Still More From Phnom Penh :)

Here are a few more photos from our time in Phnom Penh. :)

Here, Joe and I are releasing birds to gain good karma in hopes it will help us with our research.

Inside the National Museum, we fed the fish in the ponds of the courtyard.

More animals we saw at the Wildlife Refuge.

Here is a glimpse at the crazy traffic on one of the national highways of Cambodia.  I was told that all the people in the truck are going home from work

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Kampong Thom: First Glance

Joe here, yesterday after a long bus ride, we arrived in the city of Kampong Thom. It is a few hours north of the capital,  but a slow few hours because there is a large difference in infrastructure here versus the US. Kampong Thom has a rural feel, with little to no commercial shops or food chains. There is a large central market where you can buy anything from baked goods to dried fish and spices. You can even buy fried crickets and spiders to eat! Maybe we will try some ;-).

There is also visible countryside just beyond the border of the town. The countryside is a lot like central Wisconsin except substitute the corn fields with rice paddies and pine trees with palm trees. We are here in Kampong Thom while our mentoring professor, Deb, attends Teachers Across Borders (TAB). Deborah is the only teacher from the United States, the rest are Australian and they are very funny and charming. We volunteered to help in anyway we can, and today we edited and corrected English exams from last years national English exam while Deb taught about the environment and global climate change. Deb has other topics lined up for lectures later this week like genetics and human sexual biology, hubba hubba!

In the afternoon Joel and Breana visited a local impoverished school while Kelsey and I taught students how to use the Internet and google as a tool. It seems pretty intuitive, but only because we have had computer access for most of our lives. Try explaining what the Internet is to a person who is using a computer for maybe the 5th or 6th time! Tomorrow we are going to create Gmail accounts for them, we are excited to blow some minds! That's all for now, over and out.

- JW, KP, JS and BM

Phnom Penh: Markets

Hello again!
Sunday we got up early to go and have breakfast with the monks. We went to another Wat and bought food from a couple street vendors. It was cheap and delicious! For the five of us, breakfast was only $3.50 all together. The monks also invited us inside to eat at a small table so we sat on the ground and ate our noodles with chopsticks. After this adventure, we met up with our translators that we had met the day before. Pok and Vissatha met us at the Olympic Market which is a market that foreigners very rarely go to. There we bought supplies such as pots, water filters, hammocks, and sarongs (a sheet-like thing used for privacy when bathing) for when we are camping in forests of Oddar Meanchey working on our research. We said goodbye to Pok and Vissatha after working out the logistics on where we would meet up with them as that was the last time we would see them before we begin our research. We then traveled by tuk-tuk to another market, the Russian Market.  We did see a few other foreigners there and we bought some souvenirs. Breana and I (Kelsey) also bought fans. That $0.75 may be the best $0.75 we have spent here. :P

Around 2pm we hopped on a bus with all of our equipment and headed to Kampong Thom where we will stay for a week while Deb helps teach the teachers through the Teachers Across Boarders (TAB) program. We are looking forward to helping out in the school in every way that we can! :)

Phnom Penh: Wildlife Refuge

Saturday we spent the day at a wildlife refuge about an hour outside of Phnom Penh. Until 2002, this place was a zoo but now they have upgraded many of the enclosures and they only keep animals that have been raised in captivity and therefore cannot be released back into the wild. They also have breeding programs for endangered or threatened animals. This was a very useful excursion for us because we will be looking for many of these animals in the forests for our research. It was a great opportunity to see these formerly foreign animals up close.

Pok and Vissatha also joined us at the wildlife refuge. they are both from Cambodia and they will be are our translators while we are in the forests of Oddar Menchaey working on our research. They are very kind and they have already done a great job answering all of our questions about the culture and country of Cambodia. We are very excited to work with them further. :)

Our guide, Aram from the Netherlands, was fantastic. He just got married to a spunky Cambodian woman last year and so we spent a lot of time talking with them about all the customs that he has found out about. Apparently you are not supposed to touch other people on the head or step over people. These things are considered very rude and have gotten him into some rather humorous trouble occasionally. He was also very knowledgable about the animals. It seemed like he knew them each individually by name!

Hope you enjoy the photos from the wildlife refugee!

Phnom Penh: Photos

We visited Wat Phnom our first day in Phnom Penh Here are some photos from that temple. There were lots of sculptures and paintings of Buddah.

 

We use the tuk tuks often to get around the city. They are the taxis of Cambodia. Here are photos of us in them, we sit facing eachother and there is a moped pulling the tuk-tuk.

On the right is the pool at our fancy hotel! It was a great way to escape from the heat and we made sure to enjoy it because soon we will be living in much less luxurious accommodations. It was beautiful up there, especially at night. On the left is one of Breanna's meals at a fancy restaurant we went to. It was fried rice and chicken put in a pineapple.

Here is the view from our first hotel in Phnom Penh. Below are more photos from Wat Phnom. :)

On our first day in Phnom Penh we visited the Cambodian National Museum. These are photos from the courtyard.

Flight

These photos are from the very beginning of our trip.

Here Is All of our luggage piled up at the MSP airport. We have lots of equipment for our research project and suitcases full of things to give to the Cambodians.

Our flight from MSP to San Francisco was right at sunset so it lasted for almost 3 hours. It was beautiful! This photo doesn't do it justice...in real life you could see the sunlight skipping off all the Minnesota lakes we flew over. :) 

It was a 12 hour flight and we got some much needed sleep. It looks like Jo was falling asleep while playing video games. :P

Deb must have had a fantastic book. I think she finished the entire thing by the end of our second flight! Breanna wins the sleeping award. I think we are all envious of her skill. :)

Flight 2 of 3. The photo on the bottom shows where the sun is shinning.

Our first view of Asia! These mountains were in Taiwan. Below is our first view of Cambodia. This is just outside Phnom Penh, the capitol.