Cambodia: Day 61

Friday, July 8th, 2011

Om's House in Phnom Penh

9:22 PM

Sometimes I wonder if Om is schizophrenic.

You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.

I got home from my internship today (I'll get to that later) and let myself in. Om was spending the day at a pagoda in one of the provinces, so I came back to a very empty and dark house. I promptly made my way to my room where I proceeded to fall asleep on my disgustingly pink floral bed. Forty minutes later I was awakened by someone jamming their keys into the front door. Om was home.

I laid on my bed, fading in and out of sleep, trying to pull myself back into my most recent dream. That attempt, however, was rudely interrupted by Om's boisterous voice echoing from the kitchen downstairs. No one else was home that I was aware of. She was speaking in her native tongue, so she certainly wasn't talking to me. I could hear the sound of dishes being clanked together, causing her to increase the volume of her voice.

Maybe she's talking to one of her ancestors …

My stomach eventually coaxed me out of bed and I went downstairs to eat. Om was laying on her side on her wood bench, her arms outstretched to Srei Poi who was giving her a manicure. I grabbed some rice from the large rice maker on the floor and proceeded to sit down at the table by myself. I faced the wall, listening to Om saying things in a commanding tone from the other side of the room, no response coming from Srei Poi.

Maybe Om isn't schizophrenic, but I'm certain that she is the cranky old woman of the neighborhood. It's funny, I thought that those females only existed in the States, but I'm coming to find that it's a universal attribute of any type of community. Om sits at her gate in several minute increments, monitoring the activity of the street in front of her home. Many times I have seen her yell at people out of my line of sight. Well, at least I hope she was yelling at actual people. With her possibility of being schizophrenic, you can never be too sure.

As for my internship, today was a first. I actually felt like an intern! After talking to Dr. Juliette yesterday, I got to work analyzing my data on Excel. I had to go through each survey individually and copy the information to a spreadsheet. I started after I did my morning web chores and worked up until it was time to leave for lunch. I was a little dismayed, for I was barely at the halfway mark when I went home to eat, but it was a start. My ultimate goal is to have my entire report finished in two weeks, but that might be a tall order at this rate.

Mike met us after we finished eating and we went to the market that Jeni showed us on Tuesday. I went back to the secondhand shoe vendors, hoping to get my hands on some of the heels I'd been eyeing the last time I'd been there. Unfortunately, my search proved unfruitful. I have never been so frustrated to have big feet! It's not even like my feet are that big, either. I wear a size 9, sometimes a 9.5, but I could barely scrunch my toes into anything I came across. I can't tell you how many times I walked up to a vendor and was greeted by fingers pointing to my feet, the women saying, "Tom-tom!" Big.

No, I don't have big feet. You have small feet. My feet are perfectly normal! Now point me to where there are shoes that will actually fit these things!

Unfortunately, many of the shoes they pointed me to looked like they belonged to an eighty-year-old librarian or cat lady. I passed.

I'm joking about being bothered, of course. I can't enter a foreign country and all of a sudden expect the people there to automatically be able to cater to my needs or wants. The women were actually quite kind, and I'm glad I could give them a good laugh as I tried on pair after pair in vain. I know that they were wishing, just as much as I was, that for the moment I would have slightly smaller feet. One woman was especially helpful, grabbing the biggest sizes she had and bending over to force them on me.

We headed back to the office at two. I sat at my desk for a substantial amount of time before I finally got myself to power through my last stack of surveys. I headed home with Tuni at 5:30, ready for a power nap.