Alphabet of Emotions

Cambodia has stolen our hearts? No...

We have fallen in love with Cambodia? Sounds lame.

Cambodia, we love you!? Mehhh..

It is so hard to put into words the way I feel about this country now that the first year has come to an end. Nothing I say could adequately express all the nuances and layers of this experience.

Let me try to explain.

First of all, Cambodia is dirty. On the whole and in general, it is a dirty place. The streets are dusty and there are piles of trash on many a street corner. Often, out towards our house, farther from the city, said trash is lit on fire. On the flip side, in the city, there are people searching through these garbage piles with headlamps on, looking for anything salvageable. There are men urinating in public constantly, just on the wall or on a tree, making me wish I had a blow dart kit with me at all times.

Cambodian streets are unsafe. There are potholes, deep puddles marked only by a reflective CD (yeah, they are creative...), random trash, a million dogs and this is not to mention the traffic. There are limited to no traffic rules that locals consistently obey other than 'try and avoid the cops,' who stand en masse around corners, trying to pull you over and weasel two bucks from you. I would wager that 80% of the people on motos are without helmets, and often they are accompanied by three to five family members, a propane tank, a newborn infant attached to an IV and a live rooster. Mom also has a bag of cucumbers on her head.

Cambodia has poor customer service. What is on their menu is not actually what they have.

Episode one: "I'll have the Caesar salad." "Sorry...we are out of that." "Out of salad? Why don't you tell me specifically which ingredients you are out of and we can try and make this work." (awkward smile) "We are out."

Episode two: "Can I please have the burger with onion rings instead of fries?" "Onion rings?" "Yes, onion rings. Can you do?" "Yes." (ten minutes later, a burger and fries arrives)

Episode three: "Three mojitos please!" (waiter brings over indistinguishable light brown drinks with chunks of some sort of citrus floating in it)

Then there is the fact that Cambodia smells. There is the smell of bright yellow, homemade-recipe gasoline on the side of the road, sold in old, glass Coke bottles. There is the smell of the fish and shrimp paste factory down the road (we often take bets on how much someone would have to pay us to live in this area). There is the smell of trash fires. Dogs. Wet dogs. There is the smell of the many different food vendors selling their wares on the side of the road. And don't forget the smell of the fish market where live fish are clubbed over the head fresh to order!

Cambodia's weather is brutal. It is either stiflingly, all-consumingly HOT, or it is stifling, all-consumingly HOT and RAINY. The roads flood. The power goes off and on.

There are animals and bugs everywhere. I had a large lizard, longer than your hand, crawl across the ceiling and then poop on my bed. ON MY BED. Day in the life. You walk across the room at night to use the bathroom just praying that the huge brown spider you saw earlier is tucked away somewhere for a snooze and not scuttling at top speed toward your toes. Mosquitos. Frogs that chorus louder than the Rolling Stones, keeping you up. Roosters crowing at all hours. Trucks of pigs oinking by.

This is not to mention the absurdly loud music and Buddhist chants that are played over loudspeakers for the entire village to hear whenever there is a wedding or funeral. Which there seems to be one of every few days in our part of town.

Oh, and the main dish here in this obscenely hot country? HOT SOUP. Enough said.

So. Wanna come visit?!

But my point is that despite all this, despite the newness and the challenges, the smells and the wet jeans. Despite dripping sweat from all parts of your body on the two minute walk to work, I love it. I love that gasoline smell and the fish market. I love the policeman who is stationed right outside that fish market with the biggest smile you've ever seen, waving people by with a baton in the heat. I love the little man with one regular leg and one half a leg farther down our major road who occupies that same role, simply because he enjoys it and not because he gets paid. I love crossing over the Monivong Bridge from our side of town and looking down at the water (brown on its best day), with the whole city in front of us. I love the annoying call of "tuk-tuk? tuk-tuk?" no matter where I walk in the city. I love the restaurants with heavily-adjectived names (Lucky Bright Restaurant). I love seeing the reject tee-shirts from the factories that everyone wears with English sentences that barely make sense. Once I saw a shirt with just an eagle and a muffin on it. One of my students wore a "name brand" Abibas shirt to school.

Just as with everything, you adapt, you figure things out and you succeed. We have succeeded in finding things to love in every part of this stupid place. And we are happy to return for another year.