<![CDATA[Hello everyone,
My name is Kosal and I recently got back from a trip in Kuala Lumpur with my high school class. We are students in Wat Svay High School and members of the Science and Engineering group. We all are learning about recycling old things to reduce our waste by using knowledge from books and some information from internet research. In fact, we all learn how to create new things for people to use.
Before leaving Siem Reap
On 1st August, 2016, we received information the the Ministry of Education, Sports, and Engineering about an exhibition in Malaysia. After we received this information, we had to choose four projects to make exhibitions such as radio, line telephone, microscope, and electricity produced by a flower pot. In this exhibition there are many countries from Asia all coming together in one place. Each country could only choose 10 students. From Cambodia we had 10 students and 3 teachers.
In this plan, we are using a lot of time to do work with the project. We didn’t get any money from the Ministry for it. All the funds we needed to find it ourselves by asking people who want to help our project such as NGOs (Sunrise, Ponheary Ly) and other sponsors from different places. We worked every night from 8pm to 10pm, 7 days a week. On Saturday and Sunday we worked in the afternoons from 1pm to 6pm. Finally, after much work we succeeded in completing all the products for the exhibition in Malaysia.
Leaving Siem Reap
On 1st November, 2016 there are 4 members from my group who left Siem Reap at 11pm and we arrived in Phnom Penh at 4am by bus. In the morning, there is a teacher from Beltie School who came to get us from the bus station to take us to their school. We stayed in the school to prepare our products to show the manager of the school at 10am. They then took us to the hotel to take a rest. At 1:30pm we left the hotel to go back to the school to show the manager and our assistants who will help us in the exhibition in Malaysia. There were six other students and their parents who came to see us at the school too. After finishing, we prepared our product and took it to the hotel. At night, the school took us to have dinner at a big restaurant in Phnom Penh called “Tonlai Basak”.
In the morning we have to leave the hotel at 5am to go to the airport because we have to fly at 8:20am. We arrived in Malaysia at 12:00pm. In Malaysia the time is different from Cambodia, it is one hour ahead of us. Then we traveled to find the hotel and it took 1 hour from the airport by bus. When we arrived at the hotel, we prepared our product again because we know that in the plane it wasn’t safe. We have a big problem with our electricity producing flower pot, it didn’t work so we had to fix it for staying up all night. Luckily, in the morning it was working!
In the afternoon we took our products to the exhibition. There were many things at the exhibition and many people coming from countries like Thailand and China. For our product, most people are happy and they all learned that students from high school in Cambodia can recycle old material to reduce waste and can invent new products like electricity from the soil in a flower pot. Besides our products, we know and see other countries’ products and their knowledge. We see a lot of new things, new activities, new people, and new knowledge. We had the exhibition from 9am to 5pm for 3 days.
In the evening we traveled to see the highest hotel in Malaysia and also the second highest hotel in the world. It is the Twin Towers. It is very high and wonderful. I had never seen something like this before. We got there by train, my first time on a train as well. On 6th November the exhibition finished, but we have to arrive back early so we didn’t know about the results of the competition. We did very well there. After we arrived back in Phnom Penh, we continued back to Siem Reap.
Feeling and Food
When we first learned about the exhibition, we felt very happy that we could go show our products to another country. In Malaysia, the roads and environment are nice and the air is fresh. It makes me happy and smile. In the country there are a lot of big hotels and big shops. About the traffic I feel afraid because the roads are nice and easy for travel, so they drive very fast, such as motor bikes, cars, buses, and trains. I feel great for my first time traveling on a plane and train, to see the highest hotel in Malaysia, called the “Twin Towers”, and to see different people and different life styles. But it was sometimes difficult to communicate with everyone and sometimes people weren’t as friendly to us as we feel in Cambodia.
The food in Malaysia is not so different from Cambodian food, but it doesn’t taste the same. I didn’t like the food that much and it was hard for me to eat. I always missed Cambodian food. I wanted to come back home.
Finally, everything we did in Malaysia went very well. We were all happy and smiling when we arrived back in Cambodia.
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