffron robes in need of a wash

and around the corner was the washerman.

It has to be a washerman because women aren’t allowed to touch monks, or their clothes.  The only women allowed to touch a monk are his mother, his grandmother and his older sisters, and if he can’t persuade any of them to do his washing, then he has to find a washerman.  This chap is scrubbing the clothes with soap and a scrubbing brush on a stone slab.

The he hangs them out to dry.

These two ladies, sitting having a gossip in the shade are nuns.

Nuns shave their heads, and often their eyebrows too, to show that they have rejected earthly ideals of beauty.  After the menopause, nuns dress entirely in white, but pre-menopause they wear white on the top and black on the bottom – possibly for practical reasons, but that wasn’t explained by my Khmer colleague.  All I can say is, that the nun on the left, flaunting her fertility, must be a lot younger than she looks.

On Friday we had a party – in fact we had two parties, one for the morning classes and one for the afternoon classes.  The party was funded by a group of student physiotherapists from Australia who have been working with the special needs unit for three weeks.  All the children came in wearing their party gear, and I can now confidently inform you that denim is this season’s party must-have in Siem Reap.

We started off with games – some traditional Khmer, such as the scarf game –

– and other more international games, like tug of war

and good old musical chairs

and the (rice) sack race.

After the games, there were refreshments – soft drinks and rambutans – and all the children lined up to collect some.  They don’t like giving sweets to the children because of the poor state of their teeth, but sugary, fizzy drinks can’t be good either

and I dread to think how many artificial additives are required to make that lurid shade of orange.

My class were having a really good time.

Next it was time for the dancing.  It’s traditional to dance around a table in Cambodia, in the same way that it’s traditional to dance around a handbag in England, I presume.  They go round and round the table making very elegant movements with their hands.

But there was also some less traditional dancing.  Here are the cool dudes

and the disco babes

Nancy from California lead the Macarena, with the Aussie physios as her backing dancers.

But the gamblers in the corner couldn’t be persuaded to get up and dance

They’re the ones who’ll be propping up the bar in years to come.

I learnt a traditional dance, with a lot of leg swinging and foot shuffling, and showed it off on Saturday evening, much to the amusement of a group of older women sitting nearby …  oh well, I suppose I would have laughed if they’d all got up and started Morris Dancing.