10,000 Miles Later...

Saturday, 6:23PM.

Good news: I’m alive! Right now I’m in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where we’ve settled in to stay for the next two weeks of training. There is just internet on one computer, so I’m typing this on my laptop and then transferring it to there so I can post it online.

My journey here was long but thankfully luck was with me, for all my flights were on time and nothing unexpected happened. It was overall extremely exhausting, and I only fell in and out of sleep here and there. My sense of time is still really screwed up. It’s hard to believe that the days of July 31^st and August 1^st were pretty much lost to transportation and change of time zones.

I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City at 10pm Friday night. After getting through customs and obtaining my visa, I stepped outside and fully experienced the new climate. A wave of oppressive heat hit me at once. It had also been raining that day so it was incredibly humid. The weather forecast for every day from now until October: 90 degrees, 90% humidity, chance of thunderstorms.

Anyway, I figured I had to get used it. But still, nothing could have prepared me for how hot and sticky it was, even at night time. Upon leaving the airport, the other thing on my mind was that I had to find my ride from Languagecorps. However, apparently everyone in Vietnam decided to show up to watch the people who were coming outside, and I was suddenly the object of a million pairs of eyes. With my bulging, heavy backpack weighing me down, and pools of sweat forming on my brow, I sauntered off in search of my ride. The first reaction that I received, though, was that of two young girls who were in front of the crowd against the gates, who were pointing towards me and giggling, out of mockery or in sheer awe of my beauty, I will never know, but I responded in the best way possible, with a clenched mouth, noncommittal expression, and a subtle, quick raising and lowering of the eyebrows before forging off in a new direction. They responded with cries of glee or derision, but no matter, I finally found a girl holding a languagecorps sign with my name on it. Once another guy my age, Graham, showed up, we took a taxi through the city to the hotel we’d be staying at.

I’m not going to lie. My first impression of the city, as we barrelled down through the streets at night, was not the most positive. It seemed crowded, disorganized, chaotic, uncivilized. I wondered who on earth would call it the Paris of southeast Asia. It felt a lot like Athens, except I didn’t understand the language. My first observation was that most of the traffic was people on motorbikes. My second observation was that everyone on these bikes and in the cars constantly honked their horns. I guess they do it to let other people know they’re passing them, or coming into the street, or just on the road in general. I don’t know. It sure makes things noisy, though.

We got to the hotel, which is a small but quaint place in the city, and a very nice man showed me and Graham to our room. Our Languagecorps greeter gave us new cell phones and told us we’d be leaving the next morning at 8am. So, I was pretty eager to get to sleep. Unfortunately I kept waking up, even though I was really tired. Still not acclimated to the time zone. The room is nice, though, with a TV and wireless internet, and A/C which doesn’t quite work as well as I want. The next morning, Saturday morning, we repack and are on our way to Cambodia. I bring only what I need in a backpack, which is stuffed so full that I’m convinced it will explode, yet it somehow stays intact.

A man named Rick meets us at the hotel and leads us to a bus. Graham and I are joined by two girls who are a few years older than us that got there the day before us. Together we endure the 6-hour ride to Phnom Penh, complete with border check-points. We stop for lunch but it’s 11am and I’m not really hungry. Plus I think the hot weather just saps the hunger out of me. I figure I should eat something though so I pick some fried fish and spicy vegetables, and they give me some rice, too. I also get a weird citrus-y soda called Soursod or something. I don’t eat much of it, though, because the fish is riddled with tiny bones and the vegetables are really quite spicy. The whole thing only costs me $2.50, though, so it’s not much of a waste.

Back on the bus again, and for some reason they decide to show us Rambo II, which takes place in Vietnam. Followed by this are some really bad pop music videos in English by what I can only assume are Vietnamese pop stars. Our tour guide is this small, attractive girl who always seems collected and full of poise. She interrupts the programming now and again to give us a lengthy message in Vietnamese, then translates it somehow into a few sentences in English.

At Phnom Penh, we’re given a ride to the languagecorps center here, which is very nice. Each of us has a room, with pink sheets on the beds even for the guys. My room is huge but there’s nothing in it beside a bed and a dresser. It’s also partly under the staircase. The A/C works great, though. Hopefully I can sleep well tonight.

For the past couple hours, we’ve been hanging out here. We took a little tour of the area and found an open-air marketplace with fresh food and pottery and cheap DVD’s (I bought In Bruges for 2 bucks). And no trip around the market would be complete without being pestered every minute to go on a ride on a motorbike.

Later tonight, we should explore some more and go out to dinner somewhere. People in other languagecorps programs from countries like Thailand are also coming for the joint training.

It will be two weeks before I’m back in Vietnam. They told me it would be one week, but when I got here, it magically became two. Anyway, my final impression of the city will have to wait. After reflecting, I concluded that I need to remember not to judge based on appearances, and even if something appears chaotic and doesn’t fit into my idea of what a “modern city” should look like, it doesn’t mean the place doesn’t have a soul. It is hard to tell if the local people are friendly or not. Their faces seem inscrutable to me. But I should not jump to conclusions. Sometimes it takes time to get used to a new home. Once something becomes more comfortable, what once was scary is suddenly second nature.

I took a few pictures but it's not uploading now, so I'll try again some other time.

Until next time.