Hello all you readers of my blog! And my "readers" I of course mean the 6 of you that actually read this. Maybe 7. On a good day. Anyway, my life is going pretty steadily right now. I haven't had to teach for the past 2 weeks. Chinese New Year took out 3 days of school, the day after hardly anyone showed up so I went home early, and I only had to teach for 2 hours on Friday. This week they are doing testing all week so I didn't have to show up for that either. And next week, Tuesday is a holiday. SO MUCH FREE TIME. This free time is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand I have a lot of free time to read extremely long books in very short amounts of time. On the other hand, I read all the good books and now I'm stuck with shitty ones. I mean, bad ones...sorry Mom. I get to sleep in until whenever I want to, but when I wake up I have absolutely nothing to do other than read copious amounts of literature. And not anything that will expand my mind or anything. I don't want to waste my free time learning stuff. That would just be silly. I want to read trashy romances and sci fi books to alleviate the sucky-ness of both the boring-ness and lack of love in my life. So to sum up this paragraph of rambling, I've been reading a lot lately.
I'd like to make a list of things that I miss from back home. So I will.
1. People having the same manner standards that I do. I miss it in the U.S. when it's very rude to ask people how much they weigh. It's not rude here to ask, it just gets on my nerves. And when the children will follow you around screaming HELLO at the top of their lungs and their parents think it's funny. In America, if your kid is being obnoxious, you'd probably take it away and apologize. Nope, not here. Also, when I'm walking down the street, people like to ask if I want a tuk tuk or a moto. Instead of just letting me walk by when I say no, they stand in my way, try to talk to me, then when I don't, they make jokes to their friends about me. Not polite in America, totally acceptable here. I'm not saying that I think it's wrong. It's just annoying to me because I've been brought up differently. It's just their cultural norm to do things the way they do it and I understand that but it doesn't mean I can't get annoyed with it all the same.
2. Having a police force I can trust. I've never had to deal with police in America, except for when I got my one speeding ticket. But I know that if I was ever in danger, if I ever got in a car accident, etc, they would be there to help. Here it's not the same story. If you get into an accident here they'll show up, but no matter what happened it's always the foreigner's fault. You could be stopped at a stop light and someone rams into you from behind and it's your fault. Their reasoning "If you weren't in this country, the accident wouldn't have happened". It's completely true and logical, but complete bullshit too. I've heard that this happens from several different sources but have never experienced it, thank goodness. But it's nice to know that if i'm on my bike and I get hit by a moto or a car driven by a Khmer person, I'm going to have to pay for all damages. Sorry, if this sounds a bit bitter. It's just they way it works, or so I've heard. Also, you can drive at night without headlights and no one says a word, but driving during the day with your headlights on will cost you $1.25 in fines. One of my friends got pulled over on his moto for driving with his headlights on during the day. Just another example of ridiculous laws that the police here enforce. Oh well, I just hope I never have to deal with them. Corruption is very real and it can be very dangerous for a foreigner.
3. I miss being able to earn my own money. It's difficult to know that no matter how hard to work, you will never get more money. It's difficult when you've always been able to afford the things you want and if there was something you couldn't afford, you could work harder, put in more hours, find some outside work, etc, to get the thing you want. Here, I can't do that. It's the same small allowance every month and you have to pull from outside money if you ever want to do more. I've been very fortunate that my parents have been supporting me while I'm here but I don't want to have to rely on them. Oh well, I guess I just need to get better with my money and learn to live even more modestly.
4. I miss training. I miss being around all my friends and other people who are going through the same thing as I am and being able to talk to them and hang out with them on a daily basis. It's hard to be alone, especially in the city that I'm placed in. I feel very isolated. I don't fit in with the tourists but I don't fit in with the people that live here either. It's very lonely sometimes. Hopefully that'll be alleviated a little bit by my new family. Right now my family has stopped talking to me completely and we only exchange maybe 2 sentences a day. It's very frustrating and depressing to be at home now. So I try to get out of the house as much as possible. I feel like this post is getting to be a downer. I'll try to wrap it up soon.
5. Along the lines of missing training, I miss my training host family. They mean so much to me still. I feel so guilty that I haven't gotten a chance to go back and see them yet. I was so spoiled there and I absolutely love them. In those 2 months that I lived there they showed me so much love and my host mom especially made me feel like part of the family. I've been living with this new family at site for 4 months now and I don't feel even the tiniest bit of love on their part. I don't feel like part of the family and I don't think they know how to make me part of the family. I'm moving to a new host family with a mom that reminds me of my training host mom so I hope that this new family will be better. The new house will be a downgrade but I'm willing to give up my comforts that I have now in order to have a family that accepts me and treats me like one of their own.
Some other things I miss include
Air conditioning
BAKING CUPCAKES!!!!
good spaghetti
watching tv
the YMCA
not eating rice for every meal.
Oh my goodness...the rice. Every time lunch or dinner rolls around I'm dreading eating. The amounts of rice i've consumed in the past 6 months has been insane. I hate it. I wish I never had to eat rice ever again. I'm going through a major rejection phase of it. It makes me want to cry looking at it. I wish rice would die. Even talking about eating it is making me angry. So I'll stop.
So I realize that this is sort of a negative blog post but I promise they won't all be like this. There are many things I do like about site and I definitely want to be here. I miss the comforts of home and I miss my family and friends a lot but I know that this is where I should be and where I need to be. I hope I can find a productive routine to get into and start to feel a little bit happier about my service. My vacation in April to Malaysia will definitely help.
I'm going to Phnom Penh this weekend so that should be fun. I'll keep you updated!
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