Day 1

Sunday morning we woke up 6:30ish. Did a little reading/prayer, and we went over to the Raffles Le Royale Hotel to meet with Bob and Pat Gempel for breakfast. The Gempels work for HOPE, the charitable organization running the projects I am going to visit. I had met up with them last time I was in India.

The Royale hotel is SUPER super nice. Giant French Colonial building, all kinds of cool artifacts and furniture inside. Amazing huge breakfast buffet. I tried to pace myself but I got full before I got to eat everything I wanted to eat. Best was this spicy beef/noodle/vegetable soup.

Went to church with them. Church was very cool, ~300 people, almost all of the service in Khmer. First time I had to do a service with the headphones where they translate. Singing was interesting: same songs I am used to but different pace, different style, and different words (Khmer). The really odd thing was the clapping. For a song in 4/4 I am used to clapping on the 2 and 4. They clap on the 1 and 3. For a song in 3/4 (To God Be The Glory) I don't clap. They clap on the 1, the 3, and then the 2 of the next measure.

Went to lunch with a bunch of ex-pats. There are a lot of people here from other countries working for HOPE, as teachers in schools or as admins or Drs with the hospital. This one sister, Gurlinda (sp?) had a very interesting background. Born in the Phillipines, sent to study Russian in Russia by her communist grandparents at 16, med school in Moscow, worked as a doctor in Dubai and Afghanistan before coming to Cambodia. Fluent in English, Tagalog, Russian, and Khmer.

After lunch Greg and I went to see the palace, which basically amounted to a tour of a bunch of nice gardens with beautiful wooden and stone pagodas. If there was an actual palace in there somewhere we missed it, but I didn't care because I was super-fried by then. It was HOT. And crowded. Some interesting interactions with the locals. As I was walking through this one really crowded hall, where people basically walk in a circuit looking at different artifacts in cases, people are so jammed up against each other, like really tight. I kept feeling this fist in my back and I turned around kinda peeved, and it's this old Khmer lady, looking right at me. So funny to me. In America you walk up and poke a stranger in the back, repeatedly, you're going to hear about it. Here I guess that's just how they roll. Or she was a mean old lady.

Greg and I are both tall (over 6 feet). One group of tourists decided we were the most interesting thing there, and basically came over one by one to get a picture with us. Arms around us posing and all. Without asking or communicating or anything. So I will show up on some Khmer Facebook page "Look at these freaky tall people!"

We came home to nap. Greg successfully pulled that off, I got distracted with a computer game (whoops) and didn't nap.

Dinner with Gurlinda and two other sisters: Cornelia (a surgeon from Switzerland) and XXX (name forgot), a local. We went to the Titanic restaurant, which I thought was hilarious (who names a restaurant after a notorious disaster). Good food (chicken Amok, also hilarious). There was talk of going out dancing after but I was the killjoy, I was too tired.