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.