The Second Day - 1/12/08

In the morning everyone woke up early despite the fact that we had all stayed up late the night before. We went to eat breakfast, then went back to our rooms. It was here that the lack of a real itinerary really came and bit us on the heel. Tired from last night and with no purpose, almost all of us lay down on our beds and fell asleep till almost lunch time, when we were woken up by a bored Cheam.

The bunch of us, Wang, Deb, Hadi, Cheam, Steph and I ended up eating in some Mexican place called Viva! Afterwards we ended up wandering to the Old Market where we ended up doing a bit of shopping. Then Deb and Wang left and the rest of us continued walking to the orphanage. At the orphanage however, we were waylaid by Zi Yang and herded to see Robert Service (not really his surname, just that no one can remember it), the manager. Then some rubbish followed which pissed me off and made a 'kao buay' expression appear on my face, and I was left to sit fuming in a corner of the orphanage.

My mood only lifted after I followed Arjun and Paul up to where the Y5s were painting the boys dorms. Since I was in no mood to play with the children, I ended up doing painting instead. Some of the older kids came to help paint too, but we had to monitor what they were doing. There Arjun and I ended up talking to Timothy, and we discovered that he was another victim of the WTY curse. I also ended up having to climb onto a shelf which was too big and heavy to move to paint the parts that couldn't be reached, since I was the lightest one around that was still painting upstairs. I had climed up there through the help of a ladder, but coming down was another issue because the ladder had been moved. I ended up climbing down with the use of the shelves after refusing to jump and land on a bed/Jit.

After the painting, we wandered downstairs and ended up playing with the children. I ended up carrying Joi (or boy Noi as most of us called him) around and playing with him, along with random other assorted children that I can't quite recall. This day marked the first day the glue balloons first appeared, which was wildly popular with the children. I remember failing at blowing them because the gum got stuck to the yellow paint on my fingers, ruining the balloons.

Dinner was at some random place next to Swensen's, and I had chicken amok. Before that we also ran into some Caucasian who spoken accented English and asked us about our plans in Cambodia, which weirded us out. We later ended up at a place called Funky Munky to drink for a while before we dispersed. Some of the guys staying at Reaksmey joined us back at our hotel - Arjun, Paul and Jit. The rest went to buy happy pizza. Happy pizza is a very special pizza. It's like some Hawaiian pizza, but with the pineapples arranged in a smiley face. Cambodia is one of the few places that sells happy pizza.

So anyway for some reason, a happy pizza party started in the room I shared with Stephanie. This meant everyone except JLow, Yeang and Jeremy ended up crashing our room, with some of them smoking happy pizza ingredient on the balcony. A few of us also played Heart Attack in the room, which made us giggle like crazy. After a while, my room started smelling like happy pizza ingredient, which made me a little annoyed. As the night advanced, people started dissipating from my room, leaving Hadi, Steph and I to clean up as best as we could before trying to sleep.

However just as I was getting ready for bed, I heard laughter and went to investigate. What followed next was about an hour of utter rubbish and stuff I can't say here. Just know that 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is an apt description of the feeling experienced. That and hearing pillows singing in tv voices, bad spelling, and feeling thirsty like you never have before. That had to be the most insane hour of my life.

The Third Day - 2/12/08

I was woken up in the morning by Cielo I think. I felt completely dead and extraordinarily tired. I shuffled about to wash my face, then quickly joined Jit and Arjun and the others for the only touristy action of my entire trip - a visit to the Tonle Sap and the Angkor Wat. On the bus and the boat ride along the Tonle Sap, Arjun and I were the only ones consistently awake. The rest were drifiting in and out of sleep.

Lunch was some really weird beef lok lak in some dodgy place. Then we went off to walk around the Angkor Wat. The group of us got separated, so I ended up walking about with Arjun, Jit and Cielo, with Arjun worrying about random unexploded land mines in the temple grounds. Then it was back to the orphange. This was the day that I first really remember playing with Nyet, the 3 year old girl who stuck with me for the rest of my trip.

Nyet has large eyes and a tendency to not look at the camera. She smiles occasionally, gets violent and aggressive when my attention is on other kids. She likes playing with the curtains in the hall and hiding inside their dark quietness. She likes being carried, seems to speak Mandarin (or it might be the happy pizza's doing), calling out 'Bao!' (carry) and saying 'Lai!' (come) to me. She is also damn heavy to carry for a prolonged period. She also ignores people when they try to call to her, something which she also did to me on the last day for a while despite her running to me every previous day I was there. And for some reason, she really reminded me of myself as a child.

Today something insane also happened at the orphanage. The Y5s donated a swing. The kids (some 20++ of them) immediately crowded round it and were jostling to get on. There were pushing, shoving, slapping and crying. The combined weight of the kids made the already badly built swing more unstable as the base flew up a bit with every swing. Then the singing started. It soon became apparent that they only really knew EIEIO from Old Macdonald Had A Farm, the Alphabet Song and bits from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was pure chaos and insanity, with a large dosage of surrealism as the volunteers all gathered around to watch the kids swing madly.

Dinner was at the Dead Fish, where there were crocodiles and random ducks walking around the place. I knocked over my glass of pineapple juice there. Stephanie wasn't feeling well, so Hadi and I deposited her back at the hotel before going to a place called In Touch which had live music. The others were already there, and I ordered a Daiquiri. The live music was pretty amusing because while the girl was singing jazz, she often sang in funny keys, which made her funny accent even worse. After a while we headed out and those who weren't tired went to X Bar. There, I finally got my Sex on the Beach (something which the others found amusing). After a while we wandered off to Sok San (which I keep thinking is called Sovnarkom) which had loud music, disco lights and dancing lady boys (well they were supposedly female, but the bits of light that shined on their face betrayed this fact) and I had a Pimm's. By this time I had gotten a bit high since I was tired and they were more generous with the alcohol content in Cambodia.

After the club, we ended up walking back to Pub Street as Paul wanted to do some dancing. Deb didn't trust my state and ended up leading me about by the hand, something which made me giggle more. Finally after sitting at the next club/pub for a few moments, I was led out again by Deb and we all headed back to the hotel. Back at the hotel I started drinking lots of water and eating some random cookies I bought earlier. I called them JLow cookies, which made the others think I was high on alcohol -______- (he recommended them to Arjun who then recommended them to me). Then I went to sleep.

The Fourth Day - 3/12/08

Today was the only full day I spent at the orphanage. Sadly enough it also appears to be the day I least recall, for some odd reason. In the morning Steph and I headed for the orphanage by ourselves. There, we found the guys from Reaksmey already playing with the kids, and the Y5s doing the final touches to the study area they had built. The Y5s also had another surprise for the kids, they had ordered 2 more swings after seeing how popular 1 had been (and for some reason now I keep thinking about the chart of deminishing consumer satisfaction). The two new swings were put in the front, facing each other.

Similar to yesterday, an explosion of kids occured. They clamoured onto the new swings, ignoring the older one. After a while they started singing EIEIO again, over and over, much to the amusement of all of us around. There's a video of it to be found here. As the Y5s were leaving, a small certificate ceremony was held to give out the certs to all the volunteers, even though it wasn't our last day.

I was also horrified to discover that bottles of turpentine were placed in normal clear plastic bottles and left among the children. As it was, the children were already snatching the bottles to drink the water inside. However acting on some hunch, I grabbed a bottle away from Joi (which made him kick up a fuss) and smelt it. As the strong fumes hit my olfactory senses, I felt a wave of horor wash over me because a child under my care almost drank something poisonous. I ended up taking the bottle away and dumping it somewhere. After that I smelt every single bottle the children had, and ended up finding another such bottle filled with turpentine.

Upon leaving the orphanage for lunch, Stephanie was faced with an amusing prospect - having to walk in broken sandals. She ended up limping slowly, and hopped across the road on one foot as I supported her. The Cambodians around were laughing. We ended up taking a tuk tuk back to the hotel to get her shoes and went to a place called easy speaking in Pub Street. I remember I had chicken amok again. At around 2pm, most of us returned to the orphanage and went to the manager's room where he said he had plans for us to do specific projects, like painting murals and planting new shrubbery, nevermind that we said we would only be there for one more day.

We ended up taking out the art materials for the kids to play with, on the pretense of getting them to draw subjects for the mural. The kids ended up making a right royal mess of things, with markers thrown all over the place and some random abstract scribbes that looked like worms writhing in agony. Thankfully, the older ones drew more coherent images which featured lots of rainbows. I think that was because of a communication fail when someone drew a rainbow first to demonstrate what to draw.

My memory gets really screwed up when it comes to the orphanage, mainly because a lot of the things that went on repeated themselves everyday. I chased the same kids, threw the same kids into the air, carried the same kids and played with the same kids. Because of this I find myself unable to differentiate most of the days from each other. For instance there was a day that I carried Nyet (or Neath as the real spelling of her name) past the newly constructed study area and sang I'll Follow You Into the Dark to her (inappropriate song, but oh well) as the guys played with the younger children nearby.

Today there was the first feeding frenzy in the orphanage. This was because Jeremy and JLow were leaving the next day, so they bought treats for them. Those who gave out treats soon found themselves completely swarmed and overwhelmed by children jostling for food. I managed to worm out of every single one of those sessions. Heh heh. Instead I was manipulated by Nyet multiple times to get food easier and faster by being carried by me. That and I had to open sweet wrappers for multiple children, some who had already unsucessfully attacked the sweet wrapped with their teeth, leaving the wrappers slimey with saliva.

At night we ended up eating together at Burgers Without Borders. Arjun had a Chicken burger, hahaha. The burgers there were really big, and I enjoyed the tomatoes and the beef. Afterwards we met the other group at X Bar, walked to Sok San togehter and then ended up at Warehouse after deciding how horrible Sok San was. At Warehouse we ended up splitting into two main groups playing bridge. When the other group joined us again, they started to play pool with some random caucasians. I remember a few things about the night, mainly they played One More Time which I immensely enjoyed, I lost every game of bridge (my poor partners), I wasn't in the best of moods and JLow knocked over his drink, causing the glass to break. When we finally decided to head back, Steph and I were escorted by Jit and Arjun to our hotel by tuktuk.

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Argh I'm tired and it's late again. I shall try and finish up tomorow.