Day 5

This morning, we woke up to a lovely breakfast cooked by our homestay mum. To our surprise we did not only eat rice porridge and fried fish, we also had some pancakes with home made jam. They make a big effort to make us feel welcome in their home and we really appreciate it.

At 7.30 we took a tuk tuk to university since class began at 8am. We met all of our friends that are staying at other families and talked about our experience so far.

In one of the homes, the ceilings of the rooms are so low that our friends cannot stand up straight in the rooms. A lot of the families also don't have hot water (at that point I really appreciated the hot shower I was able to have in the morning) and in some, the bed only consist of wooden constructions without a mattress. Most of the rooms we are staying in don't have any form of air circulation. A few have fans and some lucky ones (for example us) have air-conditioning.

Another difference between Cambodia and Australia: the toilets. Toilet paper is not used in Cambodia. Instead, people use water and a hose. Additionally, the toilets usually don’t have a flush. To flush, a cup is used to take some water out of a bucket and the water is then poured in the toilet.

After talking about our new experience with the Cambodian culture, we had our first Khmer lesson. The grammar of the language is easy to understand. The verbs are not conjugated and stay the same in every tense. The sentence structure is very easy as well: Subject -> Verb -> Object. However, the pronunciation is very difficult.

Nevertheless, trying to talk to Cambodian people in their own language makes them very happy. They really appreciate the effort.

With our new language skills, we returned home to our homestay family and were very eager to try them out. After dinner, we had a great evening with lots of fun. One of our friends in our group bought a guitar at the markets today and the son of the homestay family plays guitar as well. So we started to play guitar and sing some songs, and the rest of the family soon joined us. We sang songs in English and in Khmer and the little daughter of the neighbours danced for us. It was really a great evening.

Having our first Khmer lesson.

The toilet flush: a cup of water

The boy on the left is Zhe, one of my friends from our group. The boy in the middle is the son of our homestay family and the woman on the right is one of the neighbours. We had two guitars playing and the whole family singing in Khmer!!

The whole family and some neighbours were singing and having fun with us.

And we had a little dance