All Things Salty & Sandy

Our first full day at the beach, that was today. We woke up in the Grand Sihanouk Ville Hotel in southern Cambodia. The Gulf of Thailand is one block to the west of us -- the Gulf of Thailand! We had a western-style breakfast at the hotel before we jumped into our pool for a quick swim. It's a pool that is long enough for lap swimming -- a rarity at any hotel anywhere, so it's a real treat! The hotel is new and all of the rooms face the pool, including the top fourth floor rooms that they still are constructing! The hotel will be finished completely by the time our entire group arrives next winter, and students, you will be very happy to hear that the hotel is in the Serendipity Beach area, an area with a very vibrant night life! The entire beach is lined with outdoor cafes; we hear that it's quite the place to go in the evenings. We instead, though, are opting for Indian food in the Victory Beach area tonight because it is sure to be tamer for us older types :)

Marsha, Deb, and I took a 6km tuk-tuk (rhymes with look-look) ride to another beach area today that is called Otres (love the French-influences that still are present here), and while the Otres Beach was nice, none of us thought it was nicer than the beach that is across the street from our hotel, so consider yourselves spared that you won't have to endure a jarring ride across the bumpiest dirt roads ever and that you won't have paid $5 just to discover that our beach area is as wonderful as Otres! Anyway, the beaches are nice and the water was WARM and WAVY! It was a treat to spend the day here and you're going to love it!

I tried for over an hour to download photos today to the blog, but I had no luck. I will try again when I get back to Phnom Penh for one night, where I can use the hotel computer. I just don't know why it isn't working from the ipad, but it isn't.

One thing that I didn't mention in yesterday's blog was that before we left Phnom Penh yesterday, we spent several hours at another NGO focused on serving children living in extreme poverty -- Pour un Sourire d'Enfant (PSE; For the Smile of a Child). Taddy was in heaven getting to hear and speak French! PSE was started by some French citizens who, during a trip to Cambodia, found many children scavenging for anything they might sell in a huge city garbage dump. When they also saw that these children were eating the garbage, they had to act. And act they did, founding PSE. I cannot do justice to the work they have done and continue to do, so please visit their website at www.pse.asso.fr.

Tomorrow morning we will leave Sihanoukville early and drive to the Killing Fields to pay our respects for those murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian genocide that occurred in the latter part of the 1970s. It is certain to be a sobering trip. We will study this historical event in some detail next winter, prior to traveling to Cambodia. I expect it to be one of the more important topics of our studies.

On a lighter note, Taddy told me that I had to include one thing that happened on our trip to Sihanoukville yesterday. The trip from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville is only ~230km, but it took us almost 6 hours because the roads are narrow and, in places, made of dirt and not in the best shape. So about halfway here, we stopped for a bathroom and snack break at a small roadside store. (And students, do be prepared to use an occasional squatting toilet, affectionately known as "a squatty potty," because we will encounter a few!) I picked up a bag of vanilla wafers -- yummy! Well, NOT SO yummy and NOT SO vanilla! On the front of the package was a picture of what I now know to be a durian fruit. The cookies were durian-fruit-flavored, not vanilla. We were in the car tooling alongside of the cows when I opened the package. Oh my gosh, what a stink! The van filled with horribly stinky air immediately. Our guide laughed and told us that the smell was durian fruit and that durian fruit is quite tasty, but very stinky. Then he proceeded to spray Glade air freshener into the air conditioning vents!

Students, you are on your own if you dare to purchase packaged cookies. And don't say I didn't warn you! :)