Bike Ride to Banteay Torp

It would seem that some awesome ancient civilizations liked the area that I now live in… Between Banteay Chhmar, which I’ve written about, about 16 km from my home, the little temple ruins in my own town (complete with Hindu elephant) and this other temple, Banteay Torp, about 13 km from my home, there is a lot to see. They are trying to rebuild part of Banteay Chhmar and turn it into a UNESCO World Heritage Site, therefore putting it on the heavily toured areas of Cambodia, granted they will need to fix the road first. But Banteay Torp is pretty cool as well, and far more remote.

So I started out in the morning for a nice bike ride up to this temple. I was determined to find it. I rode north, on the road of hell (this isn’t an exaggeration… and you need to experience it to believe me) for about 10 km before I saw the typical gateway proclaiming a temple to the right. I turned and kept going for another 2-3 km, finding a pagoda, a primary school, a massive lake, and very interested rice farmers as I went on. I barely saw the turn off for the temple because it is old and well disguised at the base of a hill, but I turned, and rode a bit more, and all of a sudden I saw this pile of rocks rise up out of nowhere.

It was incredible – a silent temple, somewhat destroyed like Banteay Chhmar and much smaller, yet still structurally intact. There are still carvings intact, and the different colored stones shimmer in the sun. I climbed around the 4 different towers and even got followed by some young boys investigating the foreigner.

Amazing. And I must say, the people there were great. I got hellos from a group of women transplanting rice and went down to greet them - very lovely farming folk! What was less amazing was when I got a flat tire in the middle of the ride back to the main road. The roads down to the temple and back from it were a little bumpy and steep, so I can’t say I’m that surprised, but it was mighty inconvenient. But, I went to the nearest repair shop where I paid a whopping 25 cents to get my tire fixed before I went on home to have pineapple stir fry with my grandma.

This is eventful to me!

It is a normal Thursday, to be sure: A completely average school day which should have lasted until 11 but quit around 9:30 due to the absence of teachers, or rather, their absence from the classroom in light of other more exciting activities on school grounds. I gave some oral exams, had some kids ogle over pictures of the Midwest that I brought (they think that the downtown river area of Omaha and the view from the Knoxville exit on the way to my grandmas are particularly beautiful, and they love the picture of my on the bridge of the big cement block known as my college theatre. They think that the picture I have of Sarah and Grant’s wedding is me in disguise and the concept of slides and playground equipment is more than foreign. And even though they have never heard of baseball, the Orioles stadium is very pretty – note said photos in this blog). This is fairly common – Khmer people Love pictures with a capital L, both when it is people that they know and when it is people that they don’t. It was uncommon, though, to watch 4 full grown Khmer men, teachers, plaster tiny circle stickers with pictures of butterflies and ladybugs and flowers all over their cell phones. This just reinforces the ideas in my head that there is a different kind of ‘masculinity’ here.

And so I left school thinking about that kind of masculinity… not that I got very far… even though the boys here spend more time on their hair in one morning than I spend on my entire beauty (I use this word with caution) regime for a week, the older ones still want nothing to do with advice from a younger woman and my sister is suffering the same sort of crazy boy syndrome that seems to follow me in my relationships as well. We even ranted together at the lunch table and my sister professed her anger (an extraordinary event, for Khmer women to talk about their feelings and gossip and ask for advice…I actually gave the same advice that my buddy Deidre gave me last week in our ongoing discussions of the opposite sex).

And again, in my normally quiet time, after I played with a very chubby and happy baby at the local coffee house and sat back to enjoy my coffee with ice and condensed milk and the last few chapters of a hilarious Sedaris novel, I encountered not one, but two separate occasions of begging. Now, let me elaborate. Begging is not uncommon…in the city. I fully expect to be propositioned when I am in the middle of the market enjoying a bowl of noodles, or when I walk the streets of Phnom Penh, or traverse some of the more touristy areas of the country. But in my own town?? It is unheard of, so twice in one day is quite a record! No that they weren’t funny… the first was a small boy who obviously saw dollar signs on my white skin and stopped on his way back from the market to just see what would happen. And the second was a middle aged man who was holding more in his hand than I had on my person. In fact, since I just came over for a coffee, I only had 50 cents, and when he showed me the example of what he wanted (cash, just to clear that up), there was considerably more than I even had in cash anywhere. I told him this, in Khmer, and that I had nothing else, and he refused to listen and badmouthed foreigners for a few minutes before stumbling out.

I think I mentioned in my last blog that it is rainy season. Today I found that it is sneaky, considering I left my house one minute, on a quest for snacks and noodles, and ended up in a torrential downpour that drove me into my cousins house for a solid 10 minutes and ruined the previously dry road with slippery mud that made me slide about and forced me to remove my shoes else they be sacrificed, stuck forever in the wet dirt. The rain turned my pleasant jaunt to and from the market into a challenging obstacle course complete with rivers, footprints that may be wider than they are long (quite a feat for me, as those of you who have gone shoe shopping with me can understand), and, as usual, the occasional pile of manure. I also had a follower, a young cousin whose hair is just the same as mine and who talks to me in the simple child’s vocabulary that I can understand. Seyma escorted me to the market and back on her tiny bike and talked about her brother and baby sister and the mud and the rain. It was lovely and abnormal – even though they are no longer afraid of me, the children who know me are still a little hesitant about how cool I am… I’m trying to work on that, not always an easy feat when you were once the boogeyman.

I suppose I should mention that one other extraordinary event is that I have actually kept myself busy all day long – between stickers and coffee and ranting and market time and children and blogging and preparing for the rain, well… it’s been nice. Oh… and there was that whole daddy-long-legs-demolishing-a-fly-in-the-bathroom incident… that was pretty cool too.

Fun Photos - 6-4-09

I decided to go biking after a particularly rainy day, my gears got stuck with mud and I got a little more than dirty… In addition to what you can see here, there were splatters of mud up my back, all over the front of my shorts and shirt, smears of it on my arms, and flakes of it on my face and in my hair. When I met up with a crew of my students in another village, they spent a good 10 minutes telling me how messy I was, another 5 cleaning up my brakes which were still a bit clogged, and probably a good hour after I left laughing at me and the pieces of mud that had found their way onto every surface of my body. I did get my bike washed the next day, granted it has rained and is now dirty once again.

Oftentimes, because one teacher teaches as many students want private class as they have (it’s a main source of income for said teachers, so the more the merrier), some students end up looking in through the window after the room holds more desks than it ever has and those desks are packed with students 3 or 4 to a bench. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned it, but there really is no personal space bubble here. I see the boys leaping onto one another and cuddling on the benches throughout the day, and girls hold hands and link arms when they walk, sometimes hugging when I make them nervous by saying hello, and they stack up to make room for me when I go to breakfast in the morning, even after I tell them not to worry – its just the culture. Anyway, after they are packed in, the rest look from the windows… and here is a photo of that.

So, last week I taught the ‘funeral’ unit for the grade 12 class, and because my co-teacher was kind enough to leave me in the middle of first period for some work with the VSOs at the hospital (Voluntary Service Overseas… the Peace Corps of the rest of the world, HQed in the UK). I love my fellow VSOs, they are awesome and do fantastic work. I am, however less excited that this particular teacher gets paid a salary to work one day a week if in fact he does actually work that day. That is beside the point. Since I only see these students one day a week and their English isn’t incredible (because they don’t have regular instruction…), I decided to do a comparison of Khmer funerals and American funerals, at least what I could remember. I haven’t been to many funerals at home and I have forgotten a lot about what happens – After a year of living abroad, I am somewhat surprised to find out how much has slipped from my mind about my own culture. This is the board after that class…between the morbid (and useless) vocabulary, and the ideas that were inches away from slipping out of my students’ grasp (the graveyard, and what to do when it gets full; the potluck dinner, and the idea that others would bring food to a gathering; the color black, and why it should be worn to a religious event; communal singing; burial; and funeral homes), it was a pretty fun day.

Dreams

So with the each month’s full moon, I’ve found that my normally dreamless sleep gets a little clouded with images of all the people and things in my life. Most recently, actually, I’ve had an odd triad of dreams that are just plain odd, mainly because they aren’t as odd as dreams usually are.

One. As part of my summer plans, I have an honors class of 10 students, and I just gave the test today to decide which 10 out of the 30-some interested students would be able to study. The class was my friend and fellow PCV Deidre’s idea for her school, and it sounded so awesome that I wanted to do it myself. So… my dream was all about her exam and my trying to guess what she had on it. I don’t understand why, given my own exam was just fine but…

Two. One of my first months here, I put all four seasons of The Office on my computer, courtesy of my friend Bob’s ipod and Davey’s computer skills. I have watched these Office seasons more than I think appropriate and have officially become an addict. Well, the 5th season recently had its finale, and a few of the PCVs were talking about buying it, which brings me to my dream. I dreamt that I was going to buy season 5 of the Office next week when I was in Phnom Penh, with Bob, and was ecstatically happy. Bob and I are both anxious to see if the copyright laws are cool enough here to allow us to have access to that…

Three. This one is my favorite. It’s a little fuzzy, but it was something like me in an airport, with my cousin Katie, going somewhere not in the US… but I was entering the airport and planning on going ahead with her, just on the way. Except, I had no plane ticket for my next destination and my mother, who was with me for some reason, was very upset with me. Something about me being irresponsible and not preparing for things. She was upset in the dream… upset enough that I woke up and reconsidered any sort of request for a long amount of time… At least my grandma was there too!