Laurie's World

First outing to Odom Garden! It’s a park in Tonle Bassac, close to my hotel. (~6min walk). Nichol and I are ready for a little low key fun after working on selecting an apartment this morning. No final decisions on that yet, but stay tuned, Sinet is working on it for me now. Let the negotiations begin. Hoping for a decision and move in on Saturday! 🙏

The park is just what we need. I am having a coffee and fries.

Slightly inflated pricing here, but I’m happy to support a small local business that is ultimately here for dogs and their people. It’s the only place like it in Phnom Penh!

As I write this, i am pretty sure the rains are coming. So we can have some outdoor fun with shelter from that! It’s 89 degrees but cloudy so actually doesn’t feel very hot. There are fans by the cafe so it’s really quite lovely!

The coffee is in the tiniest of thimble mugs. That is a standard sugar packet 😂😂😂. Sometimes when you order coffee you get a cup of coffee, sometimes you get a thimble……it is undoubtedly the same amount of caffeine as a cup of brewed coffee (maybe more) I’m expecting a SHOCK upon my first sip…..#batteryacid 😬

The condiments are truffle mayonnaise and some kind of Odom garden ‘signature ketchup’. The mayo tastes very garlic’y and the “ketchup” is pretty spicy. All good though 🤩

After I eat this, we will go over to off leash area.

Wow, my head is spinning. Spent 2 hours this morning and another 2.5 this afternoon looking for an apartment. Saw 11 in total I believe!

The range of price and amenities and ‘niceness’ here is huge. Someone from east west connected me with Simet from Cambodia Expat Services. He picked me up in a nice Lexus suv and drove me all over the place to find an apartment for the next few months. I’m looking for a two bedroom place so that Troy has a place to work when he gets here! I Saw places that cost between $700 and $1,300. It’s so weird that most say they are negotiable. Why negotiable? Just say a price, in my opinion, but that’s how pretty much everything works in SE Asia. So not too sure if that means $25 or $50 or $100 off?? But that is what I have an agent for. 😉You can rent without an agent but zero chance I am up for that challenge right now 🤦🏻‍♀️

Some apartments I was able to rule out immediately, but a couple seem doable. One is 3 minute walk from school!! Most are more than that (but max a 10-15 minutes Tuktuk ride away). Wouldn’t that be perfect to be only a 3 minute walk?! I need to really sit down and think about this tonight (or maybe tomorrow morning). It’s 7:31 pm and I’ve been up since 4am so I’m seeing the ‘wall’. 😂 I need to finish this margarita pizza I ordered (again). Don’t judge…..it’s just easy. I may also need to research what I am eating exactly as I just realized this probably isn’t regular cheese?? I don’t know if cheese is vegan. 😉🤔 plus I need to get out of here before the ukulele folksong karaoke starts. That went on for hours last night and I can hear it well enough from my room, I probably don’t need to be right in the middle of it. 😅😂

ps: Nichol doing even better today after two doses of his meds! 🎉🎉 I feel like he will be back to his old spunky self within a few more days.

Slept until 4 am this morning!! Nothing short of a miracle. Got that instant coffee brewing and Nichol and I are ready for walk by 6:30am or so. We Just waited for the sun to come up! He’s a whole new guy today. Standing up and changing his position in bed! Wanting to lick his favourite toy! All excellent signs.

Being up at 4 AM gives me the opportunity to catch up with everyone back home with texts and FaceTime as that’s still yesterday afternoon there. By 6:30, Nichol was definitely ready to go for a walk and he even tried to go down the two flights of stairs when we left the room. That was a hard no from me but once I carried him to the street and set him down, he was off to the races.

There are lots of dogs here. Off leash of course and probably some mix of street dog/pet? situation. Nichol is very good with all of it, butts were sniffed and we moved on. This is great news for us that these dogs that roam are not aggressive towards him. There was one female that we encountered a couple days ago that was clearly a new mama that barked a lot at us but at that time he was still in my arms so I’m not sure what her deal was per se. Probably just saying her piece to the new guy.
We have a little route established here in the neighborhood and I see the same people every time we go by. Up until now I’ve mostly been carrying him, but now he walked on his own and people were cheering him on and smiling it was very sweet. The security guard out front was particularly smiley when he saw our progress!

I am going out apartment hunting in about 30 minutes so will update on that later. This morning, I also caught up with a fellow teacher that I met on a pet import Facebook group as part of my research to get here. She flew in last night from Atlanta and has a cat and a dog. As it turns out her place is about half a block from me so I think we are going to walk our buddies together tonight. I’m really looking forward to it! Having another person to talk to, with shared experiences is important for all of us!

Nichol had his first dose of meds at 1pm ( I had to get peanut butter to get him to take meds but Quick trip to Aeon Mall across the way solved that need!) By 3:30pm I am already seeing more life from him than I’ve seen in days. He’s lifting his head and his breathing is normal again. I can’t even imagine what he was feeling. (DawgMom guilt!😞) I’ll make it up to him. I promise! Other than the 20 minutes to go to mall and back and a quickie trip downstairs for a margarita pizza and mango smoothie, I haven’t left him since coming back here at 3 pm on Monday. He’s eating about 1/2 the food he normally does, but is drinking well so that all good signs. The vet said he should be acting and feeling better in 3 to 4 days and that by 10 days he should be back to normal. If not I have to take them back and they will look at injections into that knee if the inflammation is not down. I’m hopeful that this will help. Even hurt him lifting his head like this is a huge improvement❤️

Picks of my supper/pizza for the foodies out there🍕 ❤️

This supper slightly more Expensive at just over $7 😂😂😂  Sawry….still very reasonable meal imo! Had to have another mango smoothie too. It’s just fruit after all….. 🥭

Once Nichol is all better and we can venture out, I’ll have more to share on the food situation!!

TTFN

Not gonna lie, today was ruff. Up most of the night with Nichol. He is not doing well and I’m questioning all my life choices about why I did this to him. I’ve got an amazing support network here already with Landon and the staff at the school plus my amazing ❤️hubs and ❤️kids back home rallied around both Nichol and I as I worked through it. I did not go into school today. I took Nichol to the vet. In my copious preparation I had already sourced out two trusted, capable and English speaking  veterinarian clinics before coming here. The staff at east west confirmed my choices as the best so I reached out to both for an appt ASAP! Animal Mama responded quickly and they could See him that morning so I made my appointment for 10 AM. I caught a Grab and was there right on time. I’m super super impressed with the care he received, they were kind and patient and knowledgeable. I can’t ask for more than that. The vet was concerned about his hips and his knees. He took x-rays and determined his hips are great but he has one bad knee with a hyper mobile patella. The 22 hours on the flight with extended time not being able to walk around was more than his knee was able to tolerate. So inflammation and pain were the result. He prescribed 10 days of Meds and he predicts we will be on the mend shortly. All this for $57.50! And supposedly this is the “expensive “vet in town. I am more than happy to pay that as you can’t even walk into a vet in America for less than $100 Let alone get x-rays and meds!

This will be my go to place for Nichol while in Phnom Penh. They have doggy daycare too so I’ll be looking into that!

They emailed me his X-rays! I hope I don’t embarrass him by sharing this, but look at his curly tail🤩

Nichol updates forthcoming! 🐶❤️

Apologies for the delay in posting about how Monday went!

Grab app not set up like I thought 🤦🏻‍♀️ So I Caught a Tuktuk to school! Narrow little lane….he gave me his number so I can call him ANYTIME apparently. I’m sure that’s the case because I gave him 10,000 riel for a ride that would’ve cost 4300 riel if I had used grab. But just to clarify that’s $2.50 USD instead of $1.10. Still within my budget 😉 And I was feeling generous.

There is this phrase that gets used frequently during orientations to new jobs, the amount of information you are presented with can feel like getting sprayed with a fire hose. I can confirm this. I actually ditched out at 2 PM as I didn’t have a computer yet, and I need to get back to Nichol. He was officially spending his first day alone in at least three years (maybe more). He still wasn’t able to walk after the flight and MY jet leg was real. So I took the hardcopies of curriculum that I could and walked back to hotel to be with him.

The same Mural that was on the wall when I visited in 2019 is still here. I sense that not much has changed in many schools over the last 2 1/2 years here as most have been primarily closed due to Covid. I need to get a pic of me back in front of it to compare to the one I took in 2019, but it was fun to see that the message lives on. Here’s my teacher desk and my door.

It’s not really my teacher desk because it has all the things from the teacher that I’m covering for. I’m not going to move any of her stuff I’ll just live in her world, it’s OK. But anyways you can have a glimpse of what it’s like. I met my grade level teaching partner, Brandie, and my Khmer classroom teaching partner, Makara. I can tell that both are absolutely amazing, so kind and helpful. We are going to make a great team!!

Some pics of school lunch (Yessssss, that’s carrot soup! So delicious!) and pumpkin in my salad! My obsession with pumpkin is being fed!

I was lucky enough to get to sit at the cool kids table for lunch! Landon actually really is a happy guy, not sure why he makes these faces 🤦🏻‍♀️  I am going  to work with him on this! I however look sweaty and exhausted. But that was accurate. So it is what it is 😂

TTFN❤️

It’s 6:08 AM. I went to bed at 9:20pm and Set my alarm for 6 AM. Don’t worry I was awake at 11:30 and 1:45 and between 2:15 and 4:30am. I slept like a rock when I wasn’t awake. 😂😂

After yesterday afternoon and evening, I solidly determined that this is not a dog friendly walking neighborhood (Especially in the rain). It’s safe enough, but just not dog friendly. And definitely not flip-flop friendly. Lots of places I had to pick Nichol up and carry him and I only biffed one time setting him down. I forgot how slippery these sidewalks are. For lack of a better term, they’re not really sidewalks, plus I had the wrong flip flops on, and the angle of the sidewalks makes them precarious at best PLUS I’m dodging parked cars and motorbikes And my commitment to picking up my dog’s poop is going toward a lost cause here, that’s all I have to say about that. You can read between the lines🤦🏻‍♀️. The afternoon walk had me looking for water and sources of food. Water found…..food not so much! For the evening walk I went the other direction and there’s a pack of very angry very large dogs (behind a metal fence thank goodness). But let’s just say they were less than happy that Nichol was walking by their turf. Once again very safe but just not as pleasant as I would’ve hoped. PS Nichol didn’t really care…..

Anyways in some of those chunks of time over the middle of the night when I was awake I did some planning for my classroom. I have lots of ideas that I bring with me from my previous experiences, my greatest wish is that they are welcomed and appropriate for me to implement here. I am mindful that I am starting the school year for someone else in someone else’s classroom. But to be fair she gave me no direction as to her wishes and the administration has said I should implement whatever suits me. So here I go.

I’ve got instant coffee in hand, I just need to get dressed, walk Nichol and order my grab. I had every intention of walking to school as it is about a 20 minute walk. But last night I looked up the cost of a grab and it’s about $1.10. Perhaps that’s a good use of a dollar at this hour in the morning 😉 I’m very excited also quite nervous. Some positive self talk at this point is probably a good idea. I’ll post again when I get home tonight so everyone knows how it went.

There is a restaurant downstairs in the hotel I’m staying at. Apparently it’s a vegan restaurant, I’m not vegan but I’m also not interested in going anywhere so I decide to give it a try. I love amok, it is a traditional Cambodian dish. I see it on the menu 😍pumpkin and mushroom amok. This seems like a no-brainer to me! DONE!  Plus a mango smoothie. All this for little over six USD. I know I could eat cheaper elsewhere but for the convenience and price I am truly happy as I don’t want to leave Nichol for longer than I have to. It was delicious !!

It continued to rain so I stayed under cover but this is such a beautiful little restaurant tucked away off the street!

stay tuned for more adventure!

Wow! What a day (or two days) or however you want to quantify amount of time it took me to get from Seattle to Phnom Penh. For the most part I would say it went about as seamlessly as one can hope. As most people know, the most stressful part of this whole thing was not knowing how Nichol’s journey would end up. I won’t keep you in suspense, he arrived in Phnom Penh the same time I did! Much to both of our pure joy. The second leg of our trip was a little frustrating for me, as the gate agents in Incheon airport were not as forthcoming with information about his  whereabouts and comfort level as the Korean Air agents in Seattle. This was definitely on my radar as a possibility given it being a foreign country with a higher chance of a language barrier. With almost 2 hours still left to departure the gate agent was telling me that he was already on the plane. This of course was concerning to me because it was well over 90° in Seoul! He assured me that the compartment that Nichol was in was air-conditioned, I really had no choice but to trust the process. Part of me thinks he told me that because he may have thought it’s what I wanted to hear. It is actually the opposite of what I wanted to hear, I would’ve preferred to hear that he was inside the air conditioned building. No point in arguing though.

When I got to Phnom Penh, the health screening, visa process, and immigration went very smoothly. This is my fifth (maybe sixth) visit to Cambodia so I have a pretty good understanding of that process. I have an “ordinary visa“ also sometimes called a business visa, this will be extended by the school that I’m going to work for, into an employment visa that is good for a year, I believe. Or maybe just three months which is all I’ve committed to😂😂Not sure about any of that yet! He asked me how long I was going to stay and I said “possibly up to a year”, and he said “OK I’ll give you 30 days!”🤷🏻‍♀️

I was tracking Nichol and my bags on the AirTags The whole trip. I was unable to see anything after Nichol and the bags were loaded on the plane in Seattle. Given that the bags and Nichol were in their own metal cans, no iPhones were around them to transmit information to my iPhone (Plus presumably blocked by the metal). But what I was able to see as soon as it happened was that Nichol was in Phnom Penh with me and that he was unloaded from the plane immediately versus the bags that took another 30 or 45 minutes. That was a tremendous relief and worth every dime! Even though it was 11:30 PM in Phnom Penh it it was still well over 80°  Those magic words “with you“ were all I needed to see!

Now here’s the sad part, spending 22 hours in his kennel really messed up his back legs. He was in a lot of discomfort and unable to walk when I took him out of his kennel. I was not expecting this as an outcome as his kennel is pretty oversized for his height and he definitely would’ve been able to stand up turn around and move if he was wanting to. Plus he had a lot of nice bedding in there. But it just shows how hard this was on him. At the time I was pretty upset I couldn’t take him in the cabin, but in hindsight, knowing how hard it was on his body to be in a large kennel, being in a much smaller kennel under the seat would have been even harder on him. The only difference being that I would’ve been able to take him out on the layover I suppose. I have canine anti-inflammatories with me so he’s had those a couple times today and by 3 PM he was feeling much better and even climbed two flights of stairs at the hotel we just checked into. But now I’m getting ahead of myself because I haven’t told you about my overnight yet!

Landon, Sam and Edward (their two-year-old son) picked me up at the airport last night and we drove out to their house on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. They moved into this house almost a year ago and it’s very comfortable and awesome and was truly a blessing to me for my first night here. But it is almost an hour drive to the school from there, so I am going to be staying at a hotel in the city until I find an apartment in the city that is within walking distance of the school. Landon’s place has a fully fenced yard so Nichol found a few spots to hang out (for brief moments)  it’s way too hot here for him to be out for more than 10 minutes!! Major scorcher today 🥵 Landon and I went for a walk in the neighborhood this morning and I met some of his neighbors and friends, and then we took the car to a local coffee shop for coffee obviously. Two dollars for a iced caramel latte something or other. Amazingly good deal for a delicious coffee!

Landon and Sam drove me into the hotel this afternoon, it is called the YK Art house. It’s $21 a night and will certainly meet my needs while I look for an apartment. It’s pet friendly and I know from traveling around America for the last year that once you click “pet friendly“ on the search engine the number of options drops dramatically. But this place comes highly recommended by the pet owner community in Phnom Penh that I have become connected to as I researched what I needed to do to make sure that Nichol would be safe and happy here. I think of all the places that I considered employment and living in Southeast Asia, Phnom Penh is possibly the most pet friendly of all. They still have some work to do in that department but I think it will be OK. As it happens this is a tiny little place down a tiny little alley that is not really accessible by cars, so Landon had to park a few blocks away on a main street and Sam flagged me a Tuktuk (and explained where I needed to go). So for 10,000 reil which is $2.50 USD, we loaded all my stuff in the tuktuk and he brought us down deep into the side streets to our place here. Landon was going to stay here in a room tonight also but without a place to park his car he had to drive back out to his house tonight so I won’t see him again now until work tomorrow. I’ve been up since about 530 am so I won’t have any problem going to bed early tonight and being up early tomorrow. Not sure about how lucky I feel about room 13……on the ‘second floor’ that is actually the third floor 🤔

Nichol and I were going to go out in search of water but it’s 3:30pm and the late afternoon/suppertime monsoon is here. So we’re going nowhere until this clears up. WHOAH!

TTFN

My ‘day’ started July 29th, but ends 34 hours later by the clock. Flying time is just over 20hr but I also moved ahead 14hours with the time zone change. The morning was seamless, as other than packing my toothbrush, I was ready to go. Nichol was on high alert and as Troy packed the car, he was frantically trying to get in there too, so as to not be left behind!

Oh dear Nichol, of course you are not being left behind. Little did he know about how NOT left behind he’d be. 😬First scam of the trip was at the SeaTac airport!  I had two large heavy bags, plus two kennels, a carry on and my laptop bag so decided to grab a couple of carts to get all this inside. SeaTac charges for luggage carts now (SINCE WHEN?) it’s only a quarter but guess what, we had no quarters (why would I take American coins where I’m going?) but you can get a guy to push a cart FOR you for $5 or you can get a guy to push a flatbed cart for $8. It’s ridiculous but Troy needs to go park the car, so I have no choice. We load up the cart and the dude takes me inside to the Korean air check in line. It’s quite long and he says he will have to drop my stuff off at the line and leave. So at this point he’s wheeled my stuff about 100 feet from where the car was. I’m frustrated that I can’t keep the stuff on the cart because Nichol is on leash but getting really stressed and pulling, and I’ve got all this stuff. I say fine and go to pay him but I only have a $20. He refuses to make change. I was soooooo mad but stuck. He already had the 20 and was busting out. The best part is, the line starts to move and I have no way to move all the crap. So I was just standing there in the middle of the walkway with piles of stuff! Didn’t take long for the line to move far enough away that people just skipped me and went to the end of the real line 😂. Whatcha gonna do?? Usually these things happen to me in SE Asia not here! The ‘no change’ thing is a CLASSIC SCAM. I’m rusty and can’t believe I fell for it. Not sure what I could have done differently tbh though.

I got Nichol checked in and it was a hard ‘No’ on getting him in cabin. So he had to go in Cargo. Poor baby boy. The goodbye was hard, but since I was at airport 3 hours in advance we had lots of time. Korean Air had a good look at Nichol’s paperwork. Everything was good there. I had to have him back at the check in counter by 11:10am for our 2pm flight. That gave me about 20 minutes to walk him one last time before he got locked up in his kennel for probably close to 24 hours 😣.

At 11:10 two Korean air agents walked me to a place where they inspect oversize luggage, I had to take him out of the kennel for that, then the same two ladies walked me to the other side of terminal where oversized luggage gets dropped off. A guy came through a door, took him and that was it. I talked to the gate agents to make sure they knew about him (I’m paranoid) and then right before boarding, a gate agent found me in the line and showed me a picture of him. They said he was already on plane. I’m ready to board!!

Then when I got seated on the plane, I asked the flight attendant to double check that they knew about him on board, and to ask pilot if the AC was on. It was high 80s by this time in Seattle. She went away and came back and said everything good. ‘My poodle was onboard’ 🤔 he does not identify as a poodle though so I won’t tell him that part. I have AirTags on his collar and in the kennel so hoping there’s info popping up on that from time to time as I move along!

Got SUPER lucky with first flight. It was a 2-4-2 seating configuration and I had a two seat chunk all to myself.

This allowed me to stretch out a little and get a little sleep. Not as much as I hoped, but hopefully enough to sustain me on my 3 hour layover and second flight, that is 5 hours I believe. Masks still mandatory on flight and everywhere here so I’m feeling as safe as possible from the ‘Vid.  Good bye Seattle

My biggest question on this flight is who will eat the melon?? That is usually Troy’s job 🥺 Tasty pineapple though 😉

I arrived in Incheon (Seoul) right on time. Looks just like so many airports, but this is my first time flying through here. Beautiful airport inside, and very helpful staff (so kind of different than this morning 😉)

Nichol is in one of these boxes apparently…..

🫣

I am currently in the Mantina Lounge in Incheon. It’s super busy bcz it’s the only one (of three possible) lounges that have reopened after the Covid closures. There’s a robot that rolls around and asks for your dirty dishes. It’s brilliant and I think we should get one for George’s 😂😂