Day 1

A picture of yourself with fifteen facts.

1. I grew up in a little town in Oregon on the coast...most people have never heard of it and when they hear the name they think it's in Ohio, Washington, or Spain.

2. Despite what it may seem like sometimes I am not a huge fan of being the center of attention.

3. I try not to live with regret and to have a smile on my face.

4. My blog is my journal and scrapbook, I am more constant at it than I have ever been with the other two (and many other things).

5. I have been to 3 of the 7 continents and hope to some day go to at least the main 6.

6. I would much rather it be raining than sunshiny or snowing.

7. I'm a softy for romance books.

8. I wish that I could just be done with school and be teaching in some other country.

9. My favorite words/sayings probably are "Hi" or "Merry Christmas" (need not be Christmastime).

10. Besides wanting to be a teacher my other dream jobs have always been to own a bakery, bed and breakfast or be a party/wedding planner.

11. I love that my Mom has moved to Utah but sometimes feel like I am in limbo and don't have a "home" anymore

12. With so many of my friends and siblings married I have much of my wedding already planned.

13. Sometimes I have days where I just feel like crying, no reason why...I hate those days.

14. My names comes from Little Women (and connections to family via Elizabeth). When I was younger I was disappointed that my parents had given me the character who died and I wished that they would have named me Elizabeth so that I had the choice of what to be called (I'm a big fan of Beth now...I like to be unique :D).

15. I strongly dislike talking on the phone, it's just so awkward to me.

CD1 - Dinner

Andrea and I talked about all the different food we had on this trip and we decided that the restaurants that were chosen were catered to the fact that we came from Taiwan, we kind of wished that we had gotten to try a little bit of different food on this trip but we enjoyed most of what we ate anyway.

Before we could start eating we had to catch a picture of everyone first :D

They had 4 or 5 different sections with different kinds of foods, we all just rotated through the sections for each plate trying a little bit of everything. Those flat things on the left were deep fried bananas, I wasn't a big fan and will probably not be trying them again.

This was really good, it was some noodles with I have not clue what's on top--they chose it for me. I really liked it though, it kind of tasted like black licorice.

This was really good too, there was sweet and sour beef I believe and something else that I liked.

While we ate we had many different types of entertainment--music, dancing, stories, singing!

As we were leaving we decided to catch one more picture of the group of us...it only took like 4 shots to get a good one :D

CD1 - After Dinner Drinks

I feel so naughty saying that we had drinks after dinner, it almost sounds like it was something alcoholic or something, but it wasn't (though I suppose it could have been). After dinner we went to some spot that was very popular with the tourists, there were lots of bars (advertising $.50, $1, $2, etc. beer all day), restaurants, and little shops.

There were many options and it took us a bit to decide what we wanted but I believe that I ended up going with some kind of smoothie.

This restaurant was across the street, it made me laugh.

After we finished our drinks we were given some time to go and explore the streets. We walked past this place where these guys were just sitting with their feet in a tank of fish. I'm not sure what kind of fish they were but we thought it was really strange.

A close up of their feet.

Our group...we were really lucky that it ended up not being a huge group and that they knew some English so we weren't lost the entire time.

As we were sitting waiting for our drinks and when we had our drinks I kept on hearing screams from below us, I couldn't figure out what was going on. When we finally went back downstairs I looked in the restaurant below us and realized that they had the World Cup on, as we wandered down the street we found that it was on in every restaurant and then at the end of the street they had two huge screens on either side and there were crowds of people watching. I saw one shop owner was in the middle of the street with one eye on the game and the other eye on his store.

CD1 - Boat Ride

Directly after being picked up at the airport and having lunch we headed out to Tonle Sap Lake. We left the main part of town and drove through many poor areas. We passed homes that were made of straw, some that didn't even have four complete walls. It made me very sad to see these areas and I wished that there was something that I could do to help them.

We got out of the van and walked out to see all of these boats floating in the river. I'm not the biggest fan of riding on boats because I always feel like we are going to tip over with just a slight movement, so I was a little nervous when I discovered that we would be riding on one of them.

Our tickets to make it official that we were going on the boat.

The ramp going down to the boats was really steep, we walked very slowly one foot barely moving at a time and holding onto the railing the whole way.

All of us on the boat, thankfully our group leader had no problem moving around on the boat.

More boats sitting and waiting until they were needed.

Another view of a house, many people would just sit there waiting for tourists to pass to try and sell them something.

A boat-store, two of the girls were so excited when they saw these---"Shopping!"

A beautiful view of the clouds and greenery.

A school that we passed.

Homes, part of the lake village.

Another school that we passed, they were just getting out. For "buses" they had a boat that would boat them to their home boats. Because the water was so shallow and some of the kids lived close enough I guess some would actually just swim home.

We stopped at this store, outside the boat they had a section where they were raising crocodiles...I wasn't so excited about seeing them there.

I don't know if you can really see but that little girl has a huge snake wrapped around her neck, we saw several like this. Trying to get people to take pictures and then give her money for taking the picture.

Some of the things to purchase in the store.

If you can't tell that is part of a snake in the bottle.

Scorpians!

Riding back in style...a couple of times kids would try to come up in their boats and beg for money, when they would do that one of the drivers would run up to them and have something to hit them with if they tried to talk to us---kind of a waking up experience for my first time being in Cambodia.

Because it was summer it was their drought season, the water was really shallow, maybe 2 or 3 feet deep. At some places where it was especially shallow our driver would turn the engine off completely and just let us flow. This boat had gotten really stuck and there was several other boats coming from both directions trying to get by.

Trying to get by the boat that was stuck and help them a little without getting us stuck ourselves.

It was interesting, at the beginning when we were going down the ramp someone had taken our picture, I hadn't really thought much about it until when we were getting off the boat and these two girls walked up to us with plates that had Andrea's picture and mine on them. We were really confused but we quickly realized that it's all about making money and that it would be something that we should be prepared to encounter many times before we headed home.

CD1 - Lunch

I will be labeling each post as C (for Cambodia) D (Day) # (For what day I am talking about) - Topic (what I am blogging about in this post). It will be too confusing if I label each as Cambodia---blah, blah so that is why I will be doing CD# -

We had assumed at the beginning that our group was going to be pretty big, because when we think tour groups we think lots of people with awesome clothes, big sunglasses, and huge old fashioned cameras. But we kept looking around the whole gate and couldn't find anyone with the same tag as us. Finally when we got off the airplane in Cambodia we stood to the side hoping that someone would come up to us, finally someone did, she introduced herself as Sophia and told us that there were only 5 of us in the group. We quickly found the other two girls and went inside to find our group leader. For some reason the other 3 seemed to have a lot of other paperwork that we had never been given, but it didn't seem to be too much of a concern of the group leader (oh something that we quickly discovered---he knew pretty much NO ENGLISH!!! They assumed that since we were coming from Taiwan that we must be Taiwanese and as such speak Chinese...WRONG! Luckily the 3 girls in the group knew enough English that we were comfortable for the trip).

After going through customs our first stop was lunch!

When we first sat down at the table this guy came around and put ice cubes in our cups for us if we wanted them...look at the size of the cubes! Then came the delicious food! They kept putting plate after plate of food onto the lazy Susan and boy were none of us complaining :D

Andrea after finishing (we didn't even eat a portion of the food!)

Look at that yumminess--you should be proud to know that I even ate fish at this lunch.

After lunch we all had to use the little girls room. I thought these signs were really cool and my Mom always likes to take the pictures of bathroom signs, so I took these for her :D

The sitting area in the hotel where we ate lunch. We were hoping that we were staying here but we ended up somewhere else that was just as nice.

They had these really pretty things all around the lobby and in the bathroom.

As there was only two stalls in the bathroom we had to take turns going to the bathroom, so what did we do while we waited our turn? Took pictures of course :D