A Box of Chocolates

We are wrapping up the school year and we have our final three days with kids this week.  I like it when things start falling out of the picture and the to-do lists get smaller and smaller.   This time of year makes me feel contemplative, and as usual, I love my kids more and more each day as the end draws near.

I've had this thought before, but it occurred to me again, so I thought I'd share it with you.  Kids are like a box of chocolates.  How you ask?  Well let me tell you.

Some kids are downright nutty.  

Some are surprising.  What's the center going to be like in this one?  He did WHAT during lunch!?

Some are a delight through and through.  It's sweet, creamy and pleasant from beginning to end.  You wish you had a whole box of just that kind.  Names are coming to mind right now.

Then there's that one with the very hard caramel. You know it's in there somewhere, and each time you pick a chocolate you hope it's not THAT one. Well it is.  It's hard to get through.  You have to power through it to the very end. Hopefully there was only one in the box.  I can handle one or two, but SIX!! The caramel gets stuck in your teeth and just doesn't seem to go away.  Eating chocolates is supposed to be a pleasant experience, why do I do this to myself?  I dream of other careers other than tasting chocolates.

Others are bright and cheery on the inside.  They have soft orange or strawberry centers.  These little ones offer sweet smiles and happy attitudes.

Some are dark and deep flavored, like the maple cream.  It may not be recognized as the sweetest and brightest initially, but it has real depth of flavor. Now that's a quality chocolate.

Some chocolates don't stand out on their own and get hidden among the wrappers.  You have to search them out.

Sometimes I wonder if eating all this chocolate can be healthy for me.  But if you think about it, tasting chocolates is really not a bad job.  And no two boxes of chocolates are exactly the same.  Next year there may not be a nutty chocolate in my box, but instead a double espresso trifle with a coffee bean on top. You just never know.

Cheers everyone! Here's to tasting chocolates one class (I mean one box) at a time.   

Bali the Beautiful

While most of the world is on holiday for spring break and Easter, we have just had a week off for Khmer New Year.  April you say? Yes, you can read more about it here if you'd like.  We've been working hard this year and it was time for some teachers to get out of Dodge, to breathe some fresh air and see some beautiful sights.  So we went to Bali, just a hop, skip and a jump away from Cambodia. 

Here's a map of our journey.

First stop was a layover in Singapore.  My first time.  Let's just say that this little island-country blew my socks off.  Remember I'm traveling from Cambodia now. It was safe, clean, beautiful and an architect's dream city.  We walked all around the city shortly after we arrived.  This picture was taken from Marina Bay.

Fun fact about Singapore... they have lots of absurd laws here.  Here are a few:

1. It's illegal to buy chewing gum.  You can chew it, you just can't buy it.  And whatever you do, you better not spit it out anywhere but in the trash.
2. It's a crime to not flush a public toilet after using it.  (My question is, what if it's a faulty flusher?  Do you have to stay and fill out a report?  I would probably run for my life and hope the officials couldn't track me down)
3. You can't walk around your house naked
4. You can't talk about religion in public (straight from the cabbie's mouth)
5. Littering is an epic offence punishable by fines and community service.  On your third offence you have to pick up trash around town wearing a sign labeling yourself as a litterer.  LOVE this one.  
6. Lastly, it is illegal to pee in elevators.

Sounds a little absurd right?  Cambodia could certainly use #5.


We stayed in a hostel, because coming from Cambodia, Singapore seems a pretty pricey place. This place called The Plot was very cool.  Ashleigh and Rebecca are peeping out from their pods.

But this post is about Bali, so let's move on.

After a stop in Surabaya on the island of Java, Indonesia we landed in Bali.  Our first destination is a town in the interior called Ubud.  We hired a driver for the day who spent about 6 hours showing us around.

And this was the first thing we saw: the rice terraces.

I'm telling you, it does something in the soul to see colors so pure and sights so beautiful.

Next we visited a coffee plantation.  They make the most expensive coffee in the world here.  A possum-like creature eats the coffee berries, then poops out the bean.  Sorry, there's no better way to say that.  Then they clean, dry and roast the beans, and it goes on into coffee from there.  Evidently when the luwak is processing it in its tummy, it does something wonderfully fantastic to make the beans special.  I guess I'm not a connoisseur, because I couldn't taste anything spectacular.   It was an interesting tour, especially to hear the word pooh fly around so many times in the most sophisticated and natural way.  

We got to sample teas and other flavors of Bali coffee.

Here are the girls trying the Luwak coffee.  I love the sequence.

Ashleigh going for the first taste.

Rebecca giving it a go.

You can imagine the jokes that were flying around...  "Bottoms up!"  "How was the pooh coffee?" "It was craptastic!"

We also visited two temples.  Bali is a Hindu country, which was another first for me.  This was at the temple of the holy springs.

The water bubbles up from a natural spring.  You see people using holy water around town in their offerings. I'm not sure if it all comes from here or from other temples.

Part of this temple was roped off.  There was prayer going on inside.  There was incense and ringing of bells.  Around the side you could see the object of their worship, this ornately carved dragon.  Same same but different around different parts of Asia.  Snakes and dragons abound in Asian temples, Buddhist and Hindu alike.

We had lunch overlooking the volcano.

The Monkey Forest was about a block away from where we were staying.

It was a beautiful walk through jungle-lined pathways.

A temple in the heart of the monkey forest

Moss covered statuary

And of course, monkeys everywhere.

This fellow was just as bashful as I was.

One night we went to see traditional Balinese dance.  All I have to say about that is that they did crazy things with their hands and eyeballs.

After a few days in Ubud, we headed to Sanur on the coast.  We spent one whole day on the beach.

There was a 7 km pathway right along the beach.

Perfect for exploring on rented bikes.

We came across this little hidden gem on our ride, called Sweet Magnolia.  It was the perfect place to stop for an icy drink and cool down a bit.

 Another day we took a boat out to Nusa Lembongan, a small island off the east side of Bali.

  

This is what the water looked like when we pulled into the harbor.  Can you imagine our squeals of delight?  Like kids in a candy shop, or teachers on holiday.

This is the first beach we swam in, called Dream Beach. 

 This is the water we came to Bali for.

We rented motos and drove around this little island. Becca was the navigator.

Becca took this one while we were driving over a little bridge.  This was my favorite day in Bali; driving a moto on narrow roads through lush jungle and views of the sea. 

Then we went cliff diving.

Into this beautiful blue lagoon.

The water was incredibly beautiful, but the currents were strong.  The highest jump was just over 13 meters (about 42 feet).  They let us do the smaller jump closer to the ladder so wouldn't get sucked out to sea.

Here is Mount Agung in the distance, one of Bali's volcanoes.

I'll leave you with one last picture.  I'm calling it 'Boats in the Bali Sea'

Living in Cambodia has its perks, and being able to travel around Southeast Asia on a teacher budget is just one of them.  If you're ever in the neighborhood, I highly recommend a visit to beautiful, beautiful Bali.

Fortitude

I'm not really a New Year's resolution kind of person.  This year, I tried to be more of a goal setter instead.  Funny story about that one.  

I wrote down a few goals for different areas of life.  One of my goals in the area of health and fitness was...  are you ready?...  to do the splits.  I had been exercising to youtube in my room, and it just came up some how.  So I decided that if I worked on it every night, I could do the splits in 2 weeks.  I was doing great.  About a week into it I was 6 inches off the ground and I pulled my muscle right where the ham meets the glut. So much for that one.  Maybe that's why I've never set resolutions for myself, because they just never seem to work out.

What does that have to do with fortitude you ask?  Well, another goal happened upon me in the month of April.  You may or may not know, but April is the hot season here in Cambodia.  It's a scorcher, an inferno, like the inside of a rice steamer. We all have AC's in our rooms, but don't use them generally because the electricity is pretty expensive here. So we hold out all year until April rolls around and then fire up the engines on those cooling machines at night and enjoy a bit of wonderful, refreshing, glorious cool air.  Did I mention how gloriously refreshing and delightful cool air is?  

Only when April rolled around I never turned on my AC.  Initially it was because I have a window that's permanently open to allow the internet cable into our house from the telephone pole out on the street (because that's how they do things here in Cambodia).  So I bought an extra roll of parchment paper and a roll of clear tape and planned to paper over my window from the inside so that it would seal in the cool air.  Somehow that just never happened.  Then it occurred to me, could I make it through April without using my AC?  Heaven knows there's a large portion of the population that survives just fine without it.  If they can do it, I can do it, right?  So a new goal came my way.  Make it through April, the hottest month without turning on my AC.  

Well, it's May now and I'm happy to report that I haven't used the AC once.  I'm not a purist.  I had the help of some ice packs and refrigerated cloths.  I even considered putting my PJ's and sheets in the freezer before bedtime, but I never had to resort to that.  I also have 2 fans that blow on me from every direction.

There's been some light showers this last week to cool things down a bit and rinse the dust off the land.  I've reached a whole new level of thankfulness.

Here are some general thoughts from the boiler room.  If you can endure the worst of the it (fill in the blank with your own version, hot season, etc.), everything else won't seem as bad.  I've found that sometimes it's okay to make yourself uncomfortable, then when life gets unpleasant it won't be such a shock to the system.  

for·ti·tude

 noun \ˈfȯr-tə-ˌtüd\

1: mental strength and courage that allows someone to face danger, pain, etc. (AND CAMBODIAN HEAT WAVES)