How I spent Saturday; a rough draft.

     Woke up at 5:45. Typical. It’s just getting light then, and the roosters are crowing. Not long after, the sound of sweeping begins. Sweeping is very big here, and I'm beginning to understand it. More on that another time.

     Made some coffee, brought it out to the terrace. (Balcony? Terrace? What’s the correct term? Maybe balcony is more appropriate since we’re on the second floor.) Fired up the laptop, but no available wifi this morning. Sometimes there’s an unsecured signal I can hijack, sometimes not.

     Steve joined me soon after. We kept things quiet, as Jaz’s bedroom adjoins the balcony/terrace and the sound carries into her room easily through the screened vents above her door. We typed, read, drank coffee and juice. Temperature: 79 degrees. Humidity 70% . A bit of a breeze. Lovely.

     

     Jaz woke up around 8:15 and joined us on the balcony/terrace/deck. Soon after that, a woman on a bicycle with a large wicker basket on the back pulled into the front yard, calling out something in Khmer. “She’s selling bread,” Jaz informed us. The woman began to ride away and Steve yelled out, “Bread! Wait!” It got her attention and when she looked back I waved her back into the yard. Her basket was filled with warm baguettes and larger loaves – we were thrilled to buy a large warm, crusty loaf for 2500 riel, or about 65 cents. We brought out the jam and peanut butter and plates and sat on the deck/balcony/terrace/porch and broke into the loaf with great delight. Thank goodness Jaz understands Khmer, or we would have no idea what that woman was doing here and would have missed out on a lovely breakfast.

     After that, we spent the morning cleaning, doing laundry, and making lists. Steve climbed onto a table to pull apart the ceiling fans in the living rooms and kitchen, removing what may have been years – or only weeks – worth of grime and dust. I decided to sort out the laundry situation. We had contemplated taking it back to Seven Candles (aka the guest house) to pay $2/kilo for the housekeepers to do it for us, or choosing one of the approximately two million laundry places along the street to do it for $1/kilo (the price difference reflects the quality difference, one would assume), but I decided that since I’m currently unemployed and have little better to do, I would tackle it myself. It turns out that the lack of treadmill here doesn’t mean I have to miss my aerobic exercise – laundry is it! I did three loads, using the following methods:

  

• Put clothes into the big plastic tub with some detergent and fill from the bathroom faucet. Soak.
• Choose appropriate music on the iPod. (Black Eyed Peas turns out to be perfect.)
• Stomp on the laundry in the tub while grooving to the music; get the heart rate up.
• Pour out the soapy water – love that floor drain in the bathroom! – and refill with clean water. Soak again, stomp again.
• Rinse, repeat.

     Then the problem became where to hang the clothes. The standard here is to hang everything on hangers on a red metal rack. (I’m not kidding; all the laundry racks are red.) Lacking the required rack (it’s on the list), I improvised and came up with a Khmertastic solution: I took my lightweight camera tripod, fully extended, and used some Velcro strapping to attach it to the back of two chairs. This managed to hold two tubs’ worth of laundry. The third tub’s worth was strung on some random rope Steve found that I tied between the hinges of our back door. I was so please with my improv – and pleased to have saved money on laundry. We’ll see whether I’ve truly done an adequate job – are the clothes truly clean? Do they smell good? Will they ever dry???? As long as I have this much free time and this much need for exercise, I’ll keep listening to the Black Eyed Peas and washing by hand myself.

Laundry improvisation

     Spent some time going through the piles of things scattered all over our extra bedroom. Still lacking places to put things, I made piles. Medical supplies, school supplies, general everyday crap. I was on a mission to find two things in particular: our measuring cup, and our kitchen magnets. I eventually found the measuring cup, but still haven’t figured where I stashed the magnets. They’ll turn up, just as Steve’s iPod did when he couldn’t find it for days.  I hung our world map on the wall and marked it appropriately with a “You are HERE” sticker. 

     Then I tackled some windows. The glass on the front doors was relatively easy - a little Windex-like spray and some pages of the Willamette Weekly from Portland, and there was vast improvement. The windows themselves are more of a challenge. If you’ve looked closely at photos of the house, you’ll see that all the windows have iron bars in a grid-like pattern. I suppose these are for security, but they sure make washing the windows difficult, and I suppose that’s why no one had washed them for a very long time. I used a razor blade to scrape off drips of paint and varnish, then threaded my hand through the bars to wash the glass. Each window is about 6 ½ feet wide by 4 feet high, and based on the fact that it took almost an hour to do one, I should be able to tackle one a day and finish by a week from Sunday, as long as I don’t do the two in Jaz’s room. I broke a sweat, and used up most of my supply of newspaper doing the one window, but the result is spectacular, if I do say so myself. Real dilemma: do I continue to work on the windows myself, or pay someone $5 to come in for a day and do it for us...?

     Midday, Jaz and Steve headed out to get some lunch. They bought something from a food cart lady (Steve is still talking about how nice her wok was) around the corner, and brought me back two spring rolls and some fried rice. Then, more cleaning. We’ll have this place shipshape in….a few weeks.

     At 4:00, the rain began, first as a good steady soaking rain. We brought the laundry in fast enough to avoid soaking it and checked that the rain wasn’t coming in any of the windows. By 4:25 or so, it suddenly poured with a fervor that I have rarely witnessed in my entire life. The noise  was loud enough that we couldn’t have a normal conversation – we had to lean in and shout in each others’ ears. By the time we thought to check the windows again and make sure that nothing was coming inside, it was. The kitchen had puddles on the floor. The corner of our bed was soaked and there was more standing water on the floor. The wind blew enough that the rain blew in on the terrace/balcony/porch/deck. We learned the true value of the long-handled squeegee that we bought yesterday for drying the bathroom floor – we pushed water into puddles throughout the house and mopped it up. The front yard became a lake. The whole event was a bit of a spectator sport for us – standing on the terrace, watching it come down, feeling bad for the occasional pedestrian or motorocycle going by on what was now more of a small river than a road.

     (I’m sure that if the landlord knew we had let rain come in the windows, he would have wondered what kind of idiots we must be. Who would leave windows open during a storm like this??? Well, we’re learning. Quickly enough, I hope. At least there are no worries about water damage as everything is concrete and tile.)

     When the rain finally really stopped at 5:30, the noise of the rain was replaced by the sound of the frogs. They are spectacular. I'd like to capture a sound file to share. The birds were suddenly everywhere, swooping after the dragonflies that appeared after the rain. The sky brightened for a bit just before the sun set, but there was still more rain to come.

     Set off for Seven Candles to try to get online there - no signal. We eventually ended up downtown at a restaurant with some internet connectivity, had some great pizza, and called it a night.

     More photos another time...