So far all I've talked about are my travelling adventures so I thought it was about time I actually said something about my work!I have been working at HERO school along with another volunteer, Vera, for 7 weeks now, and it's been a bit of a bumpy ride. Out of all the new volunteers in October, Vera and I were kind of given the short straw and placed in a new organistation that has never had volunteers before. As a result our project was not well organised for ou...

Last weekend was one of the biggest events in the Cambodian calendar - the Water Festival, which was held in both Phnom Penh and Siem Reap to mark the end of the rainy season. This entails boat races on the river and a kind of carnival atmosphere with stalls and activities lining the streets and selling, as is typical in Cambodia, anything from clothes and ice-cream to washing up liquid and fried bananas. It basically consists of lots and lots of boats racing as ...

On Saturday morning we got up early in order to catch the bus to Battambang, and had a considerably shorter journey than our bus to Phnom Penh - only 3 hours this time - but on the otherhand the bus itself was considerably less modern. We only planned to stay one night in Battambang and go home early the following morning so we knew we had to pack as much into our day as we could. This meant that practically as soon as we arrived in Battambang and had dumped our ...

On Friday morning 7 of us got up early in order to catch the 6 hour bus to Phnom Penh, and we actually had a suprisingly comfy journey there, apart from the bumpy minbus ride to Siem Reap bus station. The buses were described as "luxury limosines" but they didn't look much different than a normal coach - although obviously they weren't quite the same as the Westerbus! When we arrived at Phnom Penh we were supposed to be getting picked up by our guest h...

On Sunday we had our Khmer language class - let's just say it is a hard language to learn! Although there is an alphabet, it looks very much like symbols to me, and our teacher was going on about how each word had a body and legs?! There were only 2 out of the 7 of us who went away with any words bar Orkun (thank you) and Jol Moy (cheers) - the most important words we need to know I reckon! Later that afternoon we all met up again and took tuk-tuks to the Tonle ...