Cambodia Trip Days 4-6

The next 3 days were spent at a local community school called Treak Community Centre.  The staff here were welcoming and friendly, and students and teachers alike we spent time with the students of the school, playing, teaching, helping build bricks for further buildings and development and so on. It was such a great community service component of the trip for the students, who saw how others live, so differently from their own privileged, private school lives. This was poverty, extreme poverty in many cases, and walking through the village back to the bus was fascinating, seeing beyond the tourism to real Cambodian life. 

In the evenings we spent a fair amount of time shopping and bargaining at the night markets, eating amazing Cambodian fare, and on one night, we went to the PHARE circus - such a treat! The circus is made up of performers who use theater, music, dance and modern circus arts to tell uniquely Cambodian stories; historical, folk and modern. It was a highlight of the trip for many of us. 

At one of the markets we found some unusual street food. I ate scorpion, tarantula and snake, as did many of the students. It was strange - tarantula leg was SO chewy - I could not eat an abdomen though. The snake had tiny bones that got caught in the teeth, and the scorpion was crunchy and yum!