Kickass and Ass Kicking

Desperate to get out of the office once more, I threw myself off on another field trip. Assistant Heads now have to complete4 days a month independent monitoring visits (as opposed to the joint ones I do at the moment). Discussing this problem Ratha and Theary both volunteered to give me a freebie to get my target up (i.e. do a joint visit but count it only towards my target). The whole concept is a bit flawed because the idea is that I build the capacity of the staff not go marching off by my own. And not being fluent I need to take someone along to translate for me anyway.

Being a chronic shortage of drivers, Ratha and I drove up 2.5 hours on motorbike from Kampong Speu to lovely Kampong Chnang and boy by the end of it was my body hurting!

We were heading off to lovely Kampong Leng District, which you have to catch the ferry across to get to. I have been here before but I love the area. The mountain in the background is 'Sleeping Woman Mountain', apparenty it looks like a woman lying down and many a smutty joke has been told about this mountain but not nearly as many as 'Tit Mountain' in Battambang :)

We were heading out there to do some pre-work measurements of a food for work road and a distribution of food to TB patients. And as a sign things are hotting up I turned a nice caramel colour with a pink tinge throughout the day. Next time hat and sunscreen.

The next day I swapped cars and headed out with Theary at 5am to do some cooking spot checks of schools. Predictably we busted the cooks taking a few cans and hung around till 6:30 when the kids take their breakfast. It was quite ridiculous the amount of chickens around, there must have been at least 30 chickens around us and they would follow us wherever we went, which makes me think I am totally screwed if birdflu breaks out !

The cooks took pity on us and gave us burnt rice (the crusty rice at the bottom of the pan -yum) and some of the fish and lentil soup they had cooked. This put us into quite a position but we reasoned it was ok for us to just taste it, for pure quality reasons of course.

The second half of this post is about my absolutely kick ass weekend. Friday night was the joint farewell party for two of our staff. Predictably we all got sozzled and I think based on events I have become a little too Khmericised and some different perceptions of certain things led to some uncomfortable moments. But otherwise an awesome night and a sore head.

After dragging myself out of bed I headed out to meet Kat and Leigh. I used to work with Kat back in the Humanitarian and Emergencies Section of AusAID and she has now been posted here with AusAID. I met them near Olympic Stadium (note Cambodia has never hosted the Olympics and is pretty unlikely to ever do so) and we went and saw khmer kickboxing. I had heard Khmer Kickboxing was the original form which the Thai's adopted into Muay Thai, then the Thai's claimed they invented it. Thats why no Khmer fighter will ever fight in Thailand. Khmer style is a bit more brutal with fighters allowed to use their elbows to gouge their opponent.

We watched a few fights which was good. The skinny guys seemed to always win. Towards the end there was a few foreigner versus Khmer fights and the Khmers creamed them (although I heard the most famous fighter in Cambodia lost to an Australian guy and everyone thinks it was rigged - I had left already before this fight). One guy was amazing fighting this German fighter. He had this like flying knee butt thing happening and totally creamed the other, bigger fighter.

And we were sitting in the bookie's area. Look at this guy's mobile phones. He would take calls on all of them! We counted nine on the front and one on the back!

After the fight I went to meet my old friend Cristy for a drink then farewell dinner for another Kristy that was leaving. The next day I headed back to the Speu and pottered about. So it was a kickass weekend that had everything in it!