"We Love it Here"

Let the adventure begin:


Lets start with Wednesday night: Me and Chris are walking down Sihanouk Blvd on our way home from Lucky Supermarket (A surprisingly awesome supermarket with lots of western food…if you can eat gluten…but no worries, I found chocolate milk and ice cream!) I said to Chris, “Goodness, I love this place!! There are people everywhere, lots of family businesses, and $2 dollar movies…how could we not like this place?” …Chris says…”well of course you love this place! We haven’t had anything happen that would make us not love it here.” There goes my pragmatic husband!! Not 8 hours later, chris wakes up feeling AWEFUL! I woke up at 7 and felt his chest and he was on fire. Like ridiculous heat coming off his entire body, his head was pounding, stomach queezy. Oh goodness! So I go to the pharmacy and get a thermometer. Take his temp…but OH WAIT…its in CELCIUS! Run down stairs…ask joe how to convert C to F, run upstairs do the math…Chris has a 103 fever. Yay. Im feeling rather useless at the moment b/c I remember maybe 2 times in my life that I have ever had a fever. I talk to Sue, she says Ibuprofen, Tylenol, wet rags, lots of fans, sleep, and water. Oh and to not be worried unless he “starts to talk about the dancing plantains outside the window…then you have something to worry about.” Hahahaha. So yes, I was a little freaked out! I let him sleep for a few hours while I went to the market to get things for the hair school. I come back home, give him more meds, water, and toast and he starts coming back to normal. By 6 his fever was down to 37.6 (99.0 F). I know it was from the Lord b/c once we started praying as a group, immediately his fever broke! It was awesome! I was about a few more degrees to calling the US embassy and figuring out where to take him! Lol. So sometimes I overreact! Anyway, at this point (Thursday night) it has been raining and therefore, it is HUMID. I started wheezing immediately and didn’t sleep at all on Thursday night b/c my airways were halfway closed and the air was so thick I could almost see it. Friday, we pretty much slept all day until I could breathe again and Chris fully recovered! By 5pm we were WAY better! We had registration for our Art, English, Sports, Computer, and Hair classes that we will be starting next Tuesday. This took place downstairs in the kindergarten classroom. I met three of the six girls who will be in my 2 month hair school! Phueng, Hang, and Yang! Some of the kids we met on Sunday were there too, and after registration, we played volleyball in the entry way to the house! The kids love hitting a ball around! While we were waiting for kids to register, I saw that Yu (Trangs, the lady who runs the Kindergarten and lives downstairs, daughter) had her hair done by a friend at school. You know, where you make 5 boxed toward the front of the hair line, and then you make a type of pyramid using small rubberbands? Its hard to describe! Well it was great because I had a manikin downstairs and was able to teach a few girls how to do that! The more we are here, I am learning that the kids like to learn. They like to learn how to play volleyball, badminton, do simple hairstyles, news games! Its very easy to build relationships with kids. Which in turn will hopefully gain trust with the parents! Please pray that whatever we do here, no matter how big or small, God will be able to use it! That he will stir hearts and give us the words, and smiles to bring people to know Him. So anyway, after the kids went home, we have amazing vegetable stirfry with rice and toasted cashews (Thank you master chef Gabi!!!) and then went to Lucky supermarket to get a few things. On our way home we looked at CD World and got a few movies! We came home, did the dishes and decided to watch a movie. Here is the funny part! If you buy a movie from CD World it is $2 and they are VERY good, with covers and menu options, if you buy enough, they let you pick out of the free bin. So we bought 3 movies and got to pick one free one. We chose Friday Night Lights. Got home, put it in on my laptop in our room and right away we knew why it was free! Ha! It was so funny! We take the DVDs out and see that there are 2 disks. “Hmm…maybe the second disk is special features?” Chris says. Haha sure enough, about 58 minutes into the movie, it just stops! Guess it is time for the second DVD? We put the second one in and walah! It picks up where it left off! The best part is there it was literally filmed in a movie theatre, and the subtitles were in Malay and Chinese (which might I add, took up half the screen.) You could see people get up and leave the theatre! So me and Chris really enjoyed this experience!  The movie ends and I see a bug on Chris’s leg! It’s a little nat like bug. I squish it and forget. A minute later, I have a bug on me…look on Chris, he has a bug. OH NO! I start freaking out and feel like they are everywhere on me. We are certain they are bed bugs b/c they are EVERYWHERE on the bed! We talk to Gabi and she recommends throwing the mattress away (We need a new one anyway b/c the springs are literally poking us, and almost every limb falls asleep during the night for some reason) and sleeping on the marble floor in the living room! Ha! So we grab some clean sheets and a clean pillow and head downstairs. We are laying down, trying to figure out how we are going to buy a new mattress in the morning and disinfect everything in the room. We start laughing at our luck and start talking about how thankful we are that God has the answers and not us! Because if it were up to us, we would be a mess! Right before we fell asleep, Gabi came downstairs and graciously offered us her twin size sleeping mat! I swear that woman is the most generous person! She literally gave us her mattress! She slept on the floor so the we could have a mattress! That is the love of the Lord right there. Most genuine, caring love! I swear, we are so lucky to be a part of such a loving and generous team. (As I write this…Joe is building me a 9 foot wide ledge/manikin station that is attached to the roof (more like a huge covered patio on the third story) so that we have something to attach the manikins to) Anyway, I will write about how much I love them another day!  This morning we wake up and realize that we slept better on the twin size sleeping mat than we did on the mattress! Haha! I went with Trang this morning to go to the local market and get what we need to cook a Vietnamese meal for tonight!! So that means that today, my adventures started EARLY! Lol! We walk to the market and Trang goes to the best meat and fish venders and gets a tons of beef for 5 dollars and then we head over to the fish. This is where it gets INTERESTING!!  We walk up to this big round platter on the ground with about 10 or so live fish. Trang picks the fish she wants. The lady gets the fish, gets the clever, and starts WACKING THE FISH OVER THE HEAD! Haha. Im, ya know, trying to act cool, like I am used to the sort of thing…you know. This is totally normal for me!  NOT! She cuts the lips off, the starts scraping the fish with a devise that is a piece of wood with nails on it and rubs it back and forth to remove the scales. Mind you, the fish is still moving. HA! She cuts the fins, lips and gills off in a quite skillful manner. This is a piece of cake for her! She puts the fish in the bag and hands it to Trang. Trang tells me “8,800 riel.” I hand her the riel, we walk away. But…I waited to shiver and squirm until I told Chris! Ha! So, there is the beginning of my Vietnamese cooking 101. I will let you know maybe tomorrow how it all turns out! We start really cooking at 4pm today. Yay! Can’t wait!!

When I got home from the market, Chris told me that Joe looked in our room at our bed and had some GREATTTTTT NEWS!! :-) The bugs that we saw were NOT bed bugs, they were gnats that flew in through the fly wire! SO NO BED BUGS!! We might still look into buying a new mattress, but thank goodness, we do not have to throw away anything or raid the room with toxic cleaning stuff!

So, there are our most recent adventures!! I would love to hear what you think! Write back! Miss you guys!