August 11, 2008

• …back! well, for now…

  Goodness! It certainly has been a while since I last wrote an entry. Life’s been rather hectic once April rolled around and will continue to be until October. I’ve been studying and preparing for my LSATs, which are totally not fun. In fact, it’s been the bane of my existence, but it’ll be all over in about 2 months. Until then though, I’ll have to continue to be a hermit. Here’s a quick recap (in no particular order) of what has happened since my last post though…

  - Hella birthdays! I made an exception in my studying schedule so as to attend friends’ birthday activities, but for some strange reason, there were an outrageously high number of birthdays and birthday parties during this time.

  - Pride. Awesome as usual. Saw a lot of old friends and watched some amazing dance performances on the API Stage. Can’t wait til next year!

  

  
  
  
  
  - Work. Busy. Exhausting. Oh, and I may be sent to Australia for short term assignment. More on that later.
  

  - In Search of Roots and the motherland. I went on an amazing journey back to China in search of my ancestral roots along with 12 other interns. We had a fantastic time! There was great food, great friends, and more importantly, great memories! I’ll have a separate post for this later once I get all the pictures and what not. To sum it up, I found my paternal grandfather’s village, along with 9,000 cousins. Yes, it was an adventure!
  

  - Back to the fatherland. I got to go back to Cambodia and hit up Phnom Penh and Siem Reap again. Al hadn’t been there before, so I offered to be his tour guide and travel with him there since it was his dream to visit Angkor Wat. We got into Phnom Penh first and it offered me an incredibly warm welcome. I hadn’t been back in 2 years, but my friends over at the Boddhi Tree still remembered me and it was awesome to be welcomed back so warmly. Siem Reap was a blast, despite some obnoxious airport staff who tried to scam me and Al on a taxi ride. The sign clearly read $7 for a taxi into town, but the guy totally asked for $10 thinking that I totally clueless. I pointed out the sign to him and he totally got defensive and proceeded to threaten all the taxi drivers to not pay any attention to us unless we were willing to pay the $10 he was asking for. I was pissed. I hate being taken advantage of and I hate rude people, the combination of which I just cannot and will not tolerate. Al and I walked out of the airport and found a taxi out on the road instead. It turned out to be one of the best things that happened to us because Som, our taxi driver, was pretty awesome. We hired him to take us around for the 2.5 days that we’d be there, and he really did an awesome job showing us around some additional sites that I hadn’t seen before. If any of you are going to Siem Reap in the future, let me know and I’ll hook you up with his contact information. All in all, Cambodia was amazing yet again, and I can’t wait to go back again!

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  - More stamps in my passport! I can now add Vietnam to my list of countries that I’ve traveled to. We went to beautiful Hanoi and nearly got killed (multiple times) trying to cross the street and sitting in the car. Yes, they’re that crazy over there with their driving–if you can call it that. We also spent a night in Halong Bay on a junk boat–totally cool! A couple of us even slept out on the deck underneath the stars! Yeah, it was pretty awesome–until the rain came that is, then we stumbled back into our cabins for cover. Yeah, I totally had a blast and I definitely want to go back, perhaps to Saigon the next time around.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  Jetlag has been a pain in the butt, but I’m slowly getting over it. I’ve got hours and hours of footage from the Roots trip to edit, in addition to studying for my LSATs, and working on my law school apps, so if you see a zombie in the next couple of months, you’ll know why. Okie, that’s it for now. Yay! I’m more or less caught up with my life. Now if I could just keep it organized and on track!
  

  • 2:19 pm
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