1. The hills in Prey Veang are mined for rocks for building roads, though gold was recently discovered in the pristine northern provinces, which probably will face serious mining and defacing in the coming months.
2. Musical scales … oh, I really don’t know. We’ll have to check with Lauren and Jacob M.
3. Our Cambodian local assistant, Marya, is a Cham Muslim, and married Muslim women tend to dress more conservatively than does the larger population; younger women’s dress varies radically, and the SST women are certainly among the more conservatively dressed women in Phnom Penh when they are in language classes and at lectures (the SSTers dress in more relaxed form on field trips).
4. In general (though this is too much of a blanket statement), there is an enormous difference between under-30 Cambodians and those who experienced the Khmer Rouge period, in almost every way: attitudes, postures, optimism, hope, etc. It’s fascinating to see these radical differences between middle and older generations and the new, younger crowd, which is the majority in Cambodia.

Your whole gang is to be commended for doing so much rigorous site-seeing and climbing and cultural learning and eating strange foods and sleeping on mats. I know that GC only has the best students, but on your team, Keith, surely you have the crème de la crème! —- Rose Stewart