When you get in a routine over three months, the final week is all about realizing that this blank can be aptly filled in many different ways. The following is a random spattering of what crossed my mind shortly before leaving to return home.

1. No more moto rides with my driver Veasna.
2. No more french bread for breakfast at the roadside stand around the corner from my house, purchased for about 12.5 cents.
3. No more dinner meals with the Cambodian family.
4. No more hearing the geckos barking in the house at night (the geckos only recently learned to be rather dangerous, after weeks of living in ignorant bliss).
5. No more smelling the occasional wafts of incense from the family..s shrine when I leave my room in the morning.
6. No more trying to distinguish between moto horns on the street outside and calls to dinner echoing from the bottom of the staircase inside.
7. No more hearing dinner referred to simply as “eat rice.”
8. No more taking my flip-flops off when I get to the office door and greet the staff with my best rendition of hello in Khmer.
9. No more little kids running up beside the vehicle to wave and say ..hello.. even though they have never seen me before, will never see me again, and they will never get anything out of it.
10. No more kids having a blast just being able to see themselves on the LCD screen of my camera.
11. No more hair-raising rides on ricketty motos through red lights at crowded intersections at rush hour.
12. No more mien fruit.
13. No more meatballs of questionable texture and content. Oh wait, meatballs in the States are just as freaky.
14. No more fried tarantulas, crickets, cockroaches and maggots in the market, just around the corner from the eels and the fish that people eat eyeballs and all.
15. No more rain until the sewers flood and bubble up into the streets, which bogs down the moto engine and forces you to roll up your pants and walk the rest of the way.
16. No more bathroom at home with no hot water, no sink, and a drain in the floor and a fixture on the wall for showers.
17. No more only speaking like fifty words of the dominant language.
18. Hence, no more amusing locals when I unveil one or two of said words.
19. No more saying sarcastic things and then being corrected for being way off base, with the joke having not been understood as such.
20. No more bus rides across the country with cheesy karaoke music videos and locals singing along the whole way.
21. No more $1 meals that please the taste buds and leave you satisfied.
22. No more barrages of solicitations from moto and tuk tuk drivers.
23. No more barrages of solicitations from moto and tuk tuk drivers who have just seen me get off a moto or a tuk tuk and could not possibly expect me to be ready to go somewhere else.
24. No more being a barang (white, and therefore, rich, person) who can and should pay ten times as much as everyone else.
25. No more bargaining on t-shirts at the market, getting the price down from the ridiculous barang price of $3 a pop to something a bit more reasonable.
26. No more scratching my head at the fact that professional wrestling is very popular here.
27. No more watching the hustle and bustle of the noodle shop on the street corner from my fourth floor balcony.
28. No more walking through crowds where women arbitrarily believe it is beautiful to be pale, and therefore cover virtually every inch of their skin to prevent any further tanning (though I’ll be returning to the land where they [also arbitrarily] believe that the opposite is true, and women pay good money to spend time in an oven so they look liked a baked potato by the time they’re thirty-five).

and

29. No more wondering what it would be like to spend three months in Cambodia.