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March 30th 2011
The past few weeks have been quite eventful. We have spent a lot of time with one of the other volunteers, Jessica, mainly at Bob’s bar. It’s nice to have someone we can talk to in English who can sympathise with us on the cultural differences! She is from Seattle, she was adopted from Korea and so everyone here immediately assumes she is Chinese. There doesn’t seem to be a concept of multiculturalism. When Marie-Claire first met her the first thing she said was “Are you Chinese?” Jessica said “No, I’m American”, Marie looked bewildered by this and proceeded to say “but you look Chinese. Valentina, doesn’t she look Chinese?” I had only just met Jessica myself and was pretty mortified by this entire scenario. Since then Jessica told us that everyone shouts “Chinoise” at her ... read more
March 9th 2011
Our journey to work is one of the things we will definitely not miss about Douala. Every morning we head off in a shell of a car, you would be astounded to see the state a taxi can be in and yet still run. One morning our taxi seemed to break down and our driver signaled to the taxi behind to ram into the back of us, he kindly obliged and before you knew it we were off again. Aside from the taxis, the journey is not helped by the fact that we have to go through one of the busiest areas of the whole city (Dkoti) to get to the school. Taxi drivers even sometimes refuse to go there. The volume of traffic when we get close is unbelievable, not helped by the narrow roads, ... read more
February 14th 2011
In the past 3 weeks we have broken our personal records for most people in a car, twice! On both occasions there were 9 of us altogether, Daniel, myself and the driver and then 6 children from the school. One of the drivers has a long stick to poke them with when they start getting rowdy in the back, it is pretty effective. Most of our days are taken up by work, however on the weekends we have managed to get away a bit. Last weekend we travelled to Buea, not too far from Douala but a lot more rural. We went with our exchange manager and the other volunteers. The Humanity Exchange has recently built a house there for the volunteers to stay, mainly for people based in the village itself. Buea is just at ... read more
January 21st 2011
We arrived into an extremely humid (from which I fear our hair will never recover) Douala at about 5am, a short drive later and we were at the home of our Cameroonian family. There were a lot of people there to greet us and having not slept all night it was very difficult to get to grips with who everyone was, it still is a bit. After having the tour of the home we were asked what we would like to do, it dawned on us that this was a normal time to be up and about in Douala so we quickly mentioned going to bed before we were roped into some activity or other! People it seems sleep for about 6 hours and this does not sit well with Daniel at all. Later once we ... read more
May 25th 2010
"India makes me feel like we're cash cows and everyone's just trying to milk us" - Daniel George Matthews, 18th May 2010, I felt compelled to share this quote with you as it was when Daniel had reached his absolute limit with rickshaw drivers and was so irate he shouted it in the street accompanied with aggressive cow milking hand gestures. Nothing compares with having seen this first hand though I'm afraid. In fact, he had an all in all very stressful time in our next city, Jodhpur, also known as "The Blue City". The old quarter is made up of extremely narrow streets, a lot of traffic and no pavements and he broke out in cold sweats every time we had to venture out onto them. Traffic in India generally consists of cars, auto rickshaws, ... read more
May 19th 2010
As expected landing in Mumbai at 2.30 in the morning provided us with a full on assault to all the senses. The noise (lorries have 'Ok Horn Please' written on them to encourage anyone unsure over whether or not to use the device), the smell and the heat. Our guidebook informed us that it's best not to take a taxi from the airport into Mumbai between 2 and 6 in the morning as they are often hijacked at this time. We didn't read this until afterwards though. The taxi journey itself served to fully demonstrate that we were now in India. It's about 45 minutes from the airport to the Moti Hotel and for the most of that journey we were passing thousands of people sleeping on the pavement, under bridges or on roundabouts. Sleep was ... read more
April 14th 2010
Our first stop in Malaysia was Georgetown, Penang. Whilst we were there we did a city tour as this seemed to be the easiest way see all the heritage buildings dating back to when the British were in Malaysia. It was clear from this tour that Malaysia is the "melting pot" of S.E. Asia. There are really strong influences from China, India and Thailand which are evident in the food, the buildings and religious sites etc. However, everybody seems to be able to speak English fluently, you will even hear them speaking it to each other. In spite of all this culture, I think we would both agree that the highlight in Georgetown was when we were strolling through a park only to come across two golf buggies, used to collect rubbish, being absolutely ransacked by ... read more
April 10th 2010
Landing in Bangkok was like hitting a wall of heat and humidity, we were pleased to find the sanctuary of an air conditioned bus. Unfortunately it wasn't long before we had arrived at the famous Khaosan road. This area has become a 'backpacker ghetto' - full of shops selling every conceivable backpacker item from paintings to pirated CD's, DVD's, and second-hand books. Our first day was spent in search of some kind of Thai flavour which certainly wasn't to be found around Khaosan. So we visited a couple of Temples and the Grand Palace. We then went North to Chiang Mai. We decided on the sleeper train on the basis that it could never be as slow as the ones in China. We arrived 6 hours late. Chiang Mai was a city we really liked - ... read more
March 21st 2010
We left Ho Chi Minh on a bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. For a capital city it is very quiet compared to the others we have visited in Asia. What's disturbing about this is that the reason behind the small population is the thousands that died during the Pol Pot era, which left the city about half the size of what it once was. Aside from the usual mass of temples, the main sights here are regarding this era, which made for a pretty depressing few days in Phnom Penh. We started with the Tuol Sleng Museum (Museum of Genocide), formerly a high school, it became the Khmer Rouge main torture and interrogation centre. Our guidebook says that of the estimated 20,000 prisoners that were taken there only 12 survived and that was only because they ... read more
March 13th 2010
After meeting up with Mother Matthews at Hanoi airport we headed into the city. Our first excursion was round the old quarter, taking in the extreme hustle and bustle of Vietnam's capital. It took us quite a while to adjust to the sheer volume of traffic (mostly scooters) on the roads. Valentina and I had become sightly more accustomed to Asian roads and would often get across to find my Mum stranded on the other side with a torrent of traffic between us. When we managed to reach what was described in our guidebook as 'the most authentic street', we were able to see a number of bizarre stalls. One vendor was preparing toads by beheading them on the road, which was quite a macabre sight as once they had been decapitated they remained in the ... read more
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