My first night with the new family was a success, I would say. At the dinner table I learned many Khmer words, though I have also since forgotten most of them. I never did figure out how to pronounce ch’ngun, or delicious, though they got quite a kick out of hearing me try. But then they had to try saying Pennsylvania, which leveled the playing field quite a bit.

After dinner I tried to help the middle son, Phirun, to install the Alien vs. Predator II game on his computer, but it didn’t work. So we ended up listening to Cambodian pop music and watching hip hop music videos from Eminem and Bow Wow. Phirun, a sophomore in high school, enjoys watching sci-fi movies and romantic comedies. And like many young people in Cambodia, he is also a huge fan of WWE. We can watch this Saturday morning, he says.

This is the bed in my new bedroom. Don’t let the bars on the window fool you - it is not a prison cell. And yes, the orange on the bed is pseudo-velvet.

This is the other side of the bedroom.

Here is the street down below, as seen from the fourth floor balcony. On the street corner is a restaurant where all the moto-taxi drivers go for dinner.

Apparently it rained overnight. This morning I did a conference call with the good folks from C4 back home. I made the call from the lobby at the Sunway Hotel, and on the way there, the moto I was on got bogged down in the water and stopped. Therefore…

… I walked the rest of the way.