It's funny how getting ready to leave a city makes you want to take a lot more pictures of it.
Here is the street I lived on. My house is the white one on the left. We lived on the second floor closest to the construction site which served as a nice automatic alarm clock to get Simon and I up for school... not so much on the weekends though, when they seemed to really enjoy using the jackhammer.
Here are our neighbors, the construction crew.
This is the beautiful view from our backdoor. We called it the coconut graveyard. Once a week a giant truck full of coconuts would park here, armed with a crew of men with machetes and they would hack away at coconuts all night leaving what you see here. Then a few days later when the skins had been dried by the sun they would be placed in a large pile and then set on fire. The good news is that this meant lots of free coconuts for us.
These two were always waiting across the street for us in the morning to give us a 50 cent ride to work.
The big green building on the right is where I worked. Singapore International School is it's name although there is nothing Singaporean or International about it. I taught purely Khmer students aged from 12 to 25, all at either the pre-intermediate or intermediate English level. I asked why the school would have such a name and the director told me they had just never bothered to change the sign... fair enough.
Well. My last post was on April 5th. Kind of hard to believe really. Don't quite know how to sum up three and a half months in one post so I'm not even going to try. The important thing is that I have been so happy living here. But I feel it is time to move on. I will post more on what it was like to live here but at the moment I would like to tell you what's going on in my life now.
Back in March I had two couchsurfers come and stay at my house in Phnom Penh. If you aren't familiar with couchsurfing it is a website travelers can join to find other likeminded people and sleep on their couches. It is how me and my friend Wolfgang traveled around Europe for a month. I know it sounds like a very iffy arrangement and that's exactly what I thought before joining but there are full profiles like on Facebook and people vouch for each other and leave references so the information is all there. But important than safety is finding someone you want to hang out with and who shares the same interests as you.
So I received a message from a couple traveling together (Joel from the USA and Nathalya from Brazil) asking if they could sleep on my couch. They ended up staying for a week with us and fun times were had by all. They were very very lovely to have around, Nathalya made some amazing feijoada (an incredible bean and meat stew) and Joel schooled me in the snooker hall across the road. These two cats are important because they are currently living just outside of Melbourne, where I'll fly to next Wednesday on the 25th of July.
The idea to go to Australia was actually planted in my head in December on a bus from Bangkok to Poipet by an Italian man who had gone to Australia, bought a van, and drove from farm to farm picking fruit and making a lot of money. So there is option #1 for me, working on farms picking grapes, apples, stonefruits, strawberries, and the like. But then there was a man from North Carolina named Jeremy who ended up living with Simon and I for the month of May. He was working on his thesis here helping an NGO dealing with water management and environmental awareness in the province of Prey Veng. Before coming here he had been living in Brisbane, Australia and had made many contacts there, one of whom told him about a construction job that would be available shortly in Melbourne. So there is option #2 for me, working a construction job in Melbourne. But here's where Joel and Nathalya come into the equation! They are currently living in Apollo Park, just south of central Melbourne but are finding the cost of living too expensive there so they are looking into moving slightly further outside the city to a small town on the coast called Apollo Bay.
This week they are driving down there to investigate a house (for three?) and to confirm that the jobs they heard are available there are actually available (for three?). So there lies option #3, move in with two likeminded people with the idea of spending as little as possible and saving up to see more of the world. There's just too much of it out there.
Why keep traveling? Because how can I possibly know where I want to live if I haven't seen all my options?
And here's this just for fun...
