Fires and Rivers

Today we had fire practice. This involved the loudest alarm ever… actually I think it was so loud that probably half the office will suffer permanent damage to the ear drum. We then walked outside into the carpark… unlike in the UK there was no one waving a pink flag or taking a register, so who knows who stayed in the building… then most excitingly a big, square, red fire engine shows up… hmmm thinks I, perhaps this isn’t a practice… perhaps I should be more concerned about where Sophea and Lyna are… and then the little firemen (they were quite short) started running out the hose and being guided into the building by policemen… the hose reappeared about 5 minutes later from a 3rd floor window, where the firemen proceeded to squirt water on the flower beds… no one else seemed at all perturbed by all of this so I assume that this is standard practice in a fire drill, and that the drill is not just for staff but also the fire brigade? Obviously they don’t have enough real fires to fight if they need to water our flowerbeds…

Other excitements involve the discovery that the Mekong river race is this weekend… I have decided to enter… and hopefully come Saturday lunchtime I will have swum across the mighty Mekong… this could be a stupid idea (despite there being kayak canoes to rescue stragglers)… I haven’t been in training, I have never swum across any rivers, the river is probably reasonably polluted, and I have minor panic attacks at not being able to see the bottom of a swimming pool if its cloudy… cant imagine what a bally river is going to do to me… I know there are no sharks, but possibly there are some large hungry fish??? Hmmm well we shall see… more reports later.