Hey Guys
Hope you are all well where ever you may be. I am currently sitting on the lovely balcony at Rosy’s Guesthouse overlooking Royal Palace gardens and watching the Siem Reap “rush hour”.
This morning started with budgeting! Ahhhhh i hear you cry and yes it is not much fun staring at Excel spreadsheets for hours. Rachel and I worked through the figures that the Guesthouse had historically recorded and how we can use them, and the accounts skills from yesterday, to help create a helpful budget for the guys at Rosys to plan their business for the next year. After quite a few hours of figures, figures, a glass of water and some more figures, we set up some workable templates for the guys to use and we will go through the figures that they have calculated, along with some forecasting charts that we went through yesterday, tomorrow morning.
We also agreed on the final new logo… which we can now unveil. Please have a look below and you will see the progression of the development of creating the brand.
In the afternoon, I was fortunate enough to go and trial a Cambodian Cooking Course run by a company called Sojourn. I was picked up by tuk tuk and after about a 15 minute journey out of town, we arrived at the hotel/cooking school. The first thing we did was to walk to the local village and meet one of the families in the village. As part of the course, you give the family a good sized bag of rice to help their diet, and also through the guide, chat with the family. It was quite sad to see the conditions they lived in compared to our Western pampered lifestyles, but what was lovely was that not only did they really appreciate the giving of rice, but the kids in the house were having a great time just playing around . No computer games, TV’s or Maccy D’s in sight.
I went back the the guide Ms Pisey and was introduced to Chef Duth who was my tutor for the course. To cut a long story short, I cooked three dishes; Cambodian Chicken Curry, Fresh Chicken Spring Rolls (not deep fried!) and a dessert called Nom Tong Noun. Having done some basic chef training at University, and having a huge love of Asian flavours, it all looked fantastic! Below are the photos of the afternoon, and I found it very interesting and enjoyable, both the cooking part, but also chatting with the two lovely hosts about life in Cambodia and the food customs of the Khmers. I hope you have eaten before seeing this as it will be sure to make you hungry!!
Finally, I would like to mention the final Charity that the Rosy Guesthouse works closely with, who I have also met since I have been out here. Set up by a British couple, the Grace House Community Centre ( www.gracehousecambodia.org ) aims to address the imbalance of the lack of financial gain from tourism received by locals, by providing access to education, vocational training and health care to some of these rural villages. Another great cause and great to see that the guys at Rosy’s really support such worthwhile causes.
I hope you are having good days wherever you may be. I am off to meet the guys from the Globalteer Junior Soccer League for whom I am helping out on behalf of umi Hotels, with some training equipment for the kids as well as coaching one of the groups of kids, this Sunday.(http://www.globalteer.org/globalteer-soccer-league.html)