updates

well i have calmed down slightly from my last blog... this blog is going to be a mixture of different thoughts i've been having the last few days...

1. at work i had been thinking something was missing... couldnt quite exactly put my finger on what tho! however on Monday I realised it was the ubiquitous picture of the old king, new king and Queen mother that are EVERYWHERE, especially in public buildings... there isnt actually a queen of cambodge although it is suspected that the new king is gay (i should say this could just be a malicious rumour, but he is 53, unmarried and used to be a ballet dancer in Paris).. the old king is still alive and mostly lives in a palace in North Korea... I suspect making random movies with Kim Jong il…i understand they both have a penchant for such activities... so my workplace doesnt have pictures of the royal family on the wall... or so i thought until i noticed the cleaning cupboard door was open... had a nose round, and there on the wall were the old king and queen smiling down on the mops and bottles of detol... the cleaner obviously isnt a fan of the new king...

2. rains continue... the last 2 days we have had heavy heavy rain and thunder and lightening at around 3.30 - 4.30 in the afternoon... it is so nice as everything just cools right down. however the drainage system in this place is crap. the last 2 days have seen me once more laughing aloud as i cycle through flooded streets (water covering almost the top of the wheel of my grannie bike)... calmly passing motos and cars which are flying everywhere... stalling... crashing into each other... i realised why these rich types drive round in their 4-by-4s they need them for the flash floods - some roads are impassable to all those not in 4x4, on grannie bikes or in boats. one rather large 4x4 drove past me too fast for my liking and created a wave of water that threatened to wobble me off my bike and into the murky waters... fortunately i stayed on!

3. my dad arrived on montag, and he has been touring PP... tomorrow we planned to cycle to Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City... however today we went looking round the markets for some half decent bikes and could only find crappy ones designed for asian midgets... we decided that cycling 160miles on a dodgy bike designed for a 12 year old might not be fun... so we changed plans and are now busing it to Saigon ($6 - bargain)... and going to pick up some bikes there (im informed there is a much better range)... and then cycle home on saturday and sunday... i really hope we do get some half decent bikes cos it should be a good ride!
looking forward to going to 'nam... apparently as soon as you cross the boarder its like another world... lots busier, more developed etc... cycling back means that shopping will have to be kept to a minimum... no more Vietnamese tea sets for telfy then...
We might try and visit the viet cong tunnels... could be cool. Apparently there is also a shooting range where you can fire AK47s and other military hardware... i'm fairly anti guns etc at the moment, and cant see the attraction... although i guess i can see the macho, pretend like your a hero type thing... but it just seems bad taste, when you think what they can do to people's lives... bad taste like you wouldnt go around with a t-shirt with Hitler or pol-pot on the front... unless you were weird.

4. the arrival of dad bought many new toys for telfy... i now have a spangly new mp3 player (the old one was killed during a power surge).. it is green and exciting, and plays movies... which i didnt think would interest me, but you can get the complete series of ''the office'' uploaded for a couple of quid at the shop downstairs and i think that could be a good way to kill a bus journey... better than boxing orangutans... oh and i have a new compoooter. the old one was not killed by a power surge, but was very ancient (6 years)... it couldnt cope with me uploading digital photos and kept crashing... i think it only really functions as a typing machine... so i am very happy with my purchases, and my courior for shipping them for me... however i am dyspraxic (read clumsycareless), so i will try my very bestest not to ruin them anytime soon...


now off for diner i think xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Ponderings

I was thinking about what to write in this blog when I was cycling around and about this morning… then I came to the internet and was reading other peoples blogs and realized there was a something rather similar about Spearsy’s most recent blog and what I wanted to write about…great minds spearsy great minds…
Spearsy was saying how fragile life was after seeing pictures of the earthquake in Indonesia… I was thinking how fragile life was after watching someone go up in smoke as I cycled past the cremation tower in the temple at the end of my street, and because for the last few days I’ve been getting more and more __________ about the disparity in how people live in this country, and the fact that for so many people here life is as fragile as …. hmm an eggshell??? That’s pretty fragile right?
The blank line in the previous sentence is because I don’t quite know what the verb is I want to use… its partly angry, partly sad, and partly guilty…
I’m angry because some people in this country are so stupendously ridiculously rich, and they get that way treding on anyone and everyone… through corruption and through selling off natural resources etcetc… landmines and war and conflict in general is another thing that is making me mad… most days you see people who have had their lives damaged by violence.
I’m sad because of child mortality rates, illiteracy levels… levels of stunting and malnutrition, the highest HIV/AIDS incidence in Asia… statistics… it is easy to let them run over you without taking in what they mean to real people… but everyday I see the statistics in the children begging or playing in the street and the people with blank empty faces…
I feel guilty because it is all too easy for me to sit and judge rich corrupt Cambodians, but I live a pretty nice life here, and in the UK… giving money or buying someone some food slightly salves ones conscience… but I am becoming more and more convinced that I need to reflect carefully on how I spend my money and my time… the world is small… what we do or don’t buy impacts people in other places, and the environment… life is fragile and short… can we really justify only spending our money to build ourselves up? The world is also full of lonely and vulnerable people and we pass them by the whole time.. I speak for myself – I can spend ages engrossed in my own mini dramas (what massage shall I choose today type thing)… that I become blind to other people… giving money to a charity is the easy option… but is it really the only option?

My thoughts on these things are a bit scatty at the moment… possibly I need to ponder them further… I’m not convinced the answer is to renounce all worldly possessions, or sleep on a bed of rusty nails… or embrace Marxism… ultimately, for the majority of people in the world the changes we can make to injustice is going to be at the individual level not some sort of global revolution… which means… I think… I need to consider more carefully how I am spending my time and money…

Hmmm I think this is all a bit heavy, sorry I’m in a ponderous mood today… off for a swim…
xxxx

Rule number 7

The guest house where I live has 11 rules.
Rule number 7 is: Prostitution, gambling, drug taking and other illicit activities are not permitted in the Hotel premises.

Last night I was coming home about 10ish and I followed 2 ‘ladies of the night’ down my street and into my guest house where they were greeted by one of the owners. I then followed them all up the stairs and watched as they were both shown into one of the guests rooms. The guest looked rather embarrassed as I walked past to my room as he ushered them in. I felt rather uncomfortable, although the irony of the hotel owners breaking the rules is vaguely entertaining…
Of course this stuff goes on everywhere… several Cambodian women have told me they reckon 90% of Cambodian men go out to brothels of an evening, just like men at home might go down the pub. The Garry Glitter image of old western man and young Asian girls is much vaulted, but in reality the biggest users of the sex industry here are local men.
It’s another irony that on the one hand traditional Khmer culture is so reserved and on the other sex for money is a huge industry. My friend describes it as a rare phenomena – a culture where you can touch, but not look! She’s probably right!

7 days

Wow, it’s been nearly a week since I wrote anything here… this last week has been fairly full of various things and the time has sped past…

The start of the week was public holidays and Clari was visiting, so we went down to the beach.










We lazed around at some beachside bungalows for a few days, just reading and swimming and sleeping. Randomly met a woman who had been to a conference in Milton Keynes ages and ages ago that Spearsy, Holly and I were notetakers in chief for… it is a small world.
Oh yes, excitements were had on the final night when we heard (rather too close for our liking) a shoot out at the neighbouring 5* beach resort… seems the guards sometimes get drunk and shoot each other or the sea. [note to self: midnight dips might be dangerous]. A reminder that this country has not been ‘peaceful’ for long, and perhaps an example of the wealth the supermega rich have – it needs to be protected with guns.
After the shooting there was a huge rain and thunder and lightening storm. Wondered if we would be washed out to sea, but the next morning we were still on the beach.

The in-bus entertainment on the way home from the beach was slightly different from the normal mix of Cambodian karaoke, exceedingly violent Chinese movies, or Cambodian horror movies… instead we had a film made at a Khmer zoo… a boxing orang-utan show. I’m sure the RSPCA would lock people up for such a thing in the UK. Orang-utans were dressed up in boxing outfits and made to hit each other with boxing gloves. Meanwhile other orang-utans dressed up as cheer leaders danced around, lifting up their skirts. It was bad taste and rather cruel to say the least.

On Friday I had a telephone interview for a joby job. It was fairly nasty, mostly because the delay on the phone was so huge, and the people speaking to me were using a speaker phone, which made them seem even more distant. It made me realise how much we depend on non-verbal communication to guide us… I had no idea if I was saying too much, or too little, if they were liking what I was saying or if they thought I was an idiot! Ho hum.

Yesterday Clari and I went on a Khmer cookery course.










It was really cool. We learnt how to make spring rolls, red and green curry, fish amok (fish curry steamed in a banana leaf) and this weird banana tapioca dish. We ate everything we made so felt quite fat and had no need for diner… instead we went to the Raffles Hotel Le Royal. It’s the hotel in the movie the ‘killing fields’ (although the movie was filmed in Thailand). It was stupidly posh, and the bar was fairly pretentious… but 2 for 1 cocktails is always a good thing… we had these random champagne cocktails named after Jackie Kennedy’s visit back in the 1960’s… followed by an amaretto sour mmmmm my favourite. The most exciting thing was rubbing my feet on the carpet. A carpet I tell you, and a plush one at that. My feet are so used to tiles they were in heaven in the soft cushiness of it all.
Mel and Sophie we checked out the toilets and quite frankly they weren’t up to Lainston House standards… the towels were only paper not linen for starters.

The rains have started. There seems to be no pattern, any time of day they fall from the sky. It’s definitely cooler. Last night was almost what you would call cold… 29degrees C… needed a sheet when I went to sleep!

I think this is enough for now x x x x

Arrivals

This morning saw the arrival of what could either be the start of the rainy season, or just a huge rain storm. It also saw the arrival of Clari who is here for a 2 week visit. I was really glad her plane landed 60min after the storm had passed, yuk planes are bad enough, but planes and thunder storms… argh.

So this afternoon we are off the beach. Did I mention we have more public holidays here in the ‘bodge? Friday was Buddha’s birthday, Monday is the kings birthday and Tuesday is the Royal Ploughing ceremony… or something like that. So we shall go down to Sianoukville, and laze on the beach, and hopefully go to a tropical island. I’m sure half of Phnom Penh are there as the place seems empty, but never mind. I’ve booked us into a ‘romantic’ beach side bungalow. Excellent.

I will endeavour to take and upload some photos… but internet is crappy slow..
Ta ta

Ginger nuts

Today, for the second day running, the food stand near work is shut. This is a major tragedy for many staff including myself, and means we have to retreat to the Caltex petrol station and gorge on mangos and pot noodles (not the original pot noodles you understand... these ones have pictures of 'Miss World'emblazoned on the side)...

Today, due to major headache induced sleep deprivations (the evil things have been back with a vengence of late) i was in need of a sugar high... excitments of excitments i found a pack of ginger nuts. yumyumyumyum... theyre not 100% crunchy but have done the trick and woken me up... a bit. I have tried to share the ginger nut love with my collegues, but theyre really not into them at all.. what ho more for me.

Lights

Living fairly close to the equator the daylight hours, and the quality of daylight don’t really change much.
I was half watching the V music channel and a couple of the videos caught my eye and reminded me of home, where if you look at the sky you can often tell what time of year it is… one was a Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s live concert, it was in the summer, and must have been 10ish in the evening, the point where almost all the light has gone from the sky, but there is still a hint of blue left, summer dusky dark… I can almost smell the BBQs. The other video was Simon Webb (V music love him and play his music all the time… he used to be in ‘Blue’ apparently and is the 6th sexiest man in music according to their recent poll…) anyway in his video he is wandering around London in the dark… it looks cold and wintry, but the streets are lit up by the many many florescent lights coming from the shops he is passing. It is always dark here by 6.30, but there are not many street lights, and by 10pm its pitch black almost everywhere as people go to sleep ready to get up at 5am Yay!

By the way… for those who are interested who is the most sexiest man in music (according to the V music channel) it is JD Fortune, who won a lengthy competition to be the new lead singer of INIXIS… interestingly this was aired on the V music channel… I’m not a cynic really…

Feta maddness and a facial

Today is a great day for the pods… Marionanon is getting married, in fact probably now she is married. I am pretty sad not to have been able to go to the wedding, however Hils has been doing a fandabulous job of keeping me updated with proceedings… the photo below shows the small orange animals (from Milton Keynes) celebrating the great event by eating feta and melon salad, as the real wedding guests will be doing… excellent.
[Hils I cant seem to login to orange midgit i'll check my work email tomorrow, perhaps i wrote down the login wrong!]










Other, perhaps less surreal events have been the opening of a handbag shop under my apartment block… previously there was a bar, but the alcohol has been replaced by some fancy bags…

Last week I mentioned facials… so this weekend I toodled off for one. I think I was expecting someone just to slap on some cream and rub it off or something… but the facial seemed to involve having my face gently massaged with many different lotions and intermittently being blown with steam from a fancy Chinese machine. This was followed by the application of banana and jasmine lotion… whilst this was drying I had a arm and hand massage, and then at the end, after my face was well and truly pampered I had a head, neck and shoulder massage… during the whole experience there was aromatherapy oil burning, and the sound of running water from the Japanese garden outside, and birdsong (presumably from a CD given the inner city location?) I can now cross facials off the things to do list… excellent… however I have added a body wrap and scrub to things to do before I leave Phnom Penh… they sound exciting… I am a pampered princess indeed.

PMT

I thought I would blog about PMT… the airline that is…
In this case PMT stands for Progress Multi-trade airlines… I think I posted a photo of their logo on my flickr site, as it entertained me…
Anyone who knows me will know I dislike flying… and small airlines, particularly those operated in developing countries, are not ones that inspire me with confidence, more like deep dread…
Yesterday the paper reported that a PMT plane (a sturdy Russian Antonov of course) flying into Ratanakiri had engine failure, and so was diverted back to PP, where the airport could actually manage an emergency landing, as Ratanakiri isn’t much more than a dirt runway… apparently Antonovs can fly with only one engine (???). So it made it back to PP and proceeded to land safely (unlike last November when a PMT plane crash landed off the end of the runway…. injuring several of the passengers)… PMT said that the engine failed due to human error… the mechanic forgot to screw the oil cap back on…. Duh
In conclusion I shall not be flying PMT air…

http://aviation-safety.net/index.php is an interesting database of all air accidents ever… and is useful for vetting dodgy airlines… if you’re paranoid… yupyupyup that’s me

respect for Mr Bush???

I am not a huge fan of the President of the United States...
however i woke up this morning and watched him take the piss out of himself durring the Whitehouse Correspondants Association Annual Diner... he did this with the help of a george bush lookylikey... it was fairly amusing... and i was kind of impressed he subjected himself to that sort of ridicule, Im not sure Tony Blair would have done the same!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1765025,00.html

1st May

For this blogsite I use a webstats website called tracksy... its pretty cool and tells me all sorts of imformation like how many people visit, how many people re-visit, what the ISPs are of the people that visit... where theyre located in the world... its very clever...
anyway i thought i would have a look at my webstats today, and i decided to look at the list of websites that were reffering people to my blog, and then look at the search engine key words that people had typed in, and then ended up at my blog... of vauge amusement to me where 2 people searching for information about massage parlours in Phnom Penh... i am sure they will have been disapointed by the information in this blog...

other news... i found some pine nuts sooooooooooo expensive but well worth the investment. The resulting pesto was fandabuloso mucho amazingo... yumyum
other food i have eaten today: a deliciously scrummy Belgium chocolate brownie from 'The Shop' - a very nice deli... this was a very nice eating experience considering chocolate is only available in a couple of shops, and even then it is hidiously expensive, and fairly manky as its imported from malaysia or indonesia and i dont think theyre chocolate capitals of the world... as a result i feel chocolate deprived a lot of the time. [not necesarily a bad thing]

went out for a cycle about the place and ran into a large protest/march calling for better conditions for workers in Cambodia (relating to Labour day i guess)... it reminded me once again how globalised our world is, and how much we in the west benefit from the poor labour laws or cheap labour in countries such as Cambodia...

finally, i have decided that i need to have a facial... i have come to this conclusion as i feel it is what is missing from my check list of ex-pat activities.
massages: done
manicures: done
cocktails: done lots
yummy food: done even more
lazing by the pool: done done done
new clothes: done [although admitedly i havnt got anything tailor made, and my new clothes arent exactly executive]
having someone clean/wash/iron for me: done [although i am feeling guilty about it, and this week have been doing my own washing up... its very stressful as you can imagine]
if anyone is wise in the ways of facials can you tell me what to expect? and what type of facial i should go for... the choice seems rather huge...

on that note i shall end... i realise this blog reads like some sort of long lazy holiday... which in a sense it is given the rediculous number of Cambodian Public holidays... but i am actually working quite hard here... its just i dont think this blog, or indeed any blog... is a place to air comments, thoughts, opinions related to work... the potential for legal repercussions must be reasonably significant

x x x

Smile

Living in Cambodia is very nice… I love lying in my hammock, I love the sunshine, I love finding out how things are different and yet the same… I love eating out… I love going swimming in an unheated outdoor pool and not freezing to death, I love having massages (ooooo I am addicted for sure!)
But I miss home too… I miss some lovely people, I miss not being able to drink out of a tap, I miss the smell of grass, I miss feeling cold (sometimes)… I miss not having an oven… I miss not being able to understand everything people are saying… I miss not having proper speakers so I can play my music loudloud… I miss the countryside… I miss recycling and I miss my bike (very much).

Living in another country seems to be finding a balance between what you miss and what you like about where you are… and being happy. Mostly I think I am happy… this morning 2 things made me smile.
I was cycling home from church and stopped along the way to distract myself in a supermarket… when I came outside it was raining… and raining very hard, Cambodia style. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, I seem to always forget my raincoat… anyways I hopped on my bike and cycled… the streets clear a bit in the rain and so I cycled fast, very fast given my bike only has 1 gear… the air was cool, the rain soaked me, and I was laughing my head off (yes I am going mad)… it was exhilarating…
The other thing that made me smile was sitting in the internet café, and I looked up at the old lady opposite me. I’ve seen her before, she must work here… anyways she was just sitting there, smiling in a lovely way, at the email she was reading. She reminded me of my lovely grannie… and I smiled, because she was smiling. Nice.

Tomorrow is international Labour Day, and the Royal Government of Cambodia has put large banners up telling me I must ‘celebrate’ this. So I shall celebrate international labour day by not going to work… which seems ironic… surely you should have to go to work on ‘labour’ day? I have various plans which involve applying for jobs... acquiring a new swim card as I lost my old one… sourcing some pine nuts to make pesto… on that note I should add that I have been away 3 months and in all honesty, aside from porridge, smoothies, lollypops and sandwiches, have only cooked once, and that involved the difficult task boiling some asparagus. I actually really like cooking, but it is too easy to eat out. However this weekend so far I have made a Greek salad (ok, not really cooking… but it did involve lots of chopping)… hummus (yes you can buy tahhini imported from Macedonia… how exciting)… pumpkin soup… mmmm and would have involved making pesto if only the shops hadn’t run out of pine nuts… so I feel quite Delia like.

Currently I am lying in my hammock, listening to DJ Shadow, trying to drown the sound of jinglyjangly wailing from the temple at the end of the street… and pondering how to end this blog…

Kisses and love perhaps??? X x x x X

Battambang

I am sitting in Battambang... pronounced Battambong i think... we arrived today from Kampong Chhanang, and appear to have a free afternoon before working thursday and friday and then back to PP on Saturday. I think my collegues are going to take me on a moto ride round the sites later, but whilst they replicate their emails i have been wondering around the place, taking photos of slightly dilapidated french colonial arcitecture, probably getting sunburnt and finding the fastest internet connection in cambodia so far! This place reminds me of Siem Riep without the tourists... Siem Riep is the town that all the Angkor temples are close to, and really the centre is totally set up for tourists and isnt particulalrly cambodian at all... here it is so much more laid back... but there are a lack of nice restaurants selling fruit smoothies mmmmm. Mostly when traveling with work i am obliged to eat rice 3 x per day... my collegues were distressed this morning when i ate a mango for breakfast and not a huge bowl of rice and beef...
A final thought... whoever decided that hotel rooms with no windows were a good idea should be shot (well possibly not actually shot... i am fairly anti guns i suppose) ... i am staying in an airconditioned, but decidedly prison like room for the next 3 nights...

ta ra

23rd April 2006

Well I completed my swim across the Mekong, and came 50th out of about 111 people so I felt pretty pleased with myself… mostly because I didn’t panic about being way out of my depth, which is what tends to happen if I swim in the sea… I don’t think we actually swam that far… its probably only about 700m… however the bally organisers told us the current was going the opposite way from the direction it was actually going in and so most people tried to compensate for the current and then realised halfway across that they were heading miles down river… so we probably swam about a kilometre I would guess. The river was a bit choppy but otherwise it was fine.
Now in the last 12months I’ve run a half marathon, cycled the length of Wales and swum the Mekong. Tri-athlete telf I shall be. [not]

Other thoughts…
I am fairly rubbish at knowing my age, although after a few seconds rummaging in my brain I can usually get it right… however I always remember the age of my one and only cousin in the whole world - Jackjack… today he is 7 years old. Interestingly this makes me feel old, I can’t believe it is 7 years since he was born and I was studying for part of my modular geography A-level.
I think the reason it makes me feel old is that in another 7 years he will be 14 (nasty beard sprouting boy teenager I expect?) and I will be…. Ummmmm 31, its not that 31 is old… its just that I am speculating all the unknown things that could happen before I am 31… when Jack was born the immediate future was less hazy than it is now…finish college, go to uni… but now I have not the vaguest idea what I’ll be doing in 7 months let alone 7 years…
Although I want to cycle the length of both islands of New Zealand I don’t exactly have many long term goals…

Char I’m thinking to join you as a postman… it sounds like a seriously good plan… if anyone has any other suggestions for what I should do with my life dooooo let me know.

some photos now on FlickR

Ok, I think I have just uploaded some photos of my Kratchie/ Rattanakiri trip to flickr (link on the right hand side of this tool bar)… it was seriously sloooow, I don’t think there are any places with speedy internet in this country!
Anton a public request to pretty please upload a few nice photos of the Wat of Angkor?

Mucho gracias

X x X
Ps off to north west Cambodia with work this week, so will probably be quiet on the blog front until next weekend…

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.

The return of the swimsuit...

Hello blog reader(s)
For those of you like Katie, who were concerned about my lack of swimwear… fear not the costume hath been discovered (don’t ask me where) and returned to my room ironed (why?) and on a hanger… everyone can now breathe a collective sigh of relief… especially me as the weather is so so so sooooo hot… I know I keep saying this but it really really is… the average temperature of my room (with aircon off) is 35 degrees… and outside its considerably hotter, and the sun burns I tell you… it burns… one of my Khmer colleagues told me today I was going black… this has to be the biggest overstatement ever as from my assessment I am pasty pasty, but with a few more freckles… however here whiteness = beauty, and any slight darkening of the skin is not a good sign apparently, hence the wide availability of bleaching lotions, moisturisers etc

Dolphins, an elephant and a lost swimsuit

Well the last week has been a whirlwind tour of the north east of Cambodge. Hopefully I am attaching a map, so that all my millions of readers can become wise in the geography of the Cambodge.

I have seen so many different things it is hard to know where to start.
Hmmm… ok chronologically is probably the best way to arrange things.

First things first we caught the bus up to Kratchie (central cambodge). Catching the bus involved getting a moto to the bus station… dicing death on various forms of transport was a theme of the holiday and the first moto ride was no exception… don’t you just love cutting across 3 lanes of traffic without looking and then speeding the wrong way down a one way street facing piles of oncoming traffic… all to avoid some traffic lights? Great fun. I have decided that should I win the lottery (impossible as I don’t play) I will start a small NGO (non-governmental organisation) called ‘wing mirrors for the ‘bodge’… it will do what it says (on the tin) - provide wing mirrors for all the motos which don’t have them (probably about 90%).
Soooo we arrive at the bus station (we being my English friend Carol and Cambodian friend Sophea) and catch the bus ok. The bus ride was fairly uneventful, on time (7 hours), we had our own seats, aircon, Cambodian karaoke and exceedingly violent Chinese movies on the video… the road to Kratchie is paved and the buses cain it along, honking their horns incessantly for the moto drivers to get out of the way. Have I mentioned road traffic accidents are the number one cause of death in this country???

Kratchie is a beautiful beautiful town on the banks of the Mekong. It’s the dry season so the river was low and there were lots of long sandbanks which looked like tropical beaches! We stayed with Adam, Sopheas husband who works in Kratchie some of the time. The main thing to ‘do’ in Kratchie is get a moto 30km out of town to see the Irrawaddy river dolphins. This was more dicing with death, and this time we actually managed to kill (or perhaps seriously maim as it was still flapping when I last looked) a chicken. The dolphins were interesting, went out in a little boat and floated around watching their fins pop in and out of the water. They don’t jump around and do tricks so in that sense it isn’t really exciting, but they’re so so rare - an endangered species and I think there are only 100-150 in the world. The population is under serious threat from pollution, logging, dams etc. The people living near the river are so poor, that it is hard to get them to think about conservation – although this is what the project Adam is working on is addressing.
After we saw the dolphins we header up river to some floating cafes and lazed around eating eating and paddling in the river.

The next day we hired a car to bounce us 250km up the unpaved road to Ratanakiri. We spent 2 days in a hill lodge (after escaping from a prison cell style hotel in the town)… at the lodge we stayed in little wooden cabins in the jungle and woke up to birds and geckos and other assorted animal and insect noises. Lovely. We did all sorts of things… swimming in a beautifully clear volcanic lake, swimming in a not so clean river, visiting ethnic groups, boating on a river and best of all a really great trek to visit some of the different hill tribes that live in the area. The trek was 25km guided and we learnt so much… the guide was a bit Lofty Wiseman… I learnt that you could use just about every single leaf we went past… there are leaves for smoking, leaves for eating, leaves for cooking, leaves for healing, leaves to use as warning signs… the tribes don’t have a written language so they use different signs. We visited several villages and people wanted to talk and make us drink rice wine. It was Khmer new year, and even though the hill tribes are not ethnic khmer they have recently started celebrating Khmer new year. This seems to involve drinking lots of rice wine out of filthy dirty cups, or just sucking it from huge clay pots through a thick rubber straw… its lethal, and reminded me of Airag mongol people! The tribal groups live in houses made almost entirely from natural products from the forest. They weave these into roofs, floors etc. They’re incredibly isolated and poor, scraping a living from the forest. It was another world… it actually reminded me of going to the ‘Weald and Downland Open Air Museum’ near Arundel where you look round all these houses that people lived in hundreds of years ago… except this was real, not a museum demonstration, and people really lived like this… and seemed to be pretty happy. Although I am sure statistics such as incidences of Malaria, dengue fever, education rates and access to clean water are horrific. The tribes people didn’t wear traditional clothing anymore, however the women (especially the older ones) just wandered around topless… very surreal… some of the younger ones wore t-shirts or just a bra (also surreal)…
After we got back from the trek I went for an elephant ride in a rubber plantation which was so so sooooo peaceful, and considerably less commercial than the one Anton and I did at Angkor. I love elephants!

Evenings at the lodge were spent eating, watching the stars and having my friends try to convert me to whiskey… cant say they succeeded… gin and vodka win hands down every time… then it was off to bed before 9.30 as the electricity went off then… and we woke about 5am with the birds!

One of the themes of the trip (it seemed to me) was deforestation. Traditionally the tribal people practice small scale slash and burn where they cut down a small area of forest, plant some rice crops for a couple of years and then move on to another area, leaving the forest to recover. However now this is all changing, people are planting cash crops such as cashew and rubber, and large scale companies are bribing government officials and chopping down huge huge swathes of forest, often illegally stealing land from communities . The governor of Ratanakiri province was recently fired as it is claimed he is not doing enough to tackle deforestation and had received as much as $15million in bribe money from various sources… I reckon his sacking is just an opportunity for someone else to make some cash by selling this countries natural resources (cynic)… It is so sad grrr and it makes me angry. I’m not sure if I have said it before, but living here reinforces the fact that the world is so interdependent and that ok, the wood we buy in the UK may not necessarily be from Cambodia, but it is from somewhere, and unless the source is a ‘sustainable’ one, then somewhere someone is loosing out… and most likely it is someone who is incredibly poor and has nothing… not even land rights. It is so hard to know how to live an ‘ethical’ life… and impossible too… I am sure me staying in swanky hotels at Angkor Wat and eating imported cheese contravenes this… but somehow I think we all have to try somewhat to be more aware of the fact that many of our actions impact other people negatively – be that directly or indirectly.

Finally… this is a long blog I know… I was most distressed to arrive home and discover that my swimsuit that I put in the wash has disappeared. NIGHTMARE NIGHTMARE. Basically I need my swimsuit to go swimming… naked swimming would not be allowed in a school pool… and I am convinced my bikini would scare the children and fall off… so unless the bally cleaning lady can find it I am in a mong… swim wear is not readily available here and the stuff that there is, is designed for midget Cambodians whose waist is the size of my arm, possibly a slight exaggeration… but you know what I mean? It is so hot here that I neeeeeed to go swimming. Ho hum didlium.

Now I really should stop procrastinating on this blog and attempt to write my CV. Today has been designated official CV writing day… oh the joy.

PS Katie I have some photos of me babyhugging (I love Cambodian babies!) that I will try and upload for you sometime this week.
PS2 Anton are you going to upload some Angkor photos pretty please with a cherry ontop?

for hilary... mostly

Hilary,
i thought you would appreciate this photo of me looking very corporate... please note the corporate scarf (made by a women's income generation group) and the orange bike...
the helmet is also exciting...

x x x

traffic

Sometimes when I am cycling along the roads here in Phnom Penh I get really annoyed with the traffic, in particular the way people are constantly trying to kill me (or so it seems). Road rage on a bike is not a good thing… ultimately I will always loose out.

A couple of weeks ago I devised a way to quell my annoyance… it is absolutely perfect… I realised the reason I was annoyed was because I was taking the moral high ground, obviously I was a model cyclist obeying all traffic regulations… I came to the conclusion that the only solution was for me to break every single traffic rule and then I would have no grounds to be annoyed by other people… now I cant say I do this everyday as it might be marginally more unsafe than normal cycling… however every time I start to get annoyed I make sure I:

• Run a red light,
• Cycle on the wrong side of the road
• Cycle the wrong way down a one way street
• Cut up people on mopeds (it is actually possible to cut up a moped on a one gear grannie bike, I can be quite speedy)…
• If im making a right hand turn at a traffic lights and there is a petrol station on the corner, I just cut through it instead of staying on the road and waiting for the lights to change…All in all I am finding this method saves time… and significantly reduces annoyance with cambodgian driving… excellent…

I shall probably get into much trouble with the traffic police when I get home!

Rain and Carmen Electra

The other evening there was another huge storm. Fortunately this time it wasn’t when I was trying to sleep. All afternoon it was dark and windy and there was lightning, but no thunder or rain… I new it was going to rain, but I really wanted to get a swim in, so I went to the pool. After about 20min it started to rain. It was amazing amazing. The pool is outside, and the rain was so so so soooo heavy, it was churning up the pool, and then it got dark, it was almost as if I was in a storm in the sea. In the end I realised the rain wasn’t going to stop and I would have to cycle home in the rain… now I only live about 10 blocks from the pool, but my skirt was cream and my t-shirt was white, and it was raining hard… Marionanon will recall berating me in Vietnam for getting soaked and see-through on the back of a motorbike in a village, and I didn’t really want to repeat the experience, but there was no choice! However Marion I did manage to use my sarong as another layer, which significantly reduced see-throughness, and overall I don’t think I humiliated/exposed myself at all really… cycling home was fun… right down the middle of the road as all but the middle was flooded… I also noticed a couple of people washing their children in the run off from gutters. The rain was so heavy and warm… and yet I felt cooler than I had in days…

I’m sitting writing this at home, and the TV is on… most exciting it appears to be a show presented by Carmen Electra. Its called Manhunt: The search for Americas most gorgeous male model. Excellent. To be honest it is not as exciting as it sounds… but there are lots of topless men prancing around and taking themselves far too seriously…

Thoughts on massage

Last night I was feeling board and so I decided to go for a massage… there are several massage parlours in my street (I dislike the use of the parlour word as it springs to mind all sorts of dodgy things… however what other word can I use??)… in fact a new one opened only last week. It advertises ‘back scrabs’… tempting as a back scrab sounds I decided to go round the corner to a different ‘parlour’… here I was given a menu with all sorts of interesting massages… I went for the standard full body massage thinking it would be safer than a) chest massage b) skin peel c) full body wax (ouch)… as I am not at all wise in the ways of massage it was fairly entertaining, quite relaxing, and I emerged relatively unscathed… although to be honest the stomach part of the massage was very odd… I am now only 9 massages away from a free massage as I was presented with a loyalty type card… its so cheap I think I may go back… but I am starting to think that reacclimatizing to UK will be hard… here I am soooooooooo lazy… someone cleans my rooms, makes my bed, does my washing up, washes and irons my clothes… I never cook anything more than porridge or a fruit smoothie (although I did once boil some asparagus)… and now I am going to become a spa junkie or something… all that remains is for me to get some executive outfits and start having manicures and then I will be totally unrecognisable… actually I did notice on the massage menu you can pay $1 to have your hair washed and dried – includes free scalp massage (!!) perhaps I will go for that next time… hee hee hee
It is a hard life here in the Cambodge to be sure to be sure… in saying that I have just returned from 3 days working in the provinces, eating rice 3 times a day and sleeping in what seemed like a prison cell… the part of Phnom Penh that I live in isn’t real Cambodia that’s for sure…

fact of the day

the average cambodian man eats 18kg of rice per month... apparently
that seems like an awful lot of rice to me

Things to do or carry on a moto or cyclio in Cambodge

The following list are all things I have seen people doing or carrying on a motobike or cyclo rickshaw in Phnom Penh… sometimes the mind boggles…

• Carry an air-conditioning unit
• Carry 40 odd half alive chickens upside down hanging off the back
• Breast feed a small child
• Carry 4 or 5 members of your family all on one bike
• Wear a helmet… possibly… actually mostly not
• Carry a large TV, 50kg bag of rice and a sack of fruit whilst still managing to steer
• Sit side saddle (ladies only on that one)
• Carry a large slab of (ever melting) ice
• Carry several live pigs on the back (I am sure they must get sunburn)

Home Thoughts From Abroad

I remember my Dad sent me this poem when i was in Mongolia. I really like it and i guess it is now April so I can think about English spring and compare and contrast to the dusty humid heat here... a heat which impossibly keeps getting hotter and hotter... thank goodness for ice and gin and tonic and swimming pools... thats all i can say...

Home Thoughts From Abroad
Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England--now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Robert Browning

Thursday... it would appear

Just a very quick blog… from my desk in Phnom Penh… I am feeling very rotund at this instant after eating a huge Chinese meal with my colleagues in a surreal restaurant… surreal in the sense it is very small (8 tables) and yet we were jumped on by 7 staff all dressed in luminous green and pink t-shirts with ‘my love’ written over the chest in gold sequins…

The last few weeks have been a bit of a social whirl with Marionanon, Sue and Anton all being around at various points. Next week I am working in one of the provinces and I’m sure there will be nout to do in the evening so I’ll try and write more then. Needless to say Angkor Wat was incredible, as was Preah Vihear… although in different ways… Angkor wat in the ‘lets marvel at ancient architecture and luxury swimming pools’ way and Preah Vihear in the ‘lets get depressed about deforestation and landmines’ way… Tbang Meanchey is the main town in PV province and it was bizzarly like Dalanzadgad, Mongolia… especially the bally powercuts…

I thought it might all seem a bit dull once people went back to UK, but we have been scooping the next few months work out and seems like I shall hardly be in PP at all in April with trips (work and holidays) all over the country…

Ok enough for now… Sunday I’m off to the zoo… oh the excitements…

PS Sally: latest smoothie favourite: Yoghurt, lots of crushed ice and Cadburys cream eggs… mmmmmm

PS2 many photos will be uploaded to FlickR soon... i hope x x x

holidays

thought i should write a quick blog from my holidays in siem reip with anton...we are having a lovely jublee time... eating much food, cycling (should perhaps read sweating) round angkor watywat, flying in a baloon (fortunately attached to a long piece of thick wire), drinking amazing frozen cocktails in a swimming pool, eating squid off a bbq etc etc it is all very lovely... photos and more details will follow next week.. for now im off for a massage and then some diner in a twinkle star garden and then perhaps some sleep.. very sleepie
tomorrow may involve elephant rides and sunsets and a move to an exceedingly swanky hotel.. with infinity black marble pool... and spearsy there is a room called 'jack fruit' hopfully it has my name on it!
ta ra for now
love and cocktails
telfy x x

Cockroach

Today I spied and killed my first cockroach. It was absolutely huge and it kept scuttling around my room… I tried to kill it several times… but failed… at last I finished it off with a piece of paper. I am now wondering if it was actually more than one roach… and am hoping not the start of a small plague.

landmines

I was thinking to write something about how annoying (dangerous?) it was trying to cycle around Phnom Phen when people drive on the wrong side of the roads, dont use lights when its dark, ignore traffic lights etc... but then I was watching a programme on the national geographic channel about temples in Cambodia and I thought I would write about that instead. The programme was showing how de-mining teams were removing the land mines from around some of Cambodia’s ancient temples, it was very interesting to see how the teams go about this process. Cambodia was one of the most mined countries in the world a few years ago... now I am not so sure, but you can see the impact of land mines every day in the large numbers of people missing legs or arms... for example the other day I was cycling along and I saw a man riding a bicycle – he only had one leg... it was pretty amazing how he was managing to balance! Anyway I thought I would write about one of the stories they told on the programme.
Three brothers went into the forest to collect wood for the fire. They knew it was dangerous to go off the marked paths, but they had to get wood for their mother to cook the rice, and wood from the accessible areas had all been collected. All of a sudden there was a loud bang – one of the boys had stood on a land mine. His brothers rushed to help him... however in doing so they pulled a tripwire to a ‘pineapple’ mine... I think this was several mines all linked together. They both died... the 1st boy lived, but lost a foot... war is something evil.

Weather

I think it’s a very British thing to write about the weather… and as I am mostly British then my blog would not be complete without at least one entry dedicated to the weather in the cambodge.

Since the last weekend it has been getting distinctly hotter… people kept saying it would get hotter as we move towards April (the hottest driest month), but I didn’t really think that it was possible… however apparently it is. Monday was so so soooo hot… I cycled home at 5.30pm and it was still ridiculously hot. I went for a swim and even that wasn’t particularly cooling. I think the daily temperature is now well above 35 degrees.

Far too early for my liking Tuesday morning the reason for the heat became apparent… we had been building up for an epic storm. Just before 2am I woke up realising that living under a tin roof during a seriously heavy rainstorm would not be conducive to sleep, even with ear plugs firmly in my ears… (think millions of the hugest raindrops ever pounding down on my metal roof). For lack of anything better to do I blithely ambled onto my balcony to watch the rain… I was instantly soaked to the skin… oops. Then the thunder and lightening started. I have never experienced anything like it… rolls and rolls of the loudest thunder and lightening strafing across the whole sky, lighting up the street with a florescent glow… it reminded me of the ‘Blitz experience’ at the Imperial war museum in London… without Vera Lynne… the storm kept going for over an hour and a half… I seemed to flit between awe and amazement at the weather… and a real fear that I would be a) electrocuted b) buried under the house c) exceedingly sleep deprived the next day… Fortunately I woke Tuesday sleep deprived rather than frazzled… with a mild sense of regret that I hadn’t remembered Julie Andrews’ attitude to thunder storms… ‘these are a few of my favourite things… schnitzel with noodles… raindrops on roses… tr la la la’ me thinks it would have been excellent to sing Sound of Music songs during a real thunder storm…

We are in mango season now, and apparently there is usually one storm mid mango season to ‘take the flowers off the trees’… I really hope there aren’t too many more like that or I will have to build an air raid shelter and order some heavy duty ear defenders…

Preludes

The other day i spent some time enjoying a small second hand bookshop near my house... i love the fact that you never quite know what book you will find, and that all sorts of random people have read the books before me... perhaps surprisingly i managed to find exactly what i wanted 'the number one ladies detective agancy' - sadie ive read - it super fast for me... ready to compare and contrast? or find the next book in the series... might be more of an issue... and then the 2nd thing on my list was a TS Elliot book of poems... i wasnt particular about which one, but i just fancied getting hold of a copy... i found a 1970 edition of 'Wastelands and other poems'... here is my favourite... i can almost imagine the cold.... or not... it is soooooooooooooo hot here...
enjoy

Preludes

I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

my house is not orange

hils... of midget asian fame... i do not live in an orange house... it is peach - of that i am sure marionanon will verify... perhaps i could chip off some of the wall for her to bring back to proove it?

btw do you intend to make a blog?
i think it could be random...

Deoderant

Today was a public holiday (international women’s day of course)
I decided to investigate a different supermarket from the one near my house. I arrived and spent considerable time wandering around the isles looking at all the things that possibly I could buy… cambodge supermarkets are reasonably well stocked, but are not really that big… they are primarily stocked with lots of Chinese produced items – China is the commerce king over here…

Anyways after I had indulged in imported items such as apples and camembert cheese, I set out to find some deodorant, which was really why I went to the supermarket in the first place… I passed rows of ‘whitening cream’ (what is it with Asians wanting to bleach themselves and Europeans wanting to tan themselves?) and hair gels and toothpaste and soap and all the usual toiletries… but no deodorant. Now in my usual supermarket this is where you find deodorant, so I was pretty confused. I couldn’t believe there would be no deodorant, after all temperature is well above 30 degrees outside… I really needed some deodorant so I kept going back and forth thinking id missed it… eventually I found myself at the end of the shop, staring at a counter manned by little Cambodian ladies in smart suits, behind which was a wall of deodorant. Now please imagine this to be a make up or perfume counter – that was what it was like, but no the shelves were just stocked with deodorant. So I asked one of the ladies to get me some from the shelf and I went to put it in my basket.. but no it was snatched off me… the lady had to take the deodorant (it cost less than the cheese) with me to the cashier and then, and only then, was I left alone with it… and free to pay…

Perplexing?
Very… you would have thought I was buying something very valuable or precious…

Hash... no not that sort

The last 2 Sunday afternoons I have spent running (or perhaps that should say ‘attempting to run’) around the Cambodian countryside with a bizarre bunch of expats, Cambodians and children, in what is known as Phnom Penh Hash House Harriers (P2H3). The ‘hash’ is an international running club, I’m pretty sure there was one in UB, and apparently there are several in London… it seems to me to be a weird combination of a family trip to the countryside and a men’s drinking club - at the end there are various songs and downings of your choice of water or beer for crimes such as wearing new shoes or getting lost on the run or anything else deserving of a drink… the run (or walk if you prefer) follows a trail of paint or flour set by a ‘hare’ (I told you it was weird) and there are false trails and sometimes you cant see the trail at all… generally that is the case for me and I just try and follow people and not get lost or abandoned in a rice field… I really don’t know what the Cambodian villagers think of all these people in shorts running through their village/temple/rice field, possibly they think we are absolutely mad… something I would probably agree with them given temperatures of over 30degrees C… anyways its pretty fun, and its good to meet some different people and actually leave the city and do some exercise in beautiful lovely (hot) Cambodge… next week I might take my camera…

Thoughts on introducing ASBOs to the Cambodge

I was reading in the weekend newspaper a while back about ASBOs (Anti Social Behaviour Orders) in the UK. I would like to use my blog to recommend that the people in my street who decided to get married today be issued with one… I’m very happy for people to get married… but why do they need to use a very loud, loud speaker to blast the affair to the whole street (and beyond)… and why do they need to start at 5am and continue all day? And why do they need to walk up and down the street clashing tin cymbals when I am trying to sleep???? Even my trusty ear plugs could not drown the sound… I suppose the answer is a cultural difference, I don’t think people would tolerate it back home, but here everyone was happily out watching… attached should be a photo of the procession of the grooms family bringing gifts of food etc for the bride… (un)fortunately the photo doesn’t give any idea of the racket they were creating. grr grr and much gnashing of teeth...


Wedding procession... taken from my lovely balcony

New home

Well this weekend I moved across the road to a different apartment… I now live at the Golden Star guest house/apartments, as opposed to the Golden Comfort - everything in this street is golden… golden gate, golden sun, golden bridge etc etc… where I used to live was actually pretty nice, but in comparison this place is a million times nicer. The primary reason being a most lovely balcony, which catches a breeze, and the lighter more airy rooms… oh yes and it has a different selection of cable channels including the BBC… horah hooray. I’m going to attempt to attach some photos so you can see what it’s like…

This week we have another public holiday to celebrate women’s day so I’m going to go to the market to find a hammock for my balcony… excellent excellent…





My rooms are top left hand side of the peachy pink building




















views from the balcony. The brown pineapple shapped building is independence monument, to its right is a large temple...



my bedroom... in addtion i have a bathroom, kitchen and living area... the choice of bed linen isnt mine :o)

Lunch

Its lunchtime and so I thought I would make a change from blogging in the internet café from under my house, and write from my desk… this week I have been seeing a lot of my desk, however it appears to be a temporary blip amidst a busy training schedule.

Lunchtime is an hour and a half; we usually go outside to a small stall to eat. Outside is hot, inside is deceptively cool with the aircon. We have had a bit of rain the last few days, but on the whole the weather is clear and hot everyday.
Today’s menu was the usual plate of rice, a fish dish and liver and cabbage soup with pork fat to flavour. Basically you spoon a bit of what you want to eat onto the rice... today I have to say wasn’t the most appetising of lunches, normally there are more greens and less pork fat. Before I came here Lonely Planet gave me the impression that eating would involve lots of chopstick action, however mostly people use spoons and forks (not knives) and only occasionally do they get out the chopsticks!
After eating we go to another stall and get some freshly pressed sugar cane juice on ice mmmmm and then some mango from another seller. The mango is amazing, today we had green mango, its sort of unripe, but tastes great, you dip the mango in a small bag of salt and chili they give you… interesting tingling taste sensation.
After eating I tend to feel very very sleeeepie (perhaps because we start work at 7.30????) there is a ‘sleeping’ room at work but I’m not convinced…

Anyways enough mundane information… I shall get back to watching the over by over cricket update courtesy of the guardian…

this 'flaming lips' song is going round my head

Do You Realise - that you have the most beautiful face

Do You Realise - we're floating in space

Do You Realise - that happiness makes you cry

Do You Realise - that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes -

let them knowYou realise that life goes fast

It's hard to make the good things last

You realise the sun doesn't go down

It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

you should listen to it... its cool

think this may have worked... see below for explanation

Ancient temples....





Kompong Thom Town, Kompong Thom Province, Cambodge






Cocktails with Marky boy in Singapore

photos... grrr

ok this photo uploading m'larky isnt working
ill try later from another computer see if that works

Kompong Thom

Well I’m back from the countryside… back to Phnom Penh… nice it seems like home, even this sticky keyboard which doesn’t type all the letters properly!
I ended up staying the week in Kompong Thom, it was fairly productive as things go… and I managed to escape into a project and see some very old temples… in fact I actually took some photos and will attach them below if the connection is up to it.

Quick explanation… the temple type photos are Sambor Prei Kuk and are pre-ankgorian, that is 7th centaury which I think means over 1400 years old which all in all is pretty impressive, especially as no cement was used… I have decided temples are ok, but I think I actually preferred the forest they were in, some beautiful old trees, a lovely hot smell of wood and flowers, and all was so quiet apart from the beating of cricket wings. The other photos are of Kompong Thom… going there made me realise how flat Cambodia is… it is sooooo flat (well the middle bit I went to anyway)… you can see that the place is pretty green but also dry, the trees are all lush, but the rice fields are stubly empty dry waiting for the rains so that planting can commence. I really like the 'man sawing ice' photo... here in Cambodge the ice comes in large slabs and then people (or often small children scarily weilding axes) chop it up for your drinks... sometimes you see the ice slabs being transported on the back of a motorbike, half covered with cloth as if that would stop the sun melting the thing...
Oh yes and the final photo is marky boy drinking a cocktail… just to prove I did meet him in Singapore!

What else did I want to say… hmmm… oh yes I wanted to write some random thoughts on yesterday. Got up at 6.30 (grrr) to the sound of twinkle twinkle little star… tr la la it was coming from outside and kept going on and on and on… in the end I decided to throw some clothes on and go to the balcony to investigate… it was a funeral procession, a long line of children in white and blue school uniforms, followed by some men wearing white headbands with red (I think) squares painted on them… these men were dropping white material or paper on the street… then came the cortège, which appeared to be a sort of carnival float with dragons on the side… at this point wafts of incense came up to the balcony, and the twinkle twinkle hoot continued… then there were more people following the float carrying incense and flowers… that was about it really.
I worked in the morning, then went to the temples (photos above) for lunch. Here we met this random (quite sweet) old American man who was visiting his sponsored child. He spent a considerable amount of the lunch telling us how his favorite food was hot-dogs, and he bought them in bulk from cost-co. wicked.
At some point in the day I was given an orange scarf, woven by some women in an income generating project (obviously not generating too much income if they’re giving them away)… anyways for those who understand the orange significance it is very orange (in all senses of the word Hils) and I am most excited that it matched my orange flip flops… I have decided that the only way to be truly cooperate is to become a Buddhist monk as then I can wear an orange robe all day…
I got back to PP in the evening and went on a spending spree to buy fruit for my lovely blender (it is still most lovely) this morning I enjoyed the best mango smoothie ever… I also bought some brown bread but it tasted oddly sweet… wont be buying that again…
Last night was also quite bizarre… I still don’t really know that many people my age, but have met some older ex-pats through my friend at work… anyways we went to several bars (one on a boat with really chilled music… and another with a random live band which played ‘Roxanne’) anyway it was all quite enlightening… I discovered vodka ginger beer and lime is a very nice combination, and probably less evil than coke (a cola)… and I spent much time watching the cliché ‘older white picks up young Cambodian hottie… and then had to eat my thoughts (sort of) when I found out they were all married… it was good to be out, especially riding on the back of a moto with a warm breeze running past me… I got back home and managed to lock myself in my bedroom (ooops)… this morning getting out involved some cunning burglary techniques involving eyebrow tweezers and a comb… then I came downstairs to email and found out that 2 of my lovely lovely friends are getting married and I’m muchly muchly excited… now I’m going to eat some rice then go for a swim…
Oh yes one last thing… I was thinking something else… I remembered a quote or something… perhaps its just a phrase ‘thoughts come unbidden’ I think I noticed this in Mongolia… its quite nice, when you have more space and time to think, stuff you think you have forgotten pops into your head ‘unbidden’ … green rural England and the smell of ferns (random I know) … great big piles of snowy mountains and blasts of cold air… the autumn bonfire smell you get when crunching through piles of fallen leaves… yellow daffodils everywhere

Not much to report

Well not too many excitements to report… life continues to be warm and full of nice food… and busy at work… and after the nasty insects gave me a weeks grace on the biting front they’re back with a vengeance and I’m proper itchy…I am also meeting some different people… potentially this weekend could involve a trip to a nail shop for manicures (hmmm I am not going alone you understand) and a trip to the market to buy a bike to replace the one I am borrowing… a swim and perhaps some tourist type activities… but I seem to be holding off on visiting temples and museums… next week I am going to Kompong Thom (I doubt that’s the correct spelling), it’s a province reasonably close to PP, we will be working on re-designs of projects… I keep saying I’m going to take some photos and post them, but still haven’t taken any, perhaps this visit I will do so!

A short comparison between a magnum icecream and a Khmer ice cream

A magnum comes out of the freezer in the supermarket
A Khmer ice cream (KIC) comes out of a make shift freezer sat on a wooden cart

A magnum comes in a shiny wrapper
A KIC comes in a plastic bag

A magnum is ice cream on a stick
A KIC is icecream in a bread role… an "icedog" perhaps…

A magnum is of varying flavours, but fairly plain
A KIC is also of varying flavours, but seemingly more exotic ones

A magnum is covered in chocolate
A KIC is covered in condensed milk (moloko)

A magnum costs $1
A KIC costs 1000r (25cents)

A magnum is imported
A KIC is made down the road

A magnum is eaten by either licking or biting (depending how sensitive your teeth are)
A KIC is eaten with a plastic spoon

A magnum is nice
A KIC is just weird… bread and icecream???? hmmm

A swimming pool, wedding party and a traffic jam

Well the subject of this entry sort of sums up the long weekend I just had (long in the sense we had Monday off work for a public holiday… not in the long and tedious sense…)

I spent a lot of Saturday lazing by a very nice pool, overlooking the river (lovely apart from a mild fishy smell) and doing some swimming, resting in the Jacuzzi, and reading… then home to play with my new blender… ooooh the blending possibilities are endless… so many fruity combinations… it even crushes ice…

Then Sunday was the day of the wedding… actually I didn’t go to the wedding, just the wedding party. It was very bizarre… for starters most of the wedding parties in PP (well those of people with money) are apparently held at this great big wedding center… imagine the scene, a humongous carpark filled with more cars than I thought existed in PP, next to the carpark was what at first looked like a shopping mall/center (depending on if you’re American or English). There were several entrances to the building and each was clearly labeled with a illuminated letter (ie A, B, C) this was handy as we didn’t want to end up in the wrong wedding party… no fear we were greeted at entrance ‘D’ by the bride and groom… think princess… there were tiaras and glamorous is an understatement…. After being given what will in future be used as a silk star shaped Christmas decoration, we proceeded upstairs to eat.

There must have been about 500 people in the room all eating… to me it seemed more like a restaurant, you sit down, wait for your table to fill up and then you’re served a huge diner (cold meats, rice, noodles, chicken soup, prawns etc etc) food is yum but the singing blaring out of the PA system makes it too hard to hear what anyone is saying…and then after eating most of the guests leave… very odd if you ask me… I mean no speeches, no toasts or anything… but I suppose the ceremonies had been going since 4am…however we stuck around and the dancing started… Khmer dancing at a wedding entails shuffling round a table with an ever diminishing pile of fruit on it, waving your hands in a sort of graceful manner… not too tricky for me the dyspraxic one… alas after that sort of dancing comes weird line dancing… eeek… this helpful (?) khmer man tried to show me the moves, but I couldn’t get it… oh well… it was fun… oh yes another random thing all the women look like they’re at a ball or high class evening function.. the dresses are amazing, and most people I spoke to had been to a hairdresser to get their hair and make up done… however the men on the other hand… well some were sort of smart (they wore a shirt) but in comparison to the women they looked trampish (not that I can talk)..

So that was Sunday… then today I went to the central market. A huge art deco/nouvoux (never sure which is which) domed building which stocks everything… I bought a little radio… at last I no longer have to endure CNN news and can listen to the BBC.. horay and god save the queen.After that some friends (yes I seem to have acquired a couple) and I went off to the countryside (sort of)… we went to a cool pond complex where there are lots of ponds and nice gardens with pretty flowers, and little huts suspended over the water where you can lie and relax and eat yummy food and drink and talk. It was great… then we drove home and got stuck in the nastiest traffic queue ever… either related to

a) Chinese new year

b) an accident

c) stupid Cambodians driving all over the bally road (ie trying to fit 5 lanes of traffic into a 2 lane road) or

d) all of the above…

needless to say it was very very slooooow, however for me the novelty of people sitting on the roofs of busses or 5 people riding on a motor bike or wooden houses sitting on stilts or just the dusty concoction commotion of people has not worn off so I was happy just watching.

Recycling

Anyone who knows me vaguely well, especially Clari as she lived with me last 9 months, will know I have a thing about recycling… everything possible must be recycled or composted and packaging is evil.

So what happens when I come to Cambodge and I can’t recycle, I have to drink bottled water (litres of the stuff) and the place where I’ve been getting fruit and veg wraps everything up in cellophane and polystyrene big time?

Well… obviously I could buy water in huge containers and get someone to bring it into my room, but the rooms are serviced and free bottled water seems part of the service, and its not in big bottles… and I can get unpackaged fruit from other places… but still I cant recycle anything like paper etc.

I suppose I could just ignore my niggling conscience… but unfortunately last week we were running an assessment workshop… working with programme managers to put together assessment reports for new projects starting up… a couple of the projects are based in PP, working with communities and children who live and work on rubbish dumps… oh dear conscience can not be ignored… I am sure most people can get the picture, and I can’t claim to have seen these rubbish dumps myself, but anyway… poverty means that children are out of school working on rubbish dumps collecting cans, plastic bottles and plastic bags (they are also evil). They get paid by the kg, and collect about 50kg per day, along with crappy skin diseases, respiratory infections, diarrhea, etc etc. There isn’t a NHS in Cambodia, that’s for sure… I suppose I could look at it like putting out the rubbish gives the children something to collect and so gives them an income… but I’m not convinced… what makes this story even better is that many of these people live on raised houses above canals which carry run off polluted waste water from the garment factories… but that’s another rant…

On the more cheery side the sun is shining, the weather is gorgeous… the food is better than amazing, Monday is a public holiday, I’m going swimming in a bit and then I’m going to buy a blender and make myself some fresh fruit smoothies mmmmmmmm

Has anyone seen the Ethan Hawk movie ‘Before Sunset’? I think I watched it on a plane ages ago, but I saw it again last week and I really like it… it’s just a long conversation really…

Snow

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.


Louis Macneice - January 1935

Avoidance

Aside from the nasty ‘live sex’ icon on this computer the Cambodia I have seen this last week is lovely, warm and friendly, full of gorgeous food and flowers, relaxed and very nice all round really…

I realized today however that I am avoiding something important to understanding this place… Cambodia’s recent, and from my vague* knowledge, dark dark dark history. Those pages in Lonely Planet detailing period 1970 onwards are unread, the books I've been given about the Pol Pot era also lie untouched… the thought of going to the museums and seeing piles of skulls is not something that I want to do… although I will do it I don’t want to… I’m pondering over why not? I don’t like horror movies and this seems worse than a horror movie, and it is real and it happened relatively recently… I guess also it will change my current perceptions of the country and people… and perhaps I just don’t want nasty images going round my head?

I think I would describe myself as optimistic, particularly regarding human nature… but how can there be anything optimistic about an auto-genocide that kills one-quarter to one-third of a country’s population? How can people butcher each other like that? How? How? How? It happens all over the world, I know, but in the UK we don’t have to stare it in the nose… so we (me in particular) can live in some sort of self-acknowledged oblivion, aware… but not too close… now I guess I have to read, visit and understand… and hopefully not get too depressed???

Jack be warned I will be on a serious anti ‘army’ mission when I come visit.

*Vague is an understatement knowledge is almost entirely based on the movie ‘The Killing Fields.

end of weekend uno

It’s the end of my first weekend in Cambodia, and I thought I would write another blog entry… so far I seem to be keeping this blogging thing up ok… but then again I have not got the worlds most exciting social life right now, so I guess that could explain things.

I went across the road for diner just now and whilst I was waiting started to jot some things down that I might want to write… this preparation may be why I fear this blog entry could be quite long… but then that’s the good thing about blogs they don’t clog up inboxes with unread emails and if you don’t want to read you don’t even have to look, so mr/mrs reader you can’t really complain.

Yesterday I walked down to the river, I initially thought I was looking at the mighty Mekong river, however consulting the wise Lonely Planet I see it is the place where the river flowing from the Tonle Sap meets the Mekong and becomes something else… it is a beautiful spot. In the river are many long wooden boats, I guess people use these for fishing and transportation, and probably some people live on them… then coming ashore are lots of small market stands, selling everything and anything… my favourites are the ones under wooden shades which have lots of hammocks slung from the rafters - they’re little cafes where you can stop to eat rice whilst sitting in a hammock.

After ambling along the river I decided to see if I could get a swim in at one of the hotels. This was a bizarre experience, outside the hotel its all hot, bustling, noisy and smelly but once through the clear glass doors you’re in air-conditioned ex-pat land… the pool was lovely and quiet surrounded by sun loungers, I did some lengths then lay out on the side, sipping freshly squeezed orange juice that cost the same price as 3 meals in a yummy Khmer restaurant near work… hmmm. Then I did some more swimming as the whole thing was quickly becoming my most expensive swimming experience ever. For $72 per month you can join the hotel and use the pool and gym and sauna (quick question: why do you need a sauna when you only need stand outside for a free one?).. I was toying with this idea but fortunately I have now been shown a pool at an international school that you can join for $18 per month and is much nearer where I live, so I reckon I might try and do that… in the heat swimming is soooo nice!

I keep meaning to take some photos to put on here, but I haven’t got around to taking any yet… I will do that at some point tho… excitingly I have found a shop which prints digi photos at the cheapest price ever… Ed you would more than love this place for the bargains :o)

Some of my colleagues took me to the ‘Russian Market’ - a great place to shop methinks. It wasn’t as busy as I expected but it was the sort of place you can imagine a fire sweeping through in seconds… there is a huge ‘food’ area with lots of coal burning stoves churning out delicious food, very close to a low ceilinged area with many many stalls crammed together selling everything from the most beautiful selections of silk fabrics to cheap cheap DVDs to Chinese plastic crap (Mongol people think black market in UB) to clothes that have apparently ‘fallen’ off the production line in the GAP, Columbia, H&M, American Eagle factories that are about the place… I can see myself spending a lot of money on fabrics, but I managed to restrain myself to a couple of t-shirts.

You will also be excited to know that biker telf has come into existence, I have now braved the motos and been zooming around on the back of them (wearing my helmet of course…) however my next mission is to buy a peddle bike… I am missing Kert (my lovely English bike) and so I think a Cambodge Kert is needed… indeed it already has a name CK… excellent… alas I didn’t manage to fit my bike helmet into my rucksack and there is no way I am going to wear my motorbike helmet on a bally bike, so I will have to find a helmet too… otherwise Marionanon and Sue you know what you’re bringing in March ;o) I live close enough to work to cycle and I think it will mean I can explore places a bit faster than on foot… although negotiating the traffic might be interesting… however despite the traffic being totally nonsensical and all over the place it is very laid back… on the whole there aren’t too many people charging around at super speeds…

What else… exploring my little street has turned up a shop which puts MP3s straight onto your MP3 player: $1.50 for 5 albums… wicked. Also found a gorgeous Vietnamese restaurant which is beautifully lit and decorated and the food and beer are yum.

Mostly I am pretty happy. I think it will be good to acquire some more friendly friends at some point… but otherwise the sunshine and rice seem to be doing me fine. I remembered Holly in Darfur last night and that made me realize exactly how lucky I am to be in this lovely place, surrounded by so many (cheap) amenities.
Life in ex-pat land is great, but I am looking forward to getting out of PP and seeing some proper Cambodia.

Over and out

well

Well…
have you noticed I start most of these blogs with ‘well’… I wonder why?
What is there to write? Possibly lots, new places tend to be a sensory overload and this one is no exception… I’m loving it…

• Cambodia is hot, air-conditioning can be cold…
• Motorbikes criss-cross roads as if they’re in an uncoordinated motorbike display
• Pedestrians don’t cross major roads unless they’re a telf with a death wish
• Food is yummy and gingery and cheap and dominated by rice
• I found a shop which sells venison, kettle chips and champagne… amongst other things…
• Monks wear orange and are often bald
• The ‘Star’ movie channel is entertaining when you don’t know anyone
• At work there is a room full of cushions for sleeping on… random
• Mosquitoes like me very much. grrrrrrrrrrrr
• There are so many things to be bought… beautiful beautiful silks and woven mats…
• Purple flowers and lush palms are everywhere
• The US embassy is a fort, but whoever lives opposite it makes it look like a slum…
• I spent $25 on imported fruit and juice and cheese and oats and batteries and milk and other junk… that’s nearly 50% of the annual income of a farmer in rural Cambodge… hmm something to think about really…

Arrived

Well here I am in the Cambodge… a seemingly hot, sunny, motorbike filled place. Today I have mostly slept and unpacked and been to a shop that sells hagan das ice cream, alpen musli, mozzarella cheese, red label whiskey and US grown grapes… excellent. I resisted all of these things and instead bought a lollypop maker for 50cents, this is very exciting. A long power cut stalled the lollypop making somewhat but I reckon they will be freezing nicely in my freezer now.

I am seemingly living in some rooms in a hotel/guesthouse, in a quietish street in the middle of town… there are many different restaurants, temples and shops near by anyways. I’ve got a kitchen, lounge, bathroom and bedroom with aircon which is nice as the weather is warm… just like English summer except hotter… for now the novelty of the heat hasn’t worn off.

Tomorrow I go to work… kindly they are letting me sleep in. I start at 8am… however I understand that people tend to get up at 5am here so I have a feeling I may be woken earlier…

Btw there are lots of lovely orange robed monks… including one on the cmputer next to me.