This past weekend Cambodia celebrated its traditional Khmer New Year. My Khmer teacher and good friend invited me to the province to stay at her aunt’s home and get a taste of life in the province. Here are a few of the things I did for the first time:

I learned to shower Khmer style. First, in the house, you change clothes under a saran type thing that

wraps around your body. You head out to the ‘outhouse’ to shower by scooping water from the water basin over you and slathering up with soap. Then you change to a dry saran and head back into the house to put on new clothes. It is quite the process!

This little bundle of joy peed on me. Diapers are expensive and hard to come by, especially in the province, so babies usually just wear shorts or nothing at all. When they have to go, they just go and it just gets on whatever the baby is laying on. One particular instance it was my

lap. So…I also got to learn how to do laundry too! But besides this instance, I loved playing with a baby all weekend!

I slept (kind of)…on the bamboo floor with a thin rug, a blanket, a few mosquitoes that seemed to always find their way through the mosquito net, and the heat.

I saw chickens go from pecking at their morning portion of corn to seeing the blood draining from them in the kitchen and then eating them for dinner. I learned to look more closely when picking out my cut of meat from the serving platter…I somehow ended up with the ‘guut’ (or bottom/tail) of the chicken which I was

told is one of the best parts of the animal. I would beg to differ but at least I can say I’ve eaten it right?!

My friend taught me to drive a moto. We went riding through the countryside together! (It reminded me of drives through corn fields in Iowa on motorcycles!)

I went to my first (2nd, 3rd, and 4th) province club…it entails all the young people in the surrounding villages gathering to dance Khmer style on the lawn of the local pagodas. It is hard to explain, but basically they just walk slowly in rhythmic step to the music around a pole. You just kind of rotate your hands around in a circle. Not exactly like any club I'd been to before! Every 15 minutes or so there were a few Western pop songs that made me laugh as I knew they had no idea what the songs were about. I'm sure I

provided them with some good laughs too as I was the only ‘barang’ (foreigner) there. I drew quite a crowd of small children and gazes from the others dancing.

I had my first late night sleep-over talk with a Khmer friend. She grew up Buddhist and offered me much insight into the beliefs many Cambodians hold.

I picked and gathered mangoes in a grove of mango trees.