[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text letter_spacing=””] Today was our second day in Phnom Penh and everyone seems to be doing well! Our biggest problem is definitely adjusting to the sleep schedule here because day here is night back home. The food has all been great, and I’ve had French toast for breakfast for the second day in a row. It’s nice to have a reminder of home when I’m so far away. After breakfast we had another language lesson with our guide Phiya, and we learned how to say simple phrases. It’s really hard to get the pronunciations right because the language is so different from English. After our language lesson we all hopped on the Purple Bus and visited a local arts school where students learn traditional dancing, art, and music. There we watched the students perform several different traditional dances.
After the performance the instructor invited a few of us onto the stage to practice a type of fast dance. We got into pairs and did a three step dance where we had to jump in and across two wooden bars that were smashed together on the beat. It was super hard to do the dance steps, keep my balance, and watch out for the wooden bars at the same time but we all did our best and it was really fun! Then the performers helped us put on traditional skirts, and we did a short dance together. The kids were all very graceful dancers, and their joy and friendliness made us all smile.
Following our dance lessons, we went into the art room and were challenged to draw a clay pot. After we slaved over our drawings for 20 minutes, our teacher gave grades that ranged from a 50 to a 70 out of 100. Ouch! Our drawings were all beautiful on the inside though. Then we moved to another classroom and attempted to play “Jingle Bells” on several types of traditional Cambodian instruments, including small gongs and xylophones made of bamboo.
Next we all piled back on the Purple Bus and headed to a nice buffet lunch. It was an incredibly strange experience to try to find something to eat when we couldn’t recognize what the foods were and don’t speak the language. The majority of us stuck to foods that we were familiar with, but Scout and Olivia were pretty adventurous and Alexa tried foods like dragonfruit, frogs, snails, and chicken foot.
After lunch, we went to visit TinyToones. TinyToones is a school that teaches kids and helps them get excited about going to school by also teaching things like breakdancing and hip hop music. When we walked in we could hear “Old Town Road” blasting from one of the classrooms, and it was really funny to see how far the song had traveled from the US! All the kids were very excited to see us and got up from their chairs with the biggest smiles and waved. Then they all gathered in one room and one-by-one some of the kids came forward and showed off some of their break dance moves. They were all so young and it was really impressive that they were already so good!
When the kids had finished dancing and gone back to class, their dance teacher came in and tried to teach us some breakdancing. Most of us weren’t very good at break dancing but we tried our best, and we all had a great time trying to do all the moves. However, trying to break dance today might have been the sweatiest many of us have ever been. Then he tried to teach us a few special tricks and a few of us learned how to balance on our heads and hands for a few seconds.
We were about to leave Tiny Toones when a man with a large, professional looking camera asked for our picture. Someone said yes and suddenly we had cartons of dried fruit and vegetable chips in our hands. Everything had been cooked so we started to eat it while a man explained that we were the first Americans to try his product, and he would like to have our endorsement. We took several, very sweaty, pictures with him and his product and then he started to pull people aside for interviews in front of the camera complete with microphones. After we left Tiny Toones we had dinner in a nice restaurant and returned to the hotel for a thought-provoking work session and discussion of the cultural lens that we look at the country through. We also prepared for our interview tomorrow with CRDT, the NGO we will be working with on the island. Finally, after a really full day, we went to bed!
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