Holidays!

Hi everyone

So as if my last month at work wasn't short enough, this month is when the Independance Day (from France, not Vietnam) is held and coincides with Bon Um Tuk (Water and Moon Festival) where Phnom Penh gets about an extra million people from the provinces and the town pretty much goes nuts watching different provinces competing in dragon boat racing. Apparently it is held to signify when the water flowing from the tonle sap lake reverses because there is so much water in it and drains out to sea. Last year i escaped but I thought this might be the last opportunity to see it so i braved it and spent the week in the Penh.

I slept through most of independance day, but strolled past the independance monument and they had dolled it up a little and put these ridiculous giant balloons up.

We had monitoring and evaluation training that week as well so i was in the penh for like a week. I got a little worked up in the training cos they pretty much said they wanted to review the system, but we couldn't change anything! then i figured its not my battle so i tuned out a little.

The afternoon of the last day coincided with the first day of the Water festival so Chantheoun, Mony, Lucy and i wandered down there to see the racing before it got hectic crazy. There were SO many police around, they say around 10,000 military and regular police. The guys with the helmets are the MPs.
It was pretty cool. They were running the heats so every like one minute there was a race, the logisitics of running that thing must be mindblowing. Last year like five singaporean racers drowned by some super vortex created by so many giant boats, so this year they were more careful (though i still didnt see anyone wearing a life jacket!). I later heard that only one person died in racing. Still the weather was great luckily otherwise it would have been a total shitfight.

There was this really spacious stand which only had foreigners in it and chanthoeun said that he reckoned that it was invite only but i could see it was full of skanky backpackers so i wandered over to see what the deal was. Turns out it was the tourism cambodia tent for foreign visitors over, so we bowled straight in and brought Mony and Chanthoeun in as well which they were quite chuffed by! We got quite close to the action. I had heard about this tent from some americans last year but never truly believed it existed!



We got a bit bored and started to wander back , pretty much this quarter of the city was shutdown to vehicles so it was a bit of a trek.

But outside the royal palace there was a guard of honour forming. We waited for a while to see if he would appear but it didnt seem likely so we wandered away.
But then we turned around and saw the motorbikes revving the engines so we ran back to gawk and King Sihamoni drove out waving. He looks pretty much like his picture posted on most houses in cambodia. For chantheoun and mony it was the first time they had seen their king!
We then wandered off just as teh concerts were beginning and the squeeze was beginning


That night Mony invited me out for dinner with him and a driver who used to work at our office who i still meet when i am in phnom penh. we went to a specialist seafood restauraunt and i think it was in honour of Mony feeling bad that we only hang out on field trips. we were ordering and mony asked if i wanted flat fish and i said i didnt know what that was, after a few attempts he tries " the one that killed steve irwin". So that night we dined on crabs, prawns and stingray. And got predictably hammered (me suffering what was definately in the top three hangovers of my life complete with uncontrolable hiccuping). As we were driving home (yes drink driving, i know my bad) Mony told me his wife was very angry at him because he didnt marry me off to a cambodian girl to make me stay in cambodia. I thought that was very touching in a weird kind of way :)

The rest of the week i layed low, eating at this awesome indian place (rumoured to be a trafficking front for the Tamil Tigers but the food is just so damn good) and lying low for my epic journey for the Banteay Chhmar temple...