My round eight Exploration was Culture Shock in Cambodia. Visit our blog!

We all were very interested about it and it talked about the culture in Cambodia. The first day we learned about the meaning of culture shock.
What is culture?
Culture means how people live to show their society or to show what their society looks like.
It shows about people’s life, traditions, religion, clothing, food, festivals, ceremonies, etc.

What is shock?
Shock means feeling surprised, nervous, sad, and it talks about feeling homesick, lazy, etc.

Line graph

Why I show this picture is because it talks about the culture shock. In this picture, it shows when you go to somewhere you’ll be happy and want to live there (it is called Honeymoon) but two or three days later you will feel culture shock because you cannot fit the place that is new for you. You will think it is very hard to live there. (It is called Culture Shock). But when you start to learn more and more about the place that you live in, you feel better than before (it is called Adjustment). Then maybe one month or one year later you will feel normal and you can fit into that place (it is called Mastery).

On the next day we made a poster about when we came to Liger, did we feel culture shock?
This is my poster that I made with my friend Rithy and my other friends’ posters too.

We all were happy and worked hard with our poster. On the third day we began our learning project:
We chose the lesson that we would like to learn about in our Exploration. This is the 5 top topics that we chose:
Way of life – Social studies
Temple and Culture relationships
Greetings – Respect
Khmer beliefs
Khmer ceremonies

We also chose other 5 topics that we would learn about if we had time.
Important Khmer language
Behavior in pagodas
Khmer food
Khmer Traditional Clothes
Khmer Traditional Medicine
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We also programmed our BIG trip to Siem Reap.
We left on Monday, 20-25.
On the first day we walked around temples.
We went to Cambodia Cultural Village.
Had fun, visited organizations.
We also interviewed people on Thursday and debated about some topics and discussed about our small trip to the pagoda.
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Way Of Life
80% of people in Cambodia live in a rural area. They like to do farming there. Most houses are built on stilts to protect from the flood. Most people live in a group and build the house near the pagoda in a rural area.
Poor people living in the city is worse than people in a countryside (rural area) because of conflict and violent crime. The middle-class in Cambodia is not not rich and not poor. Rich and middle-class people in Cambodia show their value by material and their social standing. Hundred of villas are built for political and business elite. Most people in rural areas wear simple clothes and material like sarongs, kromas, palm hats, mats to sit on, flip flops… . Women dress modestly in cotton shirts and ankle-length skirts or dresses woven out of silk for religious festivals.

We also learned about the social class. What is social class? They have classes such as lower class, middle class, and high class.They have different levels of jobs and it talked about levels of life and how people are living in their society. Middle class is the class that is connected to the low class and high class and the level of people. (This paragraph about social class in Cambodia is all our ideas. Then our teacher told us what is social class. Social class is the term to show the social position of people which is differentiated by assets, occupation, income, and power.

This is the picture of the social class that I made. (Click to see clearer)

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In class we also had a debate too. Why we wanted to debate is because we can share our ideas to friends because we have different ideas, and (connecting) one idea to other ideas means we all know more.
Our topic was: should Cambodia have a social class or not? My group was pro. I hated pro, I just wanted to be con, but teacher already said my group is pro, so then I listened to him. Teacher let us have some days to prepare for the debate. Then we all were prepared and our debate began. We were debating and asking questions. It shared the knowledge a lot to everyone in my class, even when we have a debate between one group and another group. At the end of the debate we also had conclusions too and teacher told us which group won for this debate tomorrow. Tomorrow came, my group (pro) won, The points between the both groups is kind of the same, my group just had one point more than the con group. Here is the information that I got with my pro group:

Why is it important or good for Cambodia ( to have three classes of people)?
– It can show people poor so the organization will know/ they will help them.
– People will have a competition
– Economic will work
– People can know and respect to the people who more good than
– Education will decrease if there are a lot of poor people
– Poor and rich people help each other
– Communicate

This is my conclusion at the end of the debate:

Based on the citation​ on this topic, it is a very important thing to have social classed in Cambodia. We agree about this topic because it can help Cambodia to change and to develop about agriculture, economics, education, competition, communication, and greets.

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In class we also interviewed the staffs about cultures. We divided into four groups, each group had different jobs. After we were already did the interview we shared what we got.

Family
Usually dad is the head of the family
Dad usually go to work
Usually the man and woman married at: under 20 years old or up.
In rural area usually have seven-ten members in the family
The average members is five in a family
In the city usually both man and woman work.

Food
Most food are fried fish, vegetable, soup, Brohok( Khmer Traditional food), sour soup,… .
Khmer food is so good
Most people in Phnom Penh go to buy the food at: BKK, Pong Tobek, Supermarket, Kelo lek 4 market,
The material that they use to eat rice or food is spoon, fork, hand and chopstick.

Clothes
Traditional clothes like:
silk skirt, Sarong, Sieng, Cheng pants, Pamong,…
When they wear that clothes it comfortable, and they also wear it when there a ceremony.
People in the city is stylish than the people live in rural area. In rural area they wear simple clothes like, pants, shirts, jeans…. .

Entertainment
Game that Cambodian like to play when there are a ceremony is:
Pull string, dance, kneecap, fight pot, and all this traditional game it happened long time ago.
Cambodian like to play this game with family, friends,.. . When ceremony, sometime they played at pagoda, home.
Let go back to the social class topic!
We have been searching about what jobs that high class, middle class, and low class do.

High class
High rank political members/government. Big business, doctor, head of religious, members, prime minister, president, king… .
Middle class
Teacher, seller, clerk, singer, architect, shopkeeper, policeman, officer..
Low class
Factory worker, farmer, beggar. rubbish picker, fisher man, moto driver.

In class we had prepared for our trip. We divided the group. Questionia group, accountant( budget) Material, and documentary. For me I in questionia group. My group make a questions to interview the people at Siem Reap. Budget group they make do about the money how much should we spent in our trip. For the material group they prepared the material, what should we take it with us and also they make a schedule too,what place that we go on this or that day.

The day to Siem Reap

Our trip had come we all was very happy and want to go. We all was pack for our trip and ready for it. We leave Liger at 8:00am. From Liger to Siem Reap was very long. We need to pass four provinces called Kampong Chhnang, Posat, Battambang, and Banteay Meanchey. It take us to go there for 10 hour. It so long and it can make us bored. But in the bus we was singing and watch TV. We ate our dinner at Kompong Chhnang. At the evening we arrive Siem Reap and sleep at the guest house called Mong Papa. We ate dinner near there and it was yummy. Here is some pictures that we took when we were traveled.

Cambodian Cultural Village

We went there to interview about their feeling of this place and it was so fun because we not only interview the people but we also went to watch some performance at there. They performed Khmer Traditional Dance, Chinese’ Dance, Kreung’s Dance, etc…. . We also went for a walk around this place. It was so beautiful.

Trip to the Temples 

We went there to learn about Angkor Wat and other temples like Bayon. When we at Angkor Wat, we did a survey about the tourists that come to visit Angkor Wat. It was difficult sometimes because we really hard to understand what do they mean. We also visit Ta Phrom Temple. I saw a tree grows on the top of the temple, how amazing is that? We

had a guide to teach to us about the pictures on the wall and it was amazing because we know about the relation of Khmer people with other country like Cham, Chinese, etc… . Along the road that we walked to the temple, I also see some people selling food and some people play the traditional music. Walking along time like this make me really hurt my legs but one thing that interesting to me is we met some students that come to learn about the temple too. We also went to visit one Khmer Noodle shop to eat noodle, it was yummy.
At the evening we went to Bakeng Mountain to visit sunset and to do some more interview. One thing that we was laughing a lot when we the interview is when we ask for permission from the tourists, they thought we were selling stuff to them and so they just ignore it and always said no. But Vornsar, one of our classmate try to tell them that we are not the seller, “We are coming here to interview you some questions”. So they understand and said yes. After we did the interview, it was raining. How could it be possible. The rain come- so the sun down-we can not see the sun and so we were on the top of the temple under the drop of rain. It was fun though because everyone can get the cold of the weather. About 40 minutes later, the rain stopped and the sun rises. I and my friends was so happy but the thing is we can’t see the sun because everyone there had blocked the sun, they are too tall.
It was enough, we learned a lot so it was time to come back to Liger.
That is one of the most fun times I had had.