Cambodia, Day 1: Arrival

There always seems to be dilemmas in life...until I got here, mine was attempting to work a little during my long journey while trying to ignore the joys of an upgraded Business Class ticket...See, this is what I should have been doing


Papers and stuff to read were more than I could handle. And so...well...I got a bit distracted

















After about 9 hours on the plane I was gazing out on a dark landscape that looked extremely beautiful and mysterious, large crevasses and hilly regions where all I could see. Every now and then some lights would appear and I never would have guessed where we where if it hadn't been for the map on the screen...Afghanistan.
It was quite impressive and hard to believe that I was flying over a country where so many people are fighting and suffering on a daily basis. And what was I doing? Drinking champagne and eating a delicious lemon tart...

I landed at Phnom Penh airport to find the Projects Abroad coordinator, Chamroeun, waiting for me. After a short drive we arrived at the apartment and he showed me my "Cambodian mum" and the place I was going to stay in. The place is simple but comfortable and luckily I am one of the few privileged to have AC in the room! Given the heat outside (around 36 Celsius), I am more than happy with this, considering the fact that the other rooms only have fans :)

The rest of the day went by pretty smoothly, I met some of the other volunteers (Danish Signe, British Bea, Japanese Oriko, Swiss Cara) during lunch. It was an onion based sandwich which made me feel AND smell like an onion the rest of the day...lovely. Later I met Corinne and Andy, my Swiss and British roomies, which are so far very sweet and seem like fun. Corinne and I shared a talk and a cold coke on the apartment 2 rooftop (yeah there are 5 apartments, I live in # 4, all are next to each other and the roofs of 2 and 3 are nicely furnished with chairs) and listened to the rather bad karaoke music coming from the beer garden next door and which luckily does not reach our ears in apartment 4 but pretty much keeps people in the other apartments awake most of the night...

No need to say that first day was overwhelming in many ways, and I asked myself several times what the hell I was doing here. But I've got to give it some more time I guess, enough to start feeling comfortable around the city and with the extremely NICE people. I expect that will take a couple of days though...