Workshops

The last couple of days have been pretty laid back and HOT. Yesterday, it was my job to run four craft workshop classes and origami seemed like the way to go. Of course, I only know how to make one thing out of folding paper, learnt when I was a kid: a Japanese paper crane - so that is what we made. Some got it really quickly, others were having lots of difficulty following the steps. I never completely realized how much patience you need when dealing with a bunch of children at once. Kids are amazing, but wow - it's crazy work, especially because of not being able to communicate with them properly...

The other couple of hours were spent getting the older kids to shoot portraits of each other for their credits in the puppet slideshow. Here's a shot one kid, Pech, took of me.

After class, I went to the travel agent in town and bought a ticket to Vietnam and Laos. After Cambodia, my friend Carolina and I are planning to spend a week traveling - two days in Hanoi, two in Ha Long Bay (if you don't know where this is, google it, it's out of the movie Avatar), and two days in Vientiane, Laos. We're PUMPED.

For dinner, my two Norwegian buddies from Anjali, Stine and Anette, and I went for Indian food and some fish pedicure/massage. We were giggling for a half hour while these weird fish were eating up our feet next to these two burly tatted up Dutch guys. They went home before me and I decided to go for another $4 massage, which was... terrible. The masseuse literally scared me.

Today was math day and so for workshop, we played bingo with the kids, who used rocks and grass as tokens. I also printed out those magic number cards, where you can guess someone's number from 1 to 100. This was way more difficult to teach them - some of them didn't really get it and were having trouble adding. Challenging the kids maybe isn't always the best idea. Tomorrow should be more artistic.

For lunch, I got to witness 18 children rolling up to the school, crammed into one tuk-tuk. When they started to descend, it was JUST like in that circus magic trick where 50 people crawl out of a tiny car one by one. As they arrived, they were like a choir: "Hello, hello, hello."

We finally finished the slideshow for the puppet show on Saturday. I'm really excited about it and am hoping everyone will enjoy it. We're expecting about 500 people to show up and there's a big line-up of entertainment happening. The music we're going to play is hysterical - Khmer people have very funny taste in music. The kids' favorite song so far is "You know I want ya" by Pitbull... It's... funny. They go nuts when they hear that song. So, we've decided to accompany it to the slideshow!

Tonight a bunch of the volunteers who have been working on the puppet project went out in the streets of town to hand out flyers about the puppet show to tourists. We had fun harassing them and forcing them to show their faces on Saturday. I can't wait to take pics tomorrow at the show!

After dinner at a local spot, we went to the Funky Monkey for quiz night. Despite having a very large, geographically and age eclectic group of ten people at our table, we came in 7th place. Those quizzes are hard, man! But nonetheless, it was a lot of fun and we got to realize that we need to explore new things in life such as the capital of Oman.

Tomorrow is Friday, which means the weekend is approaching and I will be looking very forward to some R&R at the pool and exploring waterfalls!