Cambodia's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Well you know how oven things go awry and someone gets hurt on holidays? Well apparently this is a world wide thing. Sorry to Danielle who cut her finger open trying to help clean up. After sadness and worry, what's the way most people deal with that....laughter.

So I walk into a room and decide that we need our own rendition of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, so that this will actually feel like Thanksgiving. Oh, and it happened...and it was amazing. Are you ready for picture overload?

 We started off with a bang, a new edition to the line up, we were so energetic at this point, they hoisted me up above their heads. You can see through the progression of the photos and as the turkey sleep sets in, we had to get more creative with floats closer to the ground. I'm sure you're wondering what can Peace Corps Volunteers do with just themselves and a camera...well, prepared to be amazed.

 And this is what happens when you leave Peace Corps Volunteers alone in an air conditioned conference room.

Someone go buy something for me, only on sale though.

Thanksgiving in Cambodia.

While our plans to have a nice Thanksgiving dinner, all together as K5 volunteers changed, thanks for Peace Corps inevitable last minute changes, we were still able to make the best of it and have a blast with our half of the volunteers, a week early.

Now really a huge thanks has to go to the K4's who spent all day slaving in a kitchen to create a wonderful feast for us. They did an amazing job. That turkey hit the spot just right, and I was thoroughly satisfied. Who knew that you could make turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pasta salad, and an almost endless amount of baked goods in a country where they have turkeys, but don't eat them, and a country where ovens practically don't exist? Well, they did it. And many thanks to the staff for bringing some of the deliciousness from the lovely western stores that exist in Phnom Penh. All of this definitely made for a lovely Thanksgiving night with my Peace Corps family.

You see that napkin overflowing with dessert? Yeah, that's my dessert plate, since I didn't have room on my actual plate. And yes, I did eat them all. You can't turn down baked goods in this country, they come few and far between.

The thing I am the most thankful for on this day? That Hal is brilliant and made a turkey, mashed potato, cranberry sandwich, and took a handful of brownies, and hid them in our mini fridge. We had the best free lunch the next day, and we had time to take a nap. Best 24 hours yet in Cambodia? It's definitely a contender.

Stay tuned for the Peace Corps Cambodia version of the Macy's Day Parade.

Guy Fawkes Celebration

I'm so glad that both the VSO and Peace Corps volunteers that live in my provincial town love to celebrate and get together as much as I do. I am also very glad that the VSO (same thing as Peace Corps, but not from America) volunteers want to share their culture with us! We have two British voluteers that live in our town with us, and one more that lives in the provincial town. So when Guy Fawkes day came around, you bet your bottom dollar that we celebrated. And many thanks to Hannah for letting me steal your pictures.

Guy Fawkes was a man who tried to blow up palace and kill the king in the 1600s. Unfortunately for him, he was discovered and tortured before being killed. So we thought we were celebrating his attempt at this and his fight for what he thought was right, you know, American ideals. Turns out the celebrate that was unsuccessful burn a "Guy" in a bonfire on November 5th every day.

We started with preparing a bonfire, thanks to Hal's handy dandy eagle scout skills we had one ready in no time.

Then Pete and John hoisted up our "Guy"

Then the bonfire really began. I was surprised by how fast his "lacoste" pants caught on fire. (side note, when you get pants made here, they sew designer labels into them, so many pants say Lacoste or Levis)

We continued the celebration with the traditional bobbing for apples and fireworks. Who knew you could find bottlerockets and sparklers in a small town in Cambodia?

And we ended the night by sharing some American culture and making s'mores on the ashes of Guy Fawkes.

Snakes in Cambodia.

Have you ever heard of the Indo Chinese Spitting Cobra? Maybe the Malayan or Banded Crait?

 Images Via

How about the King Cobra? Before coming to Cambodia I had at least heard of that one. It always seemed like the scariest snake to me. Well, in general snakes freak me out...

Cambodia has a lot of poisonous snakes. The other day we were home in the afternoon and our host mother came knocking on our door saying the Khmer word for snake. Of course immediately Hal followed her. I toted a long after finding my camera. This is the scene I came upon.

Our next door neighbor's dog found a cobra in their yard. They pinned it down with a long stick that had one pointy head. They pierced it through the hood. Apparently they stuck a board under it's head after it was binned down and then they proceeded to chop off it's head with a machete. I'm really glad that they took it seriously as many people get bit just standing around in a circle looking at the snake they found.

I'd say the snake was at least 4 feet long. Every time Hal tells this story the length of the snake gets longer. He tried to convince me it was 5 feet yesterday, but when talking to his parents last night he could have sworn it was 6.

We asked if it was dinner. Their response, surprisingly was...no. Too good for the snake, but not too good for the dog, eh?

Pumpkin Carving Cambodia Style

Halloween is my favorite holiday and was not included on my list when I prepared myself for missing the holidays, so when I realized that I was going to miss any resemblance of Halloween I was pretty bummed. Then I thought about it, you know, this is supposed to be a cultural exchange, so I decided to share some of my culture with my host family, and we carved "pumpkins".

They don't have pumpkins here, like what they have in the US, but they were going to have to do. Here's our tiny baby pumpkins.

Hal set to work on carving his.

Our family was very interested in what we were doing. They're generally interested in anything that we are making in the kitchen, but once they realized we weren't making food they were a little confused. Once we broke out the candles and started cutting them, I'm pretty sure they were even more confused. But by the end of our carving session, I think they were pretty impressed with our pumpkin work. So even though they probably have no idea why we put faces on pumpkins and lit a candle inside of them, they liked it enough to want to be taught how to do it.

The bananas in the background just add to the exchange, as they were given to us by our family, from one of the million banana trees in the backyard. So I say cultural exchange = success.