Greetings, readers!
After an incredibly long hiatus – due mainly to the Blawgirl questioning the purpose and value of this blawg and blawging in general – the Chronicles of a Blawgirl is up and running once again! The Blawgirl still questions the value of blawging, but thinks that it would be fun to write down her experiences with her third and final year of law school, and with the California Barzam, for her mom and posterity.
You’ll notice there have been some minor changes around here, notably the addition of a “Clipbook” to the navigation bar, and a handy, dandy bar at the bottom of your browser that allows you to find/stalk the Blawgirl on the Interwebz if you so choose.
This post finds the Blawgirl several weeks into the first semester of her final year in law school after a summer of sitting/broiling on the freeway to get to her internship at the ACLU of Southern California office in Downtown L.A. All in all, she would take the busyness of these first several weeks over having to crawl on the 5 freeway any day.
These past weeks have seen her celebrating her 20-ish birthday, organizing the in-house competition for the mock trial team, reading/briefing cases in her remedies and constitutional law classes, learning the ins and outs of California’s Domestic Violence Protection Act for a clinical class, piecing together documents for her Moral Character Application, and putting together this loverly website.
Somewhere in there, she’s also started reading book three of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, started swimming at Corona del Mar, continued Turbo Kickboxing and Zumba-ing, and picked up a road bike to start riding on the Santa Ana River trail here in Orange County, Calif.
Dayyum. It’s even tiring just reading about it! Anywho, the Blawgirl will mosdef add blawging to the list of things she will be doing. She can’t promise that she will post every single bowel movement of her mind, but she can promise to try to be as regular as Jamie Lee Curtis.
Photo via icanhazcheezburger.com
How do I stay happy in law school? Coffee, the Boyfriend, Turbo Kickboxing, Zumba, Chuck, Grey’s Anatomy, Bones, Castle, and videos like this one.
Wow. Has it really been three months since my last post? Whoops. My bad. I really should feel guilty about updating as infrequently as I do, but sometimes life happens. In my case, the second I got home from Cambodia, I was off to Canada for a week-long trip to Vancouver, then to Las Vegas for a weekend with my family before school started. And before I even had the time to get used to the idea of casebooks and case briefing again, I was back at school reading the texts for Comparative Law, Evidence, Professional Responsibility, Federal Income Taxation, and Civil Rights Law.
This blog post finds me in the middle of the fall semester. I’ve just completed Evidence midterms and the in-house competition for the school’s mock trial honor board. And I am happy to report nothing but good things for both: I did pretty well in Evidence and made the mock trial team! Hurrah and extra confetti!
Now, I’m going to concentrate all my energies on my Civil Rights Law brief, which is due in several weeks time, and outlining for the rest of my classes.
And I promise I’ll get back to you too, little bloggy poo. We’re not dead. Yet.
Mr. Popoy cuts a tragic figure: salt and pepper hair; one arm resting on the protruding belly of one well-past middle age; one arm outstretched, fingers grasping for the warmth of human contact; and the forlorn, faraway look of a king who has lost his country.
His tragedy is in no way lessened by the fact that Mr. Popoy is not of our species: He is a gibbon, a member of the ape family.
I met the sad-looking simian recently when I visited the Phnom Tamao Zoo and Wildlife Rescue Center, which is located 44 kilometers – a two-hour tuktuk ride – outside Phnom Penh. Story is Mr. Popoy was once the other half of a gibbon pair – which mate for life, according to our tour guide – that had been rescued from the wilderness from poachers who hunted gibbons for use in traditional medicinal remedies.
For a while, Mr. and Mrs. Popoy lived happily ever after in their little kingdom, a large cage in Section 1 of the rescue center, presumably doing the things that gibbons like to do: swinging from tree branch to tree branch; flirtatiously lobbing fecal matter at each other in a mock snowball fight; perhaps even engaging in acts that could have produced little gibbon babies.
But the happy ending did not last, and life, or, rather, death happened. Mrs. Popoy got sick, and Mr. Popoy was left alone.
Keepers tried to find Mr. Popoy another friend, but other gibbons would not do: they were female, they were fertile, but they were most definitely not the Mrs. Now, Mr. Popoy can only find comfort in his caretakers and the tourists who walk through the wildlife center who are benevolent enough to find sorrow in his story, bold enough to brush the thought of monkey cooties aside, and brave enough to take his outstretched hand.
Photo: Julie Anne Ines / Flickr “Chronicles in Cambodia” (New photos added!)
A tarantula! This was served as an appetizer at Romdeng, a restaurant run by the Mith Samlanh organization that helps train Cambodian street children in service careers. On Friday, me and a couple of friends decided to check out the 15th Anniversary party being thrown by the organization and chose to order up some Cambodian grub. Among the dishes we ordered and chose to share at the really charming, surprisingly fancy restaurant were three of these creepy crawlies – one for each of us.
Much like the cricket I ate several weeks ago, this arthropod was similar to a soft-shell crab in both flavor and texture, which makes sense because they are in the same phylum. Unlike the cricket I ate several weeks ago, this sucker was huge and most definitely had a little buggy face.
The favored method of eating the arachnid was to gingerly nibble at its hairy, crispy appendages, either dipped in a mixture of lime juice and Kampot pepper or without any adornment, which is what I ultimately preferred. Of course, the sole male in the group, my co-worker, decided to man up and ate the whole torso of the little beast after making short work of its legs. Again, not to be outdone and to say that I too had eaten a tarantula, I followed suit.
It wasn’t too bad, and, actually, quite edible save for some prickly bits, which I assumed were portions of its fangs that had not been clipped. However, as I relayed to the folks at the table, I feared that what happened after my feast of crickets (well, one cricket actually) would happen after I noshed on the tarantula.
Several days after my cricket escapade, I was eating breakfast and felt a little tickle on my foot. When I looked down, I saw a large cricket chilling on my sandal, and the first thing that popped into my mind was an apology for eating his mum, dad, niece, nephew, etc.
Yup. Definitely not looking forward to seeing one of these guys on my foot as it was an adventure enough seeing one on my plate.
After arriving in Phnom Penh, I quickly learned that one of its charms – among other things – is how inexpensive the alcohol can be. This is both good and bad for me.
As I wrote earlier in this blog, I joined a gym here, The Place, so I wouldn’t have to stop my rather loose 24 Hour Fitness routine that I established back in the States. Problem is, with the alcohol being so cheap and all, after I work out during the day, at night, I end up imbibing all the calories I burned off in all manner of sugary, frothy, sometimes pink drinks, all of which I can get for less than $5, and, if it’s happy hour, less than $3. Beers are even cheaper, often going for 75 cents at happy hour.
Yeah. Kinda awesome for the pocketbook and (mom, don’t read this next part of the sentence) if I want to get tipsy on the cheap. (Note to my readers: My mum says that real ladies don’t drink in public). However, I blame alcohol for the fact that, despite working out really hard four days a week (sometimes more) and eating like a sad, sad bird, I still do not have the child-like limbs and waistlines of many of the women here. For serious, next to them, I feel like an obese giant.
It doesn’t help that every frakking time I pick up a small blouse or dress in a shopping mall the sales lady smiles at me and says “We have bigger size!” S’truth. The other day, when I was trying to buy a small T-shirt for myself, the lady asked me if it was a gift for someone. When I said that the shirt was for me, she gave me this whole “child, who the hell are you kidding?” look then suggested that even the medium would still be too small. I know that she meant no harm by it, and, seriously, I know I am not the tiniest person, but I am mos def not a large.
I smiled and said thank you for the suggestion, but inside I told the biatch that I wasn’t buying her ugly shirt. Then I went to a local bar and threw back a couple more drinks.
Note: The photo is of Street 278′s Elsewhere Bar, where I like to read, jump on the Internet, and enjoy a glass of something in the evenings after work and the gym.
Besides documenting the places I’ve been to and the things I’ve eaten in Cambodia, I’ve also been taking photos of all the cats that I’ve tried to make friends with. The thing about the cats here, however, is that they are not the happy, playful, sometimes disdainful kitty cats you see gracing the likes of I Can Has Cheezburger or Cute Overload.
Nope. These are fierce, fearful, feral felines that may or may not bite your nose off if you get too close to them and if they get the chance. Mind you, I don’t think they’re bad kitties. I just have a feeling that they, like many of the children I’ve come across here, don’t know what it’s like to be cuddled, much less loved. Thinking of pulling an Angelina Jolie and adopting these cats and several children.
Here is a cat looking wistfully at the rain, dreaming of things only kitty cats dream about:
Here is a tiny cat waiting for his mom:
Here is a tailless cat chilling at the Equinox bar, hoping that someone will pet him and that the drunkards will not step on him destroying what’s left of his stub of a tail:
And here is a cat that kept jumping into my lap even after I repeatedly put it back down on the floor. Here’s the cat giving me his “I may or may not eat your nose” look:
Photos: Julie Anne Ines / Flickr “Chronicles in Cambodia” (New photos uploaded!)
Unlike most days, I’m all by my lonesome in the NGO office right now. My boss currently has me working on an overview of the Cambodian media landscape, but I decided to take the opportunity to take a picture and do a quick blog update just so y’all and my family know that I am still alive.
After an almost six-hour ride on a crowded bus perfumed with eaux de backpacker, I arrived in Siem Riep on Friday afternoon so that I could spend the three-day holiday weekend celebrating the birthday of the queen (Vivat regina!) jumping over temple ruins in Angkor International Park, a must-do on any trip to Cambodia according to all the guidebooks.
Right now, I’m sitting in my adorable little room in a boutique guesthouse that cost only $13 a night, tax free. I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like, but the Internet speed here sometimes leaves much to be desired, making uploading photos difficult. Still, y’all can look forward to hearing about this weekend, other past awesome weekends, and the fact that I keep getting mistaken for Cambodian in posts in the near future on this blog.
Till then, off to see the ruins!
Photo: Itchyfingers
As promised, here are photos of The Place, a nine-story building that houses a gym on the eighth, seventh and sixth floors. In addition to a cool gym, The Place also boasts one of the best views of the Independence Monument on Sihanouk Blvd. — the tall monument that you see in the background of photos two and three — that I’ve seen in Phnom Penh. If you work out during the day, you can see the tuktuks, SUVs, motos and bike riders negotiating traffic below. At night, you can see the monument lit up in lights and hear the honking of horns.
If gorgeous views aren’t your thing, you can hang out in the Internet cafe on the sixth floor, check your email on some nice desktop Macs, and order a juice or coffee drink, or hang out in the lobby on the eighth floor and watch Cartoon Network on the flatscreen televisions nested in the ceiling.
Apparently, the building is somewhat exclusive, as the gym is the one of choice for some of the wealthier folks here. A two-month membership was fairly affordable, but check out the warnings posted next to the elevator. You can’t bring your gun, your bodyguard, boxer briefs or your Doberman. Fancy.
I also noticed that you can’t bring a camera. Whoops.
Photo: Julie Anne Ines / Flickr
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