Baby Nutsara, the neighbors' daughter, is quite fond of my family and I, and on most days she comes to visit us, but on this day I visited her.
The Giant Insects Return 🦗
The rainy season has returned here in the Cardamom Mountains of southwestern Cambodia, and with the return of the rains come the return of oversized insects. It usually takes a handful of storms before the forest comes back to life with the sounds of cicadas, crickets and frogs, and as I write this post a cicada is constantly hitting my computer monitor and occasionally me in the face. There's no electricity and I'm writing this post via battery power, and that makes my screen the brightest and only light around.
No Respect For Nature 🤦♂️
My sister-in-law recently came to visit us, and the only time we really spent together was a short road trip to Thmor Da, the town 30km down the mountain and the home of nearest public school where my daughters study. She stayed for two nights, but other than a couple brief morning talks she spent the days with our neighbors because they have a karaoke machine and a crowd for her to work. She really needs a crowd to be able to socialize, but I don't like being around drunkenness combined with karaoke so loud that you can't even have a conversation, so I stayed home with our daughters and did various househusbanding things like cooking and keeping the kiddos productive.
On our trip back from town we made a pee/scenic overlook stop. Any place that even has a touch of beauty in Cambodia and is easily accessible is always full of trash, and a wildlife sanctuary within a national park is no exception to the rule. It's such a simple thing to keep your trash with you until you get to town, but here trash must be disposed of immediately and carelessly, and I will never understand this part of the culture because the overwhelming majority of people here know this is inappropriate, destructive, and lazy, but still choose to get rid of trash on the roadside rather than keep it until a trash bin is available.
Nutsara, Fist Bump Champion 👊
I'll finish this post with my other pic of the day of Nutsara. Although I don't have any pics of it, I taught her how to fist bump a couple of months ago, and now every time we meet that is how we greet each other. After we fist bump I always pully my hand away and make an explosion sound and gesture, and this always triggers laughter from this cute kiddo. Perhaps for my next post I'll try to capture this in GIF form, the Nutsara fist bump 👊💥.
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