Vignettes

*Temporary blog administrator here, otherwise known as Mom.  They’re traveling home now, with rather a grueling schedule of middle of the night flying to Shanghai and then something like an 8 hour layover starting at 4 am.  Pray for safe travels!  I thought I would post a few vignettes from her emails.  She took over 3000 photos, so I know there will be at least a couple more photo posts after she returns home, probably next Tuesday.  Thanks for following her adventure, and for all your prayers on her behalf!
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(This morning, about 4 am our time)  Waiting in Siem Reap airport for flight...there is a little boy playing his trumpet...sometimes he sounds good, sometimes like a dying duck, and I have no idea what his parents are thinking or why he has his trumpet at the airport...another random event in Cambodia I guess…
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Oh, and I climbed a really cool tree today...it was great except I ran into a swarm of enormous red ants had them running all over me and biting like the dickens....you'll be glad to know I survived that as well, though.
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Vibol is treating us like royalty… He's so sweet about it, and you can tell he gets a kick out of it. He got us fried silk worms yesterday, which are like escargot to them... I told him that he was treating us too well and he laughed--he's got the cutest laugh, almost like a giggle--and said, “I don't want you to go back to your parents and complain...if you go back thin they not be happy”...his main mission seems to be to make us gain weight... :-)

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Last evening there were two little girls hanging around the "road" outside our house, so I called them over and showed them how to take pics on it. They would have gone on for hours if I had let them. Then
I sat down on the "porch" to write and a group of about six kids about ten to fifteen descended on me. I showed them some of the pictures I had taken on my tablet and they thought that was about the greatest thing they had seen…

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We just stopped by an outdoor market. There were piles of fruit, dried things and fried critters-- frog, spider (think BIG spider), a scrawny bird with a big head, and cockroaches. ..We also had some mango and pineapple sprinkled with chili and pepper.  They have stacks and stacks of eggs out as well...It's quite hot, and the only "preservation" method was a good dousing with oil... This morning we had beef with noodles, and coffee again.  I'm not a big coffee drinker, but the coffee over here is probably the best I've ever had...and I've learned a bit about coffee judging from my pa.  Every time we eat a meal at one of the street side shops,  V. says "I'm so glad you can eat this food!" I have not quite figured out what he means by that yet…

(next day) So I've added to the list since then... turtle, octopus, more frog (the frogs they eat over here are bigger the pan tree frogs, but much smaller than bullfrogs, and they cook them whole), and today I had a hard boiled egg...well, not quite, they leave it till it's halfway to a chicken, no bones yet, but you can start to see the different parts, then they cook it. I wasn't going to go for it, but V said " Oh, it's very safe".

While it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility, I am proud to announce that I have not yet gotten sick...I never dreamed that I had such a stout digestive system...

 (Her readers will be glad to know that she was the one in the group that never got sick on the trip.)