random

for the last couple of weeks i have been in phnom penh working and hanging out with the other interns. i definitely know the city pretty well now. there are some great restaurants, used book stores and shops which make it feel fairly quaint and friendly. but there is still an edge to it. and no mcdonalds:) did some tourist things last weekend - went to the killing fields, which is an area outside pp where the khmer rouge executed thousands of people and buried them in mass graves. it was pretty disturbing/horrific/incomprehensible. about half of the graves still have not been excavated.

on a lighter note, last saturday i went to my first khmer hip hop show. it was surreal. it was in a dive bar/club that they charged $2 admission to get into (first time ive ever paid cover in cambodia, and likely the last). they took songs like sexyback and changed the words to khmer. and yelled "khmer" a lot (except they pronounce it "khmai"). and the only beer they were serving was budweiser.

on sunday a group of us went to the phnom penh hotel and paid $5 to spend the day swimming. it started to pour rain about an hour after we got there and we decided to wait it out and ended up in the pool in torrential rain for two hours. it got really cold but they were going to charge us another $8 each to go into the hottub so we were stuck.

otherwise work has been good. we are starting to wrap thing up a little bit but everything takes longer than you think it will and there are a lot of editing things that need to get finished. some of the interns are leaving as early as next week.