Indelible Roots

This morning I went to work on a moto taxi same as yesterday. But today the driver (a different one than the day before) wanted 3000 riel, or $.75 for the five minute ride to work. I told him the other guy who was sitting next to him on the corner only charged me 2500 riel yesterday. He didn’t care. I’m beginning to think a lot of these guys suck as prices fluctuate so much between drivers. I do like one guy on a Suzuki Shogun. He sits near the New Market and I’ve ridden with him twice after dinner with Lyna. He’s fast, doesn’t smell, and charges a reasonable rate.

That brings up the subject of Lyna. She’s pretty cool, has a great pout, and is damned feisty. She’s thinner than I prefer, but her personality is a 9. Now I’m not all that interested in dating her, not with girls throwing themselves at me here, and she is technically married (to a surgeon at the clinic no less.) But we hang out a lot, text all the time, and she helps me out with things, like finding a laundry place today. I think she’s pretty lonely as the other people at work are hesitant to hang out with her for fear of reprisal from the doc/estranged husband. I’m only getting one side of the story though and that was it.

Because of the heat and humidity you can only wear your clothes once here before washing. That’s even though we wear scrubs all day at work. So I asked Lyna to help me find a laundry place to get my pants and shirts washed and pressed. The land lady here will wash my socks and underwear for a couple of dollars, but my pants came back wrinkled last time. She does have quite a temper like many Asian women I know, so I actually hid the clothing in my computer backpack that she always sees me with when I came home to pick them up.

But instead of taking me to a laundry Lyna tells me she’ll just take it to a place close to her home and pick it up when it’s done. That way I won’t have to pay for a taxi to go pick it up which would cost half the price of the laundering. You can’t go against that kind of logic. So we go to Soraya market, near uncle Chheang’s home instead and wander around looking for a belt for my cousin’s wedding next week.

I checked out some nice belts, but they were expensive and a little too flashy for my tastes. Lyna tells me things are five to ten dollars more here because you’re paying for the air conditioning as opposed to the open air New Market two blocks away. We went up to the top floor where the theater, roller rink, arcade, and a balloon popping game station is. Lyna plays the balloon game which is the typical pop balloons with darts game. If you pop a balloon with all twelve of your darts you get one of the stuffed animals. If you miss even one you settle for two pieces of candy. Lyna ends up with four pieces of candy.

Then we walk by the arcade and Lyna seemed perplexed by it. She says she’s never been in one before, so we go in. After walking around a bit she gets a dollar’s worth of coins and we play the basketball game. Then I try the sledge hammer game like you see at the fair. Then Lyna tries her hand at getting a Hello Kitty doll using the claw (has anyone ever gotten one of those?) Except for the claw doll, there didn’t seem to be any reward for any of the games.

We then go to get something to eat, but I don’t want to eat at the mall, so we go to the MN Café from yesterday. The small meals there worked out pretty well as Lyna tells me later that she has to go home and eat there too or otherwise her parents will start asking questions. Hmmm… This is all getting more complicated by the minute.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 8:51 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.