noodle quest 2006

leaving sihanoukville was ASTONISHINGLY difficult. it was the ultimate in jewish goodbyes. it began two days before we left and went until we nearly missed our bus. unlike the jewish goodbye which extends at legnth towards various conversational tangents and repeated re-seating of one’s self on the couch before jumping up and annoucing it REALLY is time to leave, the cambodian goodbye showcases much more subversive methods in stalling whereby one party directly hinders the other party’s ability to leave by creating lies and elaborate scams. yesterday this included our friends telling us the wrong time from the moment we woke up until nearly 10 minutes before our bus left to kidnapping us to bars on the beach under the guise of going to the bank, in the middle of while we were tryign to pack. whew. but we got out.
the bus ride was fine- we got the “first class” seats right behind the back door so no one was in front of us to lean back onto our laps and we has lots of place to stretch our legs. we got into phnom penh, checked back into okay guesthouse, went to friends for dinner. i hung out with Vanny after dinner and then came back to the hotel to chat with mother and daughter team Kristin and Dominique about their plans to adopt two kids on the beach in sihanoukville. They had been hanging out at “IT bar” with us for a few days and met some kids they fell in love with and wanted to bring home. it is very complicated to process this type of idea- the whole notion of the american hero coming in and swooping these children to better conditions is complex. on a practical level- it is very diffuclt to arrange. parents/caretakers have to be paid for the wages they will loose if their children do not work anymore, and of course there are governmental issues btu this does not address the theoretical issues that present issues.
so anyway, Ling is not getting married. in typical un-translatable cambodian fashion, the fat guy has dissapeared from the scene leaving behind a house he bought for her family. he went to thailand on monday to extend his visa for cambodia and then never showed up again at the bar. Ling’s father saw him in Sihanoukville but he never came back to the bar. her parents were very embaressed and told all of their friends that he became very ill in bangkok and couldn’t leave. the whole situation is so damn crazy- as are all social happenings here that we can not translate. we really don’t think it is abotu speaking khmer- maybe we could understand a bit more but really the base of understanding of social interaction and human relations, and social norms is so uninteligable and foreign to us that we feel we can barely understand anything and can assume nothing.
today we are getting on a bus in about an hour to siem reap to go to angkor wat and then we are going to thailand. the plan is that we come back to cambodia for a month after that to work.
there are two little ten year old boys in here one australian and one french and they are being relly loud and crazy so i have to go before i beat them senselessly. everyone says it is winter here but it is HOT as a pile of steaming spaghettit. what is the weather like in the east coast of the USA?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.