cambodians wake up everyday at the ass-crack of dawn. i have no idea why they get this early, but they do everyday. this especially sucks for me because i have to wake up just after the ass-crack of dawn. so everyday, as i'm trying to squeeze in those extra 45 minutes of sleep, my neighbors decide bang pots and pans, pretending they're in some sort of band. I dont think they're making breakfast b/c traditional breakfasts consist of rice porridge and there's no need to bang on pots and pan when preparing that culinary masterpiece. its infuriating. i'd understand if they had jobs and needed to get up that early, but lets be serious they don't.


(I know this because when i leave my house each morning my neighbors are usually either sweeping their yards/gardens/driveways or standing on the street talking.)

The best way i can describe cambodian society is that they're at the level of functionality and sustenance. What i mean is they have appliances, lights, electricity, etc. but nothing is specialized or effecient. All everyone cares about is that the stuff works. for example, the lights on our balconey are just these huge flourescent lights; they provide light, but they suck b/c they attract bugs and b/c the light they emit is terrible- you go outside to get away from flouresscent lights and their constant buzzing. Here in cambodia they're just happy to have lights.
the food here is the same way. the only reason they have food is to provide sustenance. Eating here isn't necessarily an enjoyable experience. And actually a lot of cambodians look down right upset when they eat. Khmer food tastes good, although it generally doesn't have strong flavors and its the same everywhere - rice and a small portion of some type of minced meat. Eating is a necessity not an experience, which i find a little disappointing.

My housemates and I threw a party on friday night, about 60 people showed up, everyone got drunk, played a little beirut and generally had a good time. Since half my house is australian and half american, we were divided about what type of party to throw. Apparently australians like parites where everyone just sort of sits around (on the floor) and talks. On the other hand, Eric and i believe that a good party involves very little sitting, lots of drinking games and good loud music. After lots of discussion, we compromised - good loud music would be played, people could sit around (on the floor) on the 2nd floor and on the balconey and downstairs was reserved for beirut and other drinking games (side note: i had no idea, but nobody outside of america has ever heard of beer pong, let alone beirut. I had to explaing to everyone what the game entaled. I just don't understand how foriegners have fun without drinking games). finding ping-ping balls here was not a problem, however solo cups was a different story. Luke got assigned to buy cups- so he called me and asked what kind of cups were needed for beirut. "solo cups" i replied. "huh? solo what? what are they?" how do you explain what solo cups are? and why don't aussies know of solo cups, i thought australia was just a poor man's america. i told him to find plastic cups that had a wide mouth. He ended up getting plasitc cups with a wide mouths, but they were really small. not that i could complain b/c after all it is cambodia and even if Luke knew what solo cups were, i doubt they have them here. we made do though. A lot of the foriegners were very intrigued by the whole spectacle. One danish guy watched like 4 games, but refused to play - weirdo. people even started playing for money at the end of the night- good times. The worst about the party was that we ran out of beer at like 1:30, lucky for me i had a secret stash of beer lao. In cambodia you can tell how popular a place is by the number of motos and tuk-tuks that sit outside an establishment waiting to pounce on foreigners like sex-pat pounces on a 14 year-old lady boy. At various points through out the night we had 5-6 tuk-tuks and numerous motos. I think they were having their own party. At about 2am 3 pairs of girls decided it was high time to expres their true feelings towards each other. once the crying started, we kicked them out of the house and i went to bed.

I haven't left Phnom penh yet, and i'm getting a little antsy. I was suppsoed to go to the beach this weekend, but i had to work instead. its funny how i purposefully chose to not work at a law firm b/c i value my nights and weekends and yet this week, i've worked late almost every night and till 10:00 pm once. and I worked all day yesterday (Saturday) and have to go to my boss's house tonight (Sunday) at 6 for more work. I am planning on getting out of town next weekend - I think i'm going to a small village a few hours away, so i'll have more stories to share once i leave this bubble that is Phnom Penh.

Living here is very easy because there is very little to worry about. there aren't really any laws or rules and even if there were, the cops here don't do anything. the weather's the same everyday; its hot and then it rains for about an hour or two. I haven't yet checked the weather report - no need. The only thing you really have to worry about is accidently angering a rich cambodian teenager with a bodyguard. rich teenagers are above the law here, because money buys you eveyrthing here, and their bodyguards usually carry guns and are not afraid to use them. luckily rich khmer teenagers only hang out at this one really shitty club, which isn't a lot of fun unless you like watching 60 year old white guys dancing with and buying drinks for 18 year-old-ish prostiutes.

My housemates and I have a cleaning lady. she comes 3 times a week, cleans our entire house and does all of our laundry. having my laundry done is the best thiung about living here. It's so convenient - i leave for work in the morning, dirty clothes littering my room and when I come home all my laundry is done, my bed is made, and the cleaning lady even re-folds and re-organizes all the clothes in my wardrobe. amazing. and what does she charge? $20 per month, which equals $5 for me. I don't know how i'm going to handle having to do my own laundry again. can i bring a cleaning lady back to america?

i find it remarkable that here in cambodia i can go to a restaurant and order a bacon egg and cheese, and yet in cleveland i can't.

sorry it's taken me a full week to post again. I've been working far too much and far too hard, therefore my life has been relatively monotonous - at least by cambodian standards.

The rainy season finally began - I think. It rained for about 6 hours friday and the city flooded within 30 minutes. (apparently it rains like this at the same time everyday from now until the end of october). All the trash blocks up the few sewers that actually exist. The water is pure brown filth and yet little kids swim and play in it as if its evian. I'm gonna need to buy some bleach. I can't fathom how phnom penh will flood everyday for the next few months. i just can't believe that that actually happens. I'm convinced something changes, i just don't know what.

I finally found a place to live. On thursday I moved into a house with 2 Australians and an American. (there might be a 3rd aussie who's lives there. she studies monkeys in the jungle for weeks at a time, and I think she's swinging on vines for a bit.) The house is pretty big, the rent is super cheap and everyone has their own bathroom. so far it's a lot of fun, my roommates are cool, etc. The only thing that kinda sucks about it is the location. It's located a little south of central phenom penh, so moto rides are a bit longer than usual, but the upside is i live in very khmer area; we're the only foreigners. Of course the downside to living in a khmer area is the fact that our neighbors are very close to us - we share one of our patios - and some of them like to watch tv with the volume at an insanely high level starting at 6am in the morning. Not the best thing to wake up to after a friday night that ended around 4am.

As for work, after spending 3 days working on footnotes (for some reason I got assigned 150, while most everyone got assigned 50-100) all the interns got moved back to our teams to work on completing individual sections of the initial submission. At this point, all the footnotes (800 or so in all) are supposed to be the proper form. Of course, as soon as I look at one of the sections assigned to my team, I realize that one of the interns refused to follow the formula. good times.

Ok, enough about work and onto some of the more interesting aspects of Phnom Penh. They sell gas everywhere. They have gas stations, but they also have people who sit with huge drums of gas on the side of the road and sell the gas out of old pepsi bottles. The gas looks utterly disgusting and the people who sell it look even worse. no wonder i feel like i've lost a portion of my lung after every moto ride. I should just start smoking ciagarettes instead of riding motos, it's probably healthier. Trivia night was the highlight of my week. Every thursday, a bar in the lake district (the backpacker haven that I am forbidden to live) has trivia night. My team consisted of me, my roommates and about half of the dc-cam staff - the other half of dc-cam were on another team and talked so much shit. It costs a dollar for each member of the team to play - winning team takes all. My team won and as if that wasn't sweet enough, we won the side raffle for a bottle of jim beam (promptly finished within 15 minutes of winning) and we also won the "bucket of booze" for being the first team to correctly name the high school attended by Zack Morris and friends in "Saved by the Bell." It was a clean sweep, and made waking up for work on friday really enjoyable. I'll be back this thursday to defend the title.

On a side note: while reading the Poughkeepsie Journal (a bastion of top-notch journalism)online today, I saw that Bob Barker is retiring from the Price is Right. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank him for entertaining me on all those days I skipped or stayed home "sick" from school. I'll most remember him for his uncanny ability to make 70 year-old housewives from Missouri scream like preteens at an n'sync concert. Bravo Bob, Bravo. I'm sad to see him leave; he was the only constant in my pre-adolescent chaos. Perhaps if they aired his famous "help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered" in this country there wouldn't be so many stray dogs and cats in this city. Of course the dumplings sold at all those street vendors probably wouldn't be so tasty either.

Last night a bunch of us from the office went to the only North Korean restaurant in Phnom Penh. The restaurant is appropriately named Pyongyang. It's owned by the North Korean embassy and is used purely as a way for the bankrupt nation to keep its embassy afloat. The waitstaff consists solely of North Korean ladies. They are all dressed in perfectly tailored traditional dresses and they put on musical performances throughout dinner. One plays the violin, they all sing and and they even have a traditional dance routine. They are all quite talented but the service sucks (although if you praise "the dear leader" they might crack a smile); they all seem genuinely upset when you ask for anything. I guess that will happen when you've been beaten and trained since your were 2 in the various musical disciplines and are forced to live in Phnom Penh in dormitories without your passport while your family and children are kept in North Korea to prevent you from defecting. Isn't communism great?

After the restaurant we went to a large club/concert hall, called the Rock. Apparently it's the place to be if you're cambodian, however it sucks if you're not. highlights including a live band that started every song with 2 or 3 chords from various Guns'n Roses songs, only to quickly change into Khmer rock songs. It took me about 5 songs before I realized that they weren't gonna play Guns'n Roses, but for the first 3 seconds of those 5 songs I was excited. They didn't seem to have a lead singer. Instead about 30 seconds into each song, a different singer emerged from backstage under the cover of a large fog machine. the only thing more ridiculous than the entrance were the outfits they wore - lots of hot pink, tight pants and more hair gel than guidos at the jersey shore. And I learned that cambodian rock n roll consists only of power ballads. you feel the music deep in your heart and you aren't quite the same afterwards.

work is going well. right now the whole office is working hard to get our initial submission (kinda like an indictment - it's a civil law system here, so the process is all screwed up). Once we get that finalized, I'll be on the 4-person team in charge of writing response motions. that should actually be pretty interesting, although it'll probably mean I'm gonna have a lot of responsibility, which, as we all know, isn't something I strive to have. oh yeah, they moved me into my new office, which is located on the 4th floor. it however conveniently won't have air conditioning for another week or so. if you don't hear from me for a while, it's because i will have drowned in my own sweat.

Polo shirts cost $4 here, so i'll be channeling my inner Wheeler for the next few months. I don't know why they bother to have lane markings on the road here, nobody even comes remotely close to following them. While on a moto recently, the driver seriously drove the opposite way down one of the busiest avenues for about a mile. you haven't lived until you're on a 50cc scooter squeezing between speeding dump trucks and ox carts both coming at you head on.

Sunday night it was this kid Sam's birthday. (he's one of the dc-cam interns). to celebrate we took an hour long boat tour of the mekong river. We bought a bunch of beers and set sail a few minutes before sunset. Phnom Penh is situated right on the river. Because it's the beginning of the wet season the river is low and you literally have to descend down the bank of the river carefully avoided that vast amounts of trash, used condoms, broken glass etc, to get to the boat. The boat was small, but comfortably sat the ten of us. Once on the river we enjoyed some formaggio, cracked open the beer and chilled out. We sailed out for about 30 mintes, passing a couple floating slum villages. The villages were bizarre. They were basically a a bunch of rafts situated together, although some were much nicer than others and few had tvs and stereos. After we turned around, Phnom Penh sparkled. It was just past sunset and all the buildings that line the river bank were lit, you could see the lights from cars passing and the reflection on the river glowed. What you couldn't see was the garbage, the stench seemed to disappear and it was like looking at a completely different city than the one I departed from. Of course, walking up the river bank the details of Phnom Penh returned in all their glory. For $1 it was a great time. This friday we're all going out for a longer river cruise on a much larger boat - i'm looking forward to that.

Monday I started work. I don't want to talk about work too much, but somethings are just too ridiculous not to share, plus it's becoming obvious that work will be comsuming a fair amount of my life, so if I don't talk about it then what am I gonna talk about?
My office is about 10km (that's 6 miles for those patriots who refuse to acknowldge the metric system) outside of Phnom Penh. They bus everyone to and from the offices everyday. It takes about an hour to get there, so I have to be at the bus stop at 7am. The worst thing about the trip, aside from it taking so long because of the traffic and complete lack of traffic laws, is that i'm stuck with all my co-workers for an extra 2 hours everyday. And once we all get to the office, we're stuck there. It's kinda like forced labor.
So 8 interns started when I did. 3 others at the office of the co-prosecutor (OCP), 3 at the Defence office (DSS) and 1 at the office of co-investigative judge (OCIJ). As I mentioned before, we had a 3 day induction course. Thank god I finished that today. All we did was sit in a conference room all day and have various employees come in and lecture us about some aspect of the trial or history of cambodia. some of it was interesting, but after the 2nd hour of the first day it got really repetitive and being in a room with that many law students for that many hours is similar to cruel and unusual punishment. For example, today the interns all got bussed to UNDP headquarters for a security briefing (which was mostly pointless b/c we're not technically "ëmployees" and therefore don't qualify for most of the services). For the entire hour of the bus trip two female interns had a conversation about a professor at Georgetown. Apparently one of the interns had the prof and the other is the niece of the prof. The conversation was horrible but the worst part was the way they conducted the conversation. They giggled after meaningless sentence. normally giggling is bad enough, but both of these interns have sort of low voices for girls, which makes the giggling grating. It sounded like...i can't even come up with a haflway decent analogy. It sounded like shit and I'm a worse person for having to hear it.

Despite all of this, I can't wait to actually get started on real work. And the other people at the Court all seem to be really cool. We're all just keeping our fingers crossed that the internal rules of the court get approved by the 13th or else I'll be coming home early.

Some random items before I grab some dinner: I've started looking for an apartment. Haven't settled on one yet, but should by this weekend. I found a place to take muy thai lessons - i'm gonna start Monday. I have my own tuk-tuk and moto driver. whenever i want a ride, i give him a call (assuming he's not waiting outside my hotel). every guide book says how every bar that you go into has hookers who throw themselves at you. now, i'm not looking for a hooker, but i've been to a bar every night since i've been here (not b/c i'm an alcoholic, but b/c its what everyone does, plus beer lao is great and cheaper than water) and I have yet to have any girl throw themselves at me. I'd just like a look.

The best thing about Cambodia is the beer. They import Beer Lao here and it is delicious-light refreshing with a hint of citrus. I must've drank about 10 yesterday. I hear they can't import the beer into the US because Laos doesn't have adequate health regulations. And by adequate I mean none. It's odd that Laos can't figure out democracy or freedom, but they brew beer with the best of them. I think this just goes to show that you can away with a lot so long as you have a good beer.

The worst thing about Cambodia are the tuk-tuk drivers. For those who don't know, tuk-tuks are like taxis, except they're just carriages hooked up to the back of motos. It's a great way to get around town, but everywhere I go I get asked if I want a ride by at leat 3 or 4 different tuk-tuk drivers. This all started the first night I got here as I walked the ten feet from my cab to my hotel with all my luggage. I couldn't believe it. "You want tuk-tuk?" "No, I don't want a tuk-tuk. I'm going into my hotel." If they wanted to be helpful they could've offered to carry my bags.

Phnom Phen is an enormous playground. You can get/find anything you want at anytime. It's amazing. There are also a lot of interns here, though not necessarily at my place of employment. A bunch of interns from dc-cam and I want to this huge ex-pat party at some bar last night. The bar was an outside lounge complete with a pool in the middle. Needless to say, after a few drinks the idea of jumping in the unchlorinated pool with your clothes on seems like a great idea. good times. The DC-Cam kids really make this place feel like I'm on the Real-World. Why don't they have a Real-World Cambodia? Everything legitimately costs a dollar and you can do whatever you want.

I start work on Monday and we apparently have 3 days of orientation. What they're going to tell us for 3 days is beyond me, but I'm sure I'll find it amusing. oh yeah, and as I was telling some people before I left, my job has restricted me from living in certain areas of the city. At first I thought this wasn't a big deal, and chalked it up to sketchy areas of Phnom Phen. Well, it turns out that one of the areas is where all the backpackers stay and hang out. The area is cheap, laid-back and sits on the shore of a huge lake. I'm not happy about this and unless they have some really good reasons for restricting my movements, I might be breaking this "suggested" rule rather soon.