Hello! I went to the beach for the weekend - Sihanoukville I think it's called. We can't pronounce anything so have resorted to calling everything "Shnuckville". Before I left England I said "on no, I'm not going to go to beaches and things, I'm going to do proper travelling, none of this beach holiday malarky". After two weeks in Phnom Penh, which is the dirtiest, hottest place I've been to so far, I was more than ready for the beach. Even so, it was a far cry from your run-of-the-mill beach holiday. Where else can you get your legs threaded in public? It was really nice, even though we set off slightly hungover/still drunk from the night before at 7am after getting in at 4am (we had a leaving party on Friday night, lots of dancing!). I have finally discovered my indespensible use in a group situation - I was the only one who didn't sleep through my alarm and managed to wake everybody else up and get them on the bus, and then negotiate motos when we arrived in Shnuckville. Then there was much sunbathing, swimming and relaxing. I still have semi-clean feet from the sea. It is impossible to keep clean in Phmon Penh. You have a shower, step outside, and you instantly are covered in grime. It doesn't help that I'm wearing a mixture of sunscreen, insect repellent and itch relief cream, and at school there is lots of gravel and children playing football, so I tend to get dirt stuck to my legs after five minutes.

The Cambodians don't really get the concept of the beach. They can't swim, and all of them went in the water wearing their clothes. So they just sit in the water or jump up and down, fully clothed. Then you get a million Cambodians walking up and down the beach, while you're dozing, saying "you want manicure, you want massage, you want buy fruit/bracelet" as well as people just begging. Jasper even got asked if he wanted a "special massage". And Louise told us on the way that she'd forgotten to shave her legs. As soon as we arrived she was surrounded by beauticians saying "oh! Many hairs, I take away", so she eventually caved and got her legs threaded on the beach. This took two hours and her friend spent the whole time sat on my sunlounger massaging my leg.

I am running a "most innappropriate English slogan on a T-shirt" competition. In the running so far are "no, you're not drunk,I really do look this good" on a ten year old girl and "I could be your son" on a homeless beggar kid on the beach.

School is going well. I can't believe I've only got a few days left, I feel as though I'm just getting into the swing of things. I love my CCOLT class (the orphanage kids), they are so sweet. My new favourite is Phannith, he's the youngest but cleverest in my class at eleven years old. He frowns at me really cutely when he's trying to understand what I'm saying and this transforms into a big grin when he "gets it". Today he suddenly picked up a broom and started swinging it round the classroom. "What on earth are you doing, Phannith?" I asked him. "I don't like mosquitoes, they eat my teacher, so I kill them". Dalin is thirteen and the girl who's a bit aloof and told me I wasn't sexy. She's very sweet but quite shy, which the Khmer teachers mistake for stuck-upedness. Tree is fourteen and a bit of a typical teenage boy. He gets bored easily and is quite lazy. I really like him though, he's also very shy. He also says "no, yes, ok" every time I ask "do you understand?", which is fairly often! Pheaktra only joined my class last week as he was moved down from the lower class. This means he thinks he knows everything but in fact doesn't! I think he's fifteen. Then Sreymom is the oldest and most mature, so I think some of the things I do are a bit too young for her, but then her English isn't too good so she can't go in the advanced class. She's got some sort of pox at the moment so I haven't seen her for a few days! They're all such lovely, good kids though, especially considering what they've been through. Most of them aren't strictly orphans, but come from very poor and large families so their parents can't afford to look after them. Because of this few of them went to school properly before coming to CCOLT and a lot of them had to work. Some of the parents just abandoned the kids and moved to Thailand for a better life. Very few of the families visit the kids, and the children only go out to go to public school in the mornings and play football for an hour at the weekend.

I've also been teaching the kids Kung Fu! Some of them are really good, others are like me and a bit slow on the uptake. The tiny girl who likes skipping that I wrote about last week is really good, she nailed the centre-line punch on the first attempt and now does it every time she sees me. I've nicknamed her Kung Fu Kangaroo as she also learnt the word kangaroo from Louise, so hops around like a kangaroo every time she sees her. She's a bit ill at the moment though so the last couple of days has just been sitting around looking sorry for herself, bless her.

The university class is continuing to grow. We had eight students on our first day, now we have thirty. And they are all at different levels. Some are better than me at certain things, like grammar, and others can only say "hello, how are you, how old are you, how many brothers and sisters do you have?", so it's really difficult to teach them as half the class are bored and half are baffled at any given time. Some of them really annoy me because they don't try at all. I'll go to see how they're getting on and try and help them but they just giggle and say "me no speak English" - well that's why you're in English class! It's a good class though, you get a lot who want to practise their conversational English so we spend a lot of the lesson just chatting and as we're the same sort of age it works quite well. Most of them try really hard and really want to learn.

As well as these classes we teach evening classes four times a week. This is complete chaos as we each have two classes in a night with about 40 local kids in each class. We have a Khmer teacher to "help" us, but mine isn't exactly helpful as his English is, quite frankly, rubbish considering he's an English teacher. Every time I ask him a question he thinks I'm asking something else and goes off on a tangent about something irrelevant. He also just says "teach!" like I'm some kind of performing monkey and never tells me the correct page in the book so I end up reteaching them something they've already done. And he also writes down the wrong answers. I spent an hour last week carefully explaining a grammar point to everybody and then he wrote the wrong version on the board when I wasn't looking. He also told me I said "onion" wrong. I think I know! This class is slightly annoying as I get boys sitting at the back who do no work the whole lesson and just giggle when I ask them what they've done. It's completely voluntary so I don't know why they bother coming. I got really mad at them last week as they just copied the answers from the back so I kind of yelled. I think I got the right balance though as they weren't scared of me and actually did the exercise properly. Then there are the eager beavers who stay behind at the end of the lesson to ask me complex grammar questions. I don't know!

The people in charge are kind of annoying. The headteacher just tries to make us buy things all the time (considering we've paid to do this and they get money from the governers for books). Last week he asked me to go to the bookshop with him to help him choose some new textbooks. Firstly, it was the most hair-raising moto journey I've been on, we almost crashed at least five times, to which he just said "whoops", effectively. When we got there he spent ages looking at the books and them said "so what you think?", "yeah, they look like good books, you should get them". "So, you buy?" No! Then he tried to make me buy paper for the office printer, which isn't even for the children. He's taking the advanced class now as the kids have been spilt into four classes. Last week he spent the whole lesson speaking in Khmer (how this teaches them English is beyond me) and this week there is no class because he's "busy". And has no books, because when I refused to buy the books he decided they were too expensive and he didn't really need them.

Outside of school I've been hanging around with the other volunteers. They're a cool bunch and some are quite entertaining by being a little eccentric. We've been playing a cardgame called Presidents and a*******s, which has become quite addictive and we play it almost every night. We also found a quiz night at Lazy Gecko Cafe which is good fun. Last week we came 6th out of ten which is not terrible. We hope to improve on Thursday!

My mosquito bites which I got on the first day turned out to be bed bug bites (I had 47 by Thursday. Yes, I counted, there's not a lot else to do when you lie awake all night scratching your legs). After complaining twice, which resulted in just getting the sheets changed, I saw one crawling out from underneath the blanket. After getting very excited and scaring my room-mate by jumping up and down yelling "bedbug! see, I'm not crazy!", I caught and squashed it. The hotel obviously hadn't believed me and thought they were just mosquito bites. But I presented it to them the next morning and demanded a new room, which I got and fingers crossed so far I just seem to be sharing with Tania.

Well I'm off to bed now, so it's goodnight from me, and goodnight from my bedbugs.

;)

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