Adventure 2012: You say goodbye

8 June, 8pm
Today was our last day at ABCs and Rice school so we tried to get involved again as much as possible. One class had missed out on doing the bead animals so we did those with both the morning and afternoon sessions. Along with storytimes, origami and other class games the day went really quickly.

At the end of the day we had an amazing send-off, pretty overwhelming actually. Most of the children had written us a letter or drawn a picture, and at the end of the day after assembly they sang us a song (Beatles, You say goodbye) and gave us lots of hugs, and good luck wishes, and hopes for us to come back soon. Even after such a short time, we all feel such an attachment and a sadness at heading away. In many ways their lives are so different, but they are still kids just like ours, they goof about with each other, love to run around and play games and smile and laugh a lot. Some are clever, some are funny, some are attention-seekers, some are athletic, some shy, all the same personalities you see at home. Pretty much without exception they are affectionate and friendly, and absolutely love and reciprocate positive attention. What’s not to love!

Tonight Katriel and I are ‘home alone’. Tammy has organised a quiz night to raise money for ABCs and Rice, at a pub in town (Molly Malones!). We were all going to go but with a late night last night and no chance to sleep in this morning, the wheels started falling off the Katriel-train tonight at dinner so we decided to just send a smaller team to the quiz.

We were amused to learn that the government, who used to employ quite a number of staff in town, have recently moved to a large new office about 45 minutes out of town. The staff, predominantly locals, are quite unhappy about the new travel requirements. The reason for the move? Land in Siem Reap is getting popular and the price is gradually rising – the government sold the land under the old civic buildlings to make a profit, and bought cheap cheap land a way out in the middle of nowhere. Ha ha at least governments and councils are the same everywhere!

We have discovered that Fanta in Cambodia comes in a much wider range of flavours than just plain old orange…. We’ve tried the pineapple flavour (yellow), Katriel accidentally scored a green one (flavour unable to be ascertained), but there is also lychee flavour (seriously?????) and something else in a purple tin. Who’d have thought!

Tomorrow we plan to visit 2 or 3 of the famous temples around Siem Reap – there seem to be 3 really popular ones but many more out of the limelight. Lara Croft Tombraider famously had scenes shot at Ta Prohm (sp?) so we may just need to go there (just in case Angelina Jolie is back in town). The big attraction is to visit Angkor Wat at sunrise or sunset - given that the sun rises around 5am I think we’ll give that a miss. Sunset we could maybe do, though the guidebooks tell us that the mozzies love tasty white skin at sunset as well.

We think we have now pretty much seen everything on a motorbike…. Drivers holding umbrellas, phones, cigarettes, two bikes riding beside each other with the drivers and passengers chatting, a couple on a motorbike, a person with a toddler on a motorbike (toddler stands in front usually), family of 5 on a motorbike, guy holding full-sized ladder on a motorbike. But the best one so far... 2 guys on a motorbike with ... wait for it ... a fridge. It’s quite comical.