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.