Day 5

Today I woke up at 5:45 and went for a jog. I went to Independence Monument, built when Cambodia won its independence from France, where many Cambodians go in the mornings for exercise. Getting there was easy; it was straight east (toward the rising sun) and you could see the tall monument from anywhere close. I climbed the stairs to the top of the monument to see people everywhere. People were jogging, playing badminton, doing tie-chi, and kicking a shuttle cock looking thing in a circle like a hacky sack. The tie-chi was very cool to watch; one group was using Chinese fans and another group was using swords. When I was jogging, a man and I kept passing each other and eventually started running together. We probably ran side by side for 20 minutes without saying a word, neither of us knew the other’s language. Getting back to the hotel was much more difficult than leaving it. I had a map, but marked the hotel in the wrong place. Eventually I found someone that could give me directions and found my way back. If worse came to worse, all I really had to do is accept one of the hundreds of ‘moto’ offers and said ‘Goldiana Hotel.’

Later, I went with Alan to run some errands. First we went to get a couple of signs made for the dorm. Alan had already designed the signs and printed them out, but he didn’t think about doing a Khmer translation. Hok translated the first sign and hand wrote it onto a metal sheet with the approximate spacing and dimensions we wanted. The next sign was bigger than any of their scrap metal, so Hok cleared the papers off the table we were working on and drew out the sign with a dry erase marker directly on the table. Another interesting thing was when Hok had to translate ‘dormitory’ and ‘Harpswell.’ Being that this was the first dormitory in the country, there was no word for dormitory. I don’t know what he did, but he got on the phone with a few different people and created a word. Also, he translated ‘Harpswell’ phonetically; so when a Cambodian read it back, they said ‘Harpswell.’

After getting the signs made, Hok took us to a place to buy planting pots. The shop consisted of a man's backyard and a few thousand pots. There were hundreds of unique designs and the man knew where to find whatever we described. We bought many very large pots and only paid about $5 per pot. In the United States one of these pots would have cost at least $75.