Andrew Turco - A year in Cambodia

Thursday:

Unless these are just the rare mango rains coming with an intense frequency, I think going to meditation at Wat Lanka might have been my last legitimate, pre-rainy season activity. The Thursday night before Bryan and Jana left for Bangkok, they invited me to join them for meditation at one of Phnom Penh’s original wats, so just as the sun was falling behind the city’s squat skyline, we walked the few blocks from their apartment to the pagoda.

In the time between school and meditation, I went back to my apartment to change. Once there, the big question was what to wear to a local wat meditation session? How do you be respectful of being in a temple while being comfortable enough to sit on the floor and relax?

The monks at Wat Lanka hold meditation sessions everyday at six o’clock, and the monk who was in the temple that evening was very accommodating of the fact that neither the three of us nor the one other person who was there had ever meditated before. As with many other activities here, it’s always fun to learn details of things I previously only knew about generally. When you meditate, you don’t actually sit directly on the mat on the floor but with about one-third of your butt resting on a circular pillow on top of the mat on the floor. The slightly raised seat made it infinitely more feasible to sit with my legs crossed for that long. Additionally, I learned that you’re not supposed to reflect or think about anything while you meditate; instead, you’re supposed to get to state in which your mind is blank.

We sat with the monk for the first half hour, and all three of us admitted afterwards that we weren’t sure whether we were supposed to be listening to the monks directions and nodding in comprehension or closing our eyes and practicing the techniques he was telling us, especially since after the first half hour, he had us face the Buddha and begin our 30 minute meditation session without instruction.

Either way, it was very relaxing, and the doors on all sides of the building were open, which let in a warm breeze. Outside and above us, the bells hanging from the eaves clanged gently, and we were well enough in from and high enough above the street that the constant noise of Phnom Penh disappeared from around us.

Unfortunately, it’s April, which means it’s hot. For some reason, the monk closed half of the doors at the same time that we turned to meditate in front of the giant Buddha statue, extinguishing refreshing puffs of air. When meditating, you’re not supposed to move, and if you’re doing it properly, even sudden and loud sounds shouldn’t disturb you.

I let the first few drops of sweat roll down my face and neck, but after a while, I couldn’t help myself. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and it almost started amusing me how much I was sweating in a delirious kind of way. Anyone could have easily pointed to the dark green patches on the sleeves of my light green shirt as proof that I hadn’t been still for the entire time. I tried to wipe my sweat quietly so that no one would hear. Luckily, everyone’s eyes were closed.

Afterwards, I joined Bryan and Jana for a final drink in the neighborhood next to the wat, where they live and where I stayed at the guesthouse at the beginning. I intentionally don’t go down there much anymore, and it was amazing how much the surroundings of those few blocks brought me back to my first month here. Luckily, I’ve been here long enough to able to find the recollections of my clueless first few weeks amusing.

Saturday:

On Friday and Saturday, it continued to be hot, to the point where my fingertips were getting pruney just from the constant sweat.

Veggies is the name of a small, fresh produce-oriented grocery store on Street 240. The front room of the small store has shelves full of fairly non-descript goods, but the back half of the store is a walk-in fridge with cheese, vegetables, fruit, meat, and even smoked salmon. On Saturday afternoon, it was so hot that I actually ducked into Veggies to use their walk-in fridge for a few minutes during my walk home from somewhere else. Whenever someone else would come in, I pretended to be studying which cheese to get, and in my defense, I ended up buying some milk. There’s nothing more refreshing than stepping into a refrigerator on a hot day.

That night, a few of us were planning on going to dinner in the Chinese neighborhood near Central Market. We were about to go when the skies opened. We could have guessed that the weather was about to change based on the strong breeze that all of a sudden started blowing through our apartment and providing some relief from the heat. It was about an hour after dark, and the water came down like I’ve only seen it do here before. It was one of those storms that are great to watch from the comfort of your own place or sitting under an awning. We delayed dinner until it stopped raining and basked in the glory of finally, after multiple months, having weather that actually makes you feel justified getting cozy inside.

Brendan put on some tea and like an old couple, we sat in the living room with our teacups, watched the rain, and chatted. As the rain came streaking down outside, our conversation wandered to various Cambodian topics. Since our lease is coming up and since the expat we’re sub-leasing from is coming back, we’ve started looking for other places to rent during our last couple of months here.

Earlier, we saw an apartment that was being rented by an expat who’s been here for three years and who told us that she was riding her motorbike down Monivong a day before and decided that it was time for her to leave. She was, therefore, packing up to go back to Britain and trying to find someone to take on the remainder of her lease. She was interested in taking on a short-term tenant, however, so that, in case she couldn’t find anther foreign country to go to and in case Britain was too expensive, as she predicted it would be, she could come back. It was time for her to leave. She didn’t speak a word of Khmer and admitted to us that she hadn’t really kept up with friendships in a city whose expat population is often in flux. She herself had such a desire to get out that she was leaving halfway through her lease, yet she was admitting to us right then that she might be back if she couldn’t find anything better. That night, Brendan and I pledged to each other that we’d never live in a foreign country just because it was easy and cheap or because we couldn’t succeed elsewhere.

We also noted with amusement that Brendan’s name has slowly moved to nearly the top of the Post’s masthead. The paper was purchased from its founder in January, and the new publisher is expanding the staff and output multiple-fold. That, combined with a few exits from a previously small office, means that you’d probably never guess from reading the paper that reporter Brendan Brady is 22 years old and has been at the paper since only September.

We also discussed the unnecessary recklessness of drunk driving at night. The city’s streets empty out after around 9:30, and for the only time, cars and motorbikes can get up to legitimate speed in the quietness of night. Unfortunately, it’s completely accepted that the majority of the people driving at those speeds are drunk, and both Brendan and I have seen our fair share of westerners getting on their bikes in states we’d be doubtful they’d be caught doing in their home countries. They then joke about it at dinner days later or wonder in all seriousness why they crashed into another wall or were held up on their way home. This, of course, is not to say that Khmers aren’t probably even more accepting of this type of driving. What is it about Phnom Penh that makes this acceptable all of a sudden?

And finally, we got a few good laughs from the fact that about half of the last essays I got started with the phrase, “All people in the world…,” a common Cambodian way of writing that goes from super general to the specific topic that they will then write about. To non-Cambodians, however, it seems like a comically broad way to start an essay before narrowing to the actual thesis.

As we sat in our chairs and I looked around, I noticed the multiple copies of the Phnom Penh Post that have piled up next to the books on Southeast Asian history. I thought for a moment about how absorbed I am in and how much more knowledgeable I am of a country of which I knew very little about even last year at this time.

By around nine o’clock, the deluge had tapered to a steady rain, and we ventured out to dinner. Rabia had been unable to get to our apartment because of flooding, and as we stepped onto the sidewalk to go to her place instead, the fluorescent lights over the neighboring apartments allowed us to see that Street 178 was, in fact, full of water. Two people up to their lower thighs in water pushed a white Toyota Camry back to higher ground, and people stuck on other streets but determined to continue on their journeys slogged through the river of floating debris, holding bags at shoulder height.

It made for a little bit of excitement, but you couldn’t have paid me to plow through the water, unless I was in one of the Land Cruisers or dirt bikes, which all of a sudden became the only vehicles able to ford the street in front of us. Everything that had accumulated on the streets during the entire dry season was suddenly mobile and floating through the steady stream of water that passed in front of us.

We got on a motorbike in a drier area and held our legs up as high as we could as we splashed through the puddle-filled streets. We had dinner at Nature and Sea, a small outdoor, but covered, restaurant on the third floor of a small, skinny building. With a view of lit Independence Monument and a steady breeze, there couldn’t have been a better place to be on that rainy night. We commented on the chill in the air, telling ourselves how cool it felt, even though I realized when getting into bed later that all of us had been wearing short sleeves and sandals and had had no desire to put on another layer. Yet, to us, it was cold.

This Week:

This week produced one very great find. On my new Nokia cell phone, which doesn’t even have a color display, they’ve included a small flashlight on the top, which has made my walk down the dark tunnel to our apartment infinitely more convenient. Additionally, I would easily pay a premium for a flashlight on my phone at home rather than the utterly useless camera. Why did this not become the feature to be popularized? This discovery has been the highlight of my week.

Also, through numerous confessions, meetings, and chats with certain students, we have discovered that the cheating from last week didn’t come directly from one of the teachers giving the answers to his class (though, in the process of finding this out, the teacher did admit that he never gives the listening section of our tests and also made his students come in earlier than scheduled the Thursday of the midterm so that he could leave early). In the end, we figured out that he had had a copy of the test on his desk during class on Wednesday, and when he stepped out between classes to use the bathroom, students went with their camera phones to take pictures of the tests, which they later enlarged and worked together to make cheat sheets for. We were all shocked by high-tech nature of the operation, and all cell phones should definitely have flashlights rather than cameras.