For C we didn’t choose Canada or China for example because they’re both too big and well known. We didn’t pick African countries like Cameroon and Comoros because they’re too close to our last country. Instead we picked this country home to the Khmer Rouge and Angkor Wat.

With its interesting history and poor economy this mainly Buddhist country, called Cambodia, is the smallest country on the Indochina peninsula.

If you want to learn more click here for our info packet. Cambodia

For the word search click here: CambodiaWordSearch

Interesting Facts about Cambodia:

1. The great lake’s depth in the wet season is 9 times deeper then it is in the dry season. The area growth nearly triples it size from the dry to the wet season.
2. The Vietnamese communists invaded the Khmer Rouge communists.
3. The people and language are not called “Cambodians”and “Cambodian”, instead both are called Khmer.
4. Angkor Wat is on the Cambodia flag.
   

   

    

Food

Food in Cambodia has Vietnamese and Thai influence. A lot of dishes have fish in them. Most dishes are not that spicy and a lot of dishes have lemongrass in them. For breakfast we had pork noodle soup (Kuy Teav). For dinner we had a green mango salad.(Swai Nhoam Pakea Kiem) and fish amok.

Breakfast

Kuy Teav recipe  For this recipe we took a shortcut and got instant pork broth and mixed it with gelatin instead of making the pork broth from scratch. It tasted like ramen noodles and the pork broth was very yummy! mmmm

 

Dinner

Green Mango salad recipe  This tasted a lot like the Thai green papaya salad. Our mangoes were green on the outside but orange in the inside. Try to find ones that look more green on the inside.

Fish Amok recipe  This is served in a banana leaf boat. For us it was hard to wrap them so we tried two and laid the banana leaves in a pan.  We also steamed in the oven. Our Amok was not as custardy as it showed in the picture. It was more watery but still tasty.

 

Culture and Art

For the art we did Khmer shadow puppets which are pretty cool. A white screen is put down before a fire. The actors cast their puppets on the screen and act the play out with their puppets. They create a shadow on the screen with the puppets but the actors have to be careful not to show their body. Puppets are traditionally made with leather, but we’ll stick to black construction paper right now. Puppets characters are sacred gods. Here is a link to a video to learn more about these shadow puppets:                                                Sbek Thom Shadow Theater

  Instructions to make shadow puppet

1. Draw a character on black paper. Make sure to have a circle outline and holes or slits inside the outline to show the character. The edges of the character have to be connected to the outline.
2. Cut the holes out using an xacto knife. Make sure you do it on a cutting board. If you break the line tape it together.
3. Tape some sort of long skinny thing to each side of the puppet. We used skewers.
4. To set up the theater hang a white sheet from something. Put a light behind it. Then lay down or duck to act it out. You must hold the puppets up high.

To watch a video on our shadow puppets press here.

 

Cambodia Flag

The Cambodia flag has 2 stripes of blue on and below a bigger stripe of red. As i’ve already explained the towers of Angkor Wat are on the front. The white color represents the country’s major religion: Buddhism. The temple represents the universe. The blue represents Cambodia’s royalty of its past empires. And lastly, the red represents means the nation, Cambodia. It was adopted on June 30, 1993, the flag was originally adopted before the Khmer Rouge on October 29, 1948. To learn more, click here on the Wikipedia description: Cambodia flag

Next is D is for Dominica.

– By Isaac