Scotland: Glasgow

After spending 2 days in Edinburgh we took the hour long train to Glasgow for a day of fun. We stayed at the Sandyford Hotel, which is about 2 miles from the city center. You can take buses into the city center very easily, but we ended up walking all the way from our hotel to Glasgow Cathedral on the other side of town. Sadly, by the time we walked there the Cathedral had just closed. Boo! We still were able to look around it and take wonderful pictures. We also spent a while walking around the Glasgow Necropolis which is connected to the Cathedral.

We had a good time in Glasgow, it had a much more laid back feel to it. It also appeared to have a huge night life, which really surprised me on our walk back to the hotel.

It's a good thing we did so much walking in the cities, because we ate like starving people. Especially Hal and I who had unlimited access to western food for the first time in 8 months. For dinner in Glasgow we ate at the Konaki Greek Tavern.  It was super close to our hotel and was fabulous. We ordered 2 chicken kabobs with potatoes and veggies, and hummus and pita and stuffed ourselves silly on wonderful greek food. I'd seriously recommend eating there if you're in the area.

Scotland: Edinburgh

Hal and I flew into Glasgow airport from London and met up with his best friend, also named Sam at the airport. We took a bus to the Paisley station (the closest one to the airport) and went to the Exhibition Center stop which was close to our hotel.

We were freezing. SO cold. It was 90 degrees with 50% humidity every day when we left Cambodia. It was snowing when we landed in Glasgow. We pretty much wore every warm thing we owned the entire time we were there. This is my first official picture of myself in the country I have been dreaming of going to for years and years.

We spent the night there and took a train the next morning to meet my sister and her husband in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is beautiful. I love that they have preserved SO many old buildings. The first day we spent mostly in new town and the second day we visited old town and the royal mile. We went to see Edinburgh Castle, which was very cool, but not the castle experience we were expecting.

Want the beautiful castle experience you think of, when you think of castles go to the Holyrood House, it's the Queen's palace where she stays when she comes to Edinburgh. We walked there from the castle, along the royal mile, but it was closed by the time we got there. There is also a beautiful hilltop cemetery around the corner from the Holyrood House.

After visting the cemetary which had graves older than America we started walking back in the direction of our hotel. We saw the mini hike up to Calton's hill and decided to do it. It was very beautiful up there. It's not a hard walk up the hill, and there are stunning views of the city up there. Definitely worth it.

Those are the main things we did in Edinburgh, but it's such a beautiful city I couldn't help posting some pictures of scenery and beautiful buildings.

Scotland: London

Haha, that title doesn't really make sense, but seeing London is really just part of our Scotland trip.

After couch surfing in the morning we got up and headed out early. We went and saw Tower Hill (Tower of London) which was very close to where we stayed the night.

 After that we took the underground to the Westminster stop, which when you walk up the stairs to the street, you're literally staring up at Big Ben. I love Big Ben and was so excited to see it right away! We had all of our luggage with us, but we both only used a carry on for the entire 2 week trip, so it was doable to bring our luggage. Westminster Abby is right around the corner so we saw that after, but it was really expensive to go inside and we didn't have time, so we just walked around.

After this we walked around for a bit and ended up walking over to Buckingham Palace. It wasn't really what I expected. It was much more plain than I expected after seeing pictures of some of the homes and palaces of the Queen. The guard was there though, so it was cool to see them.

Just me and the guard chilling out.
After this we wandered around and found cool buildings on our way to Victoria station to catch a train to Gatwick Airport.

This was my favorite, it was a hotel called "The Albert" on Victoria street. Get it? If you don't, go watch The Young Victoria... immediately.

Up Next: Glasgow

Heat

A little break from my Scotland posts to post about my normal life here in Cambodia. I realized I don't post that much about our life here at site, even though that's the majority of our time here in Cambodia. Something has come up that I feel so passionate about that I had to post right away.

I'm melting.

It was hot before we left, but it was bearable, we still could sleep with the fan off at night after it cooled down. Then we went on vacation for 2 weeks where it was snowing and we froze. We were adjusted to the heat, or so we thought. All that cold made it miserable to come back. Walking off the plane was like being hit in the face with a hot wet blanket, a nice "Welcome Back", if you will.

Since we've been back our fan has been on almost non stop. I can say I've never felt heat like this.

Forcast for tomorrow: 99 degrees with humidity as high as 76%

Do you know how hot humidity makes my life?
Do you know what it's like to have your fan blowing hot air at you?

This year the random rains have come a bit early, my source of great joy. I get real excited when I hear that boom of thunder, to know the relief from the unbearable humidity is soon coming.

The group of volunteers who came before us thought it was so cool in July when we arrived. I always thought they were crazy, that there was no way this July was cooler than the previous one. It's not that their July was hotter, it's just that April is just that hot.

Update: Weather forecast for April 18th:
Saturday
Clear with a chance of a thunderstorm. High of 95F with a heat index of 138F. Winds less than 5 mph. Chance of rain 20%.

Scotland: Travel Trouble

Hal and I started out our journey very early on the morning of April 1st. We flagged down a touri (a large van) and by 6:30 we were on our way to the border town, Poipet. The border on the Thailand side was very crowded and took a long time, but soon enough we were on the Thai side and enjoying a little 7/11 and air conditioning while we waited for our next touri to get enough people to head out to Bangkok. Around 10 we were on our way to Bangkok. I was very surprised they grow real vegetables, and have trees instead of endless rice fields.

We made it to Bangkok and enjoyed some lunch with friends along Kao San road, the popular tourist part of Bangkok. We left them at Paragon shopping mall, and headed to our hotel the On Nut Guesthouse. This is where our travel troubles started. We had written down the wrong address! Oops. Luckily the hotel we showed up at let us use their internet for free as we didn't have a computer or a phone that worked or anything. Finally we found our hotel and checked in, but sadly were over an hour late for meeting our friends and never were able to meet up with them. It's so hard to travel without a computer and cell phone, we discovered. This whole trip we felt what it was like to plan a trip back before computers.

We went on a search around MBK (a shopping mall) for a Gap, which I read online they had a Gap outlet, and a good food court for thai food. Well after wandering around lost since we couldn't find a good map. There are thousands of stores in this mall and if you walk down one hallway on the floor, there's an entire other hallway you can't even see. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Well the mall was closing so we went in search of food, which also ended up being a bust and we settled for some yummy indian. We didn't get to see the Hunger Games either while we were there. Basically Bangkok was a bust this time.

We made it back to our hotel, On Nut Guesthouse which we chose because it was close to the BTS (sky train) so we could get to the airport early in the morning. The hotel was really great. Our bed was super comfortable. The internet wouldn't work on my phone, so they were really nice and let me use their computer for free (it's hard to find free internet in Bangkok). Just wanted to double check on our flights....everything looked good.

We were up at the crack of dawn to make it to the airport in time, we were there and waiting, but found no sign of King Fisher Airline. We kept asking information and they kept sending us to the same place. Finally someone told us our flight was cancelled and that King Fisher no longer operates out of the Bangkok airport. Crap. Crap. Crap. This is where I am very proud of Hal and I. We held it together, and even though we couldn't get a hold of King Fisher(they never answer the phone!) we went to ticket counter after ticket counter asking about their flights to the UK that day. KLM had one to Glasgow leaving a midnight. Full, no go. Thai Airways had one leaving at noon, in like 2 hours. Thai Airways is amazing. We got tickets for not too much more than we wanted, thanks to some deal, and at noon we were headed to London. Once we got past security they had free computers. We sent an e-mail to Hal's parents asking them to look for lights to Glasgow the next day and got a reply "Is this an April Fools joke?" haha, forgot that we're 13 hours ahead and it was still April Fools day there. The flight was great, all of their drinks and food are free! And we even got a show with the couple 2 rows ahead of us verbally assault the couple a row ahead of us for opening their window blind and waking the other couple's child. And we were able to watch that family have a police escort off of the airplane.

We arrived in London around 8 pm and spent a ridiculous amount of money at the airport using the internet (really Heathrow, no free wifi, and for that matter, really the UK no airport free wifi in 3 airports?) It was like a pound of 2 for 10 minutes. That's ridiculous! Anyway, we spent like 10 pounds in order to book a flight the next day to Glasgow. We found a nice deal on Easy Jet, but would have to leave in the afternoon. That ended up working great, because we got to actually see London during the day.

Hal and I were couch surfing that night with a wonderful couple near Tower Hill, and were so nervous because we didn't make it to their house until around 11pm. They were so lovely and stayed up late getting to know us and they even fed us breakfast and told us how to make it to see what we wanted to see and to Gatwick Airport.

We were hoping to leave the bad mojo we had in Bangkok and early London behind, and luckily, we did and we had a fabulous rest of the trip

Scotland Teaser

Hal and I are back from our dream vacation to Scotland. Apparently going back 6 hours is a lot easier on the jet lag than jumping forward 6 hours. Since we're still slow going, trying to recover from jet lag I thought I'd post some teaser pictures from our vacation. Hope you enjoy.

Meet My: School

It's definitely time for another post to help you see my life here in Cambodia. This ones all about my High School. It's technically a middle school and high school all in one. My school is a little bit unique, as my school director and his son really like to garden, we have pots of plants all over the school.

This is the 12th grade building and the administration office where the school director and assistant school director can be found most of the time. I don't particularly like to hang out in there, there's bats living in the ceiling.

This is the 10th grade building, where I teach one class. This is the wall of the school I want to do an art project on.

So funny story about my school, which kind of shows how Cambodia works. They got money for a new building which they started(pictured below), but they ran out of money and so they stopped work on it. Later they were sponsored to build a new building by the company that runs a local orphanage. Of course they didn't finish the building they already started. They actually took materials away from that building to work on the new building(pictured above). It's almost finished, so hopefully next year they won't have to have classes outside.

This is the 7th grade building which I also teach in. It's badly in need of repair...or more like, needs to be torn down. If it's raining, you can't teach as the entire roof has massive leaks and many of the walls are missing.

This is one of the two 12th grade outdoor classes.

This year the high school started up a garden project. The students water and week their plots all themselves. They have little competitions to see whos looks better and who produces the most morning glory. That's pretty much all they grow there. Students were actually just able to harvest their first batch of morning glory. The blue meshed area is going to be for small trees to grow until they're large enough to be planted.

Now you know what my school looks like! Where I spend the majority of my time when school is in session, which lately seems like never. It's funny how when you're there every day you begin to not even think about the fact that students are learning outside and how the buildings are falling apart, but taking pictures of my school and looking at them makes me realize all of the troubles students have to overcome to get an education in this country.

Banteay Chmar

Hal and I took a little visit to our friend's site in Banteay Chmar.  It isn't too far from our site and I really wanted to go visit after hearing Trophie, the volunteer who lives there talk about the temple in her town. Everyone hears about Angkor Wat, but tourists don't really know about the tons of temples that exist all over Cambodia. There's a lot of them in different provinces. I'm just lucky enough to have a cool one in my province.

The Banteay Chmar temple was essentially ruined in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. There were a lot of Vietnamese and Thai people in Cambodia, and many precious artifacts from the temples were stolen. Some of them have been more recently returned from Thailand. Banteay Chmar is almost all ruins, but they're working really hard to rebuild it.

The temple has a large moat surrounding it that the town actually uses as their main water source during the dry season.

 As you can see above and below, the people who ransacked the temples, usually went after the heads.

Angkor wat, and many other temples have "satellite temples" other complexes not too far from the main temple. The picture below is one of the satellite temples of Banteay Chmar. There's not much left of it's satellite temples, but you can see some of the ruins along the path to what is left.

Warning for those who want to visit Banteay Chmar. Sometimes there are tour buses that go up there and they have homestays where you can stay the night, but if you want to go up for the day, go in the dry season (Nov-mid-april). The road up there (60 from Svay Sisophon) is horrible in the rainy season. Even now, in the height of the dry season the road is still really bumpy. We told our taxi what time we wanted to go back and he seemed to agree, but he left without us, so we were able to stay the night with our friend. So if you're taking a day trip, make sure to arrange a set time with your taxi or you might end up stranded as taxis don't usually go down in the afternoon unless you want to pay a lot.

All in all though, it's worth a visit. We had a lot of fun up there. It's a really small dusty town, but it was great to visit for a day.

Bumrungrad Hospital

When I was medvaced to Thailand with Dengue Fever Peace Corps put me in the Bumrungrad Hospital. I seriously can't say enough about this place. Especially since earlier I had my blood drawn at one of the "best" hospitals in Cambodia...yeah, no comparison with Bumrungrad.

My hospital room in Bumrungrad was the nicest hospital room I had ever been in. The hospital seemed like it was an American hospital the way it was run and their quality of care. They took really good care of me while I was there. While I was put on a soft food diet, and didn't eat most of the time I was in the hospital, I did eat after I got out and I kept coming back to the hospital to eat because they had a great selection. After living in Cambodia for 7 months seeing a McDonalds(which I never ate at back home, but couldn't get enough chicken mcnuggets while in Thailand), and a Starbucks was like heaven. They also had another great shop called Au Bon Pain with yummy pastries that I can't seem to find anywhere in Cambodia.

The night we got to the hospital Hal was so impressed with our hospital room that he took a video of it. I thought that since a lot of people look into getting surgery outside of the US I thought I'd post the video so they can see what some of the rooms are like, so they can know there are really good hospitals in Thailand.  Or if you're backpacking in SE Asia and are hurt, go here!