After Second Day of Training

We've had our first couple days of training, which I was at first a little apprehensive about, but now I'm feeling more confident about it. Our job as teachers is to teach them conversational English so they can communicate, more than rules of grammar or drilling words into their heads. So, I feel like it's not a big deal if I'm not perfect at grammar and spelling. The important pieces of grammar the students will pick up just by hearing me talk. We have a couple teachers here who are training us in teaching and the finer points of language in general. For example, today we were talking about phonetics, and how to write words in other languages by their phonemes. I find it all very fascinating, after taking a few languages myself over the years.
Today we each had to practice teaching a little lesson called a "warmer", which usually starts the day's lesson. It involved a short dialogue on a certain topic to review vocab, and then getting the students to repeat the dialogue back to the teacher and then with each other. It seemed really repetitive as we did it in English, but for nonnative speakers it must be difficult to pick up. I look forward to learning more about teaching methods and such. I mean, my temperament is such that I could sit in classes all day and learn things. In the near future, though, I will have to step over to the other side of the classroom and finally be the teacher.
I find Phnom Penh more and more familiar, as I get in the rhythm of how things are done here. It's not as unbearably hot as I thought at first, and not as insanely chaotic either. Anything is manageable when it becomes more familiar. I've been trying a lot of different food at the restaurants here, many of which serve American and French food too, and I'm interested to see how they do these dishes. I'm also interested of course in trying new Asian food. Every place here seems to serve Vietnamese and Thai and Chinese dishes along with Cambodian, so it doesn't seem like I'm eating in a specifically Cambodian place. Tonight I got a soup, though, that was Cambodian which was pretty good, with fish, egg, pineapple, and tamarind sauce. For a starter, I had feta and spinach spring rolls. It was definitely nice to satisfy my feta craving.
The other LC teachers in training are all very sweet people and I'm glad to be working with them. Someone tonight observed how the whole thing is not competitive at all. I think it's because we're all pretty much starting at the same level and going through the trials of learning to be an English teacher in a foreign place.
The highlight of my day, though, was definitely the massage that I splurged on this afternoon. $4 for a one hour massage... good deal, like everything here. I had never had a massage before so I was in for a surprise. I knew they could be kind of rough, and I definitely saw that. You never could have guessed they could be rough when your masseuse is like a 90-pound girl. They use their elbows and feet and work nearly every part of your body. Sometimes it kinda hurts when they hit certain pressure points. But at the end of it, as I'm walking away, I feel like I'm years younger. Like my bones and muscles are reborn. Everything is just more relaxed and renewed. Definitely worth it.

This weekend we're going to Angkor Wat, and I'm really looking forward to checking it out.

I set up a photobucket account, but it was taking too long to upload pictures yesterday so I haven't got most of them up. A few got uploaded already, though, so I'll post the link and you can get checking for updates: http://s334.photobucket.com/albums/m418/PetroSmith/Two%20Weeks%20in%20Cambodia/