care packages and finding a house - what more could you want!

Last week I received my first care package from home - so exciting! It only took two weeks to get here (which is quite impressive given the number of packages that we've heard about going missing forever / AWOL for up to six weeks) and arrived just in time for Easter, complete with Cadbury's mini eggs and creme egg splats. I literally could not have been happier.

When I was in Namibia (ten years ago this year!) I was very lucky to receive lots of letters every time I got back to basecamp. I spent a lot of time writing letters when I was there too as, back in the day, email and laptops just weren't the norm. (This was also before digital cameras got affordable too however, I digress...) It's lovely getting letters and I'm only sad the postal system is slow and expensive to send mail through otherwise I'd be sending postcards and airmail letters to everyone!

There were other practical things that I'd asked for too, such as stain removal liquid, some clothes that I thought would be useful to have and rubber gloves (I wasn't sure you'd get them here which is a bit ridiculous, but you never know!) Mum and dad also enclosed birthday cards from my family and some pics from home including some of my newly painted flat. They've been very busy since I left cleaning the flat and repainting everything (or just painting a lot of things given that I never quite got round to painting my bedroom or living room in the six years I was there...) It's looking fantastic (thanks again folks) and my lovely new tenant has moved in and is hopefully going to be very happy there!

and another of me with all my exciting things!

We've been house hunting ourselves here. As I mentioned in an earlier post it may be me being fussy but I just hadn't seen anywhere that felt like home. This is mostly because the apartments are all empty and therefore hard to imagine how they would look homely, generally quite dirty (you'd think sweeping up the dead cockroaches would be the least you'd do if you were trying to rent out your apartment!) and because some of them are just plain not nice. And also because we had seen fellow VSOer Clare's place and then stayed in it for a week while she was on holiday, and I sort of fell in love with it. There were two problems - Clare wasn't leaving until mid-end May and we didn't want to be in our tiny, cheap guesthouse for another six weeks, and Gordon wasn't sure he wanted to be in BKK1, the area the flat is in which is basically expat-land (or Barangville as it's commonly known, Barang being the catch all term for foreigners).

Before we moved to Cambodia we'd chatted quite a lot about how we could integrate into a Khmer community living in a city. Once we came here we kept having these discussions and slowly we've realised that it's just very difficult. We've heard lots of stories of volunteers with similar thoughts but who have just not managed to do it. It's not that Khmer people aren't friendly, far from it, but all I can assume is, they have their own lives and their own friends and they're not particularly fussed to make friends with foreigners. There are obviously exceptions but I've realised that any Khmer friends we make will take time, and where we live actually won't make the difference as the chances are it will be people we meet through work or mutual friends, not through chatting to them in our street.

Anyway, on Saturday, after looking round MORE apartments with a new agent, all of which I'd already seen with another agent, we finally decided that we would take Clare's. So, all going well, we have a house, with some really great (ex-pat) neighbours that we can move into sometime next month. In the meantime, after some panicked hunting, we have moved into the Cheeky Monkey for the meantime. It's like a posh hostel where we have our own room with bathroom and can use the kitchen and living room etc. It's lovely and we've got some good hostel-mates including a Korean girl who is interning at one of the Ministeries, and a French girl, who speaks five languages, and is working at one of the Ministeries and the UN! We really are the poor relations here.

It's Khmer New Year this weekend so we've decided to head to the beach. More of that next time! In the meantime, all this started with talk of a care package. Not that I'm fishing (much) but it is really exciting getting mail here, so if anyone fancies going old school and writing a letter our address is:
Claire and/or Gordon
VSO Cambodia Programme Office
PO Box 912
Phnom Penh
Cambodia

I can't promise I'll be able to post anything back as, bizarrely, sending seems to be even trickier (and way more expensive) than receiving (I think they take the money but don't actually put the stamps on for you...) but you will have our eternal gratitude!

Sua s'dey chinam t'mei! (literally hello year new)