The floods...

After having a shower with a frog I went into my bedroom and realised i was getting wet. The ceiling was leaking, dripping everywhere including my bed. Jenni shouts to get a bucket, i rush for the wicker bin...hmm really wasn't going to work. Eventually found the Khmwer shower scoop which quickly filled up with wee coloured water..nice. In the meantime Jenni has rushed to put on her raincoat (always important) and went to shout for Mr Gee and Phally (the khmer family who sleep on the breakfast table outside our room in the bamboo leaf shelter). Mr Gee looked blankly at Jenni shouting 'helppp' and walked upstairs... We believe he thought she was just shouting in excitement about the torrential rain storm...not that my bed was getting soaked through! Terje (another volunteer) comes to the rescue with the smallest biscuit tin you'll ever see! I think it caught 2 drops of water....thanks for the effort though! Phally eventually saved the day and the water stopped coming in from upstairs. I was evacuated onto a different, dry bed and we managed to fall asleep quite easily after the excitement before bed time.

So....I wake up at 5am and pull up my mozzie net, put my foot down and to my horror it sinks down into water a foot deep. A foot as in a 12inches foot, not a foot as in on the end of my leg. I woke Jenni up and put on the torch to see our room completely underwater! My first panic was - water snakes. We got back into bed thinking if we have another little sleep, Mr G can help us later. It's quite hard to sleep when your bed is now a boat. I got up and to Jenni's amusement decided that if we opened the door the water would gush out... (it was 5am, I was tired!!) I opened the door and the whole of the downstairs in the house and outside now looked like a lake.

I have never seen this much water, overnight the water rose another foot. So now downstairs, the surroundings of our house and down the road is knee deep muddy water! Jenni and I were evacuated to a small shed like room upstairs in the house (that apparently is the home to rats) along with the guys who were also flooded downstairs.

Unfortunately the house that I teach at is also flooded so I wasn't able to teach, who knows how I would have gotten there anyway, its a 25min cycle. Taught the others canasta....alwaysss good on a rainy day/if your stranded in the house by floods. We were goin got head out for dinner and when we reached the (nearly) bottom step before the water we decided we did NOT want to wade out into the flood so ordered a take away! amazing, my fave restaurant does delivery!! I suggested getting a couple of bottles of whisky to keep us warm in this distressing time and the others agreed. So we ordered 4 to go with dinner. These kept us amused for the evening...and the next! During a much needed game of ring of fire (a drinking game mumza) Mr Gee bought a dead rat and put it on our table where we eat. Nice. At least that's one less out of our new bedroom. Sat with the Khmer family and practiced my Khmer that I had learnt and agreed to give the two girls Bin and Measa and the guy Phally English lessons 3 days a week with Sandeep.

I woke up feeling a little rough after the cheap vanilla flavored whiskey to very loud music blaring out of our neighbours house from 4.30am onwards... Wee thought they were having a wedding as this is what they do on a wedding day apparently....It happened again the next morning and all day, I think they just were having a little flood party for the whole street. I especially enjoyed the song 'and they called it puppppy loveeeee'How random. They are the neighbours that have an accordion and always play Christmas songs on it, the other day I even saw one of them wandering around with a Santa hat on just as a normal sunhat!!! love it.

We went for a wonder around Siem reap and decided that our road is one of the most flooded! The river has now burst its banks and there are children playing in the street, fishing and swimming!!! They love to jump off the bridge into the water and swim to the side until they can stand! Even though many houses are made from bamboo and palm leaves here everyone seems in high spirits. Jenni came back from school yesterday and informed me that alligators has escaped from the alligator farm....great. And I was worried about snakes, snails, rubbish, sewage and frogs.

Anyhoo........I am fine, a little bored being stranded in the house but I managed to get a lift into town today!! Hopefully the water will start to go down but I just don't know where it will go.....