Month six…you provided oh so many laughs 🙂
-Sometimes you get so sunburned your host has to come in and rub baby powder over your entire body while your team laughs at you.
-Sometimes when you get sick your host insists you drink warm condensed milk to feel better. News flash. You don’t.
-Sometimes you cram seven Americans into a four person tuk-tuk. By the end of the ride you can smell the brakes burning on the poor tuk-tuk driver’s motorcycle.
-Sometimes your life in consumed by cockroaches. They are in your room, in your bags, in your bathroom, in your laptop. You cannot run and you cannot hide. Your only solution is leaving Cambodia.
-Sometimes your teammate orders herself a massage at Daughters of Cambodia but due to the language barrier the employees believe all your teammates want a massage as well so everyone ends up with massages and huge bills.
-Sometimes you get your purse stolen out of your lap while riding in a tuk-tuk and your teammate takes off down the alley after the perpetrator, yelling profanities and waving her pepper spray.
-Sometimes you have to set up your tent on the balcony because you are so fearful of the bugs crawling around you cannot catch any sleep unless you are zipped up and “safe.”
-Sometimes you visit the same bubble tea stand so many times the employees know your order by heart. They know it so well that all your teammates have to do is say “white girl bubble tea” and the employees will make them the same exact drink.
-Sometimes you and your team participate in what appears to be a Valentine’s Day run for charity and you find out it may or may not support LGBT issues (regardless of your personal beliefs keep in mind we try to avoid offending our local hosts and LGBT is still quite a sensitive topic among foreign Christians).
-Sometimes a very attractive man catches your entire team watching him while he swims laps and does pull-ups at the Olympic Stadium pool (whoops!).
-Sometimes you dye your hair four times (yes, you read that correctly) in a 24 hour period trying to achieve the proper shade of light brown. You, at different times, achieve pink, yellow, and black before finally reaching brown.
-Sometimes your team has to work together to consume massive amounts of papaya (a fruit no one cares for in the least) because it is placed in front of you.
-Sometimes you eat what appears to be brown tofu but it turns out it is chicken blood.
-Sometimes you are eating breakfast and a rat appears in the kitchen. You and your teammate proceed to scream and run in circles while the rat also runs in circles, never leaving the kitchen. You step on the rat, injuring your foot but not killing the rodent, and have to go have X-rays taken to ensure you did not break anything (you did not). Your host and his family watch the entire thing and laugh hysterically.
-Sometimes your tuk-tuk driver says he knows where he’s going but it turns out he’s lying and it takes you two hours to arrive at your destination when it should have only taken you fifteen minutes.
-Sometimes half of your team loses their sleeping pads to popping and/or roaches chewing holes in them (the second part of this statement is still a point of contention for Team Unwritten. Some of us believe it’s possible, others think the idea of a roach taking the time to chew an exact circle is ridiculous).
-Sometimes you ask your host what could be considered an inappropriate question regarding her impending wedding night and she does not understand so your solution is to start making kissing motions and noises. This quickly leads to her embarrassment.
-Sometimes you make a tuk-tuk driver angry because you insist he sits in the Burger King parking lot while your teammate runs in to grab ice cream to go.
-Sometimes the tuk-tuk drivers at the end of your road literally race towards you trying to beat their tuk-tuk driving friends as soon as they see you and your team rounding the corner because they know where you are going and that it’s a sure way to make some money.
-Sometimes your host does not like the heart shape you made out of a bunch of flowers and proceeds to draw you a “Cambodian heart” as if they are somehow different than American hearts.
-Sometimes the best you can hope for is that the roaches crawling on the kitchen counters where you’re cooking do not actually touch any of your food. If they don’t touch the food you count this as a victory.
-Sometimes you and your team are asked to sing a special song at church and you decide beating on the offering box on the stage sounds better with the “unplugged” sound than actually playing on the drums.
