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.