why i love living abroad

monday morning after a holiday is the same in schools all over the world. i've been teaching for almost 10 years now and the conversation among teachers is always the same...


"how was your break?"

"good. too short. yours?"

"good. same."


and that is pretty much it.


so i ran into the Cambodian language teacher this morning and began the usual post-vacation conversation...



"hey meng, how was your break?"

his eyes lit up behind his crooked metal glasses.

"oooh very good, very good. dancing, wrestling, buffalo races..."

yep. same old same old. another holiday, another Water Buffalo Race.

matt dillon in cambodia

everyone here in phnom penh knows matt dillon. he directed and starred in City of Ghosts, which takes place here, and he comes back to visit every once in a while. a friend asked me to write a piece for FilmCambodia.org about seeing him In the Flesh at a party one month ago. here is what i wrote:




As a new expat in our fair adopted city of Phnom Penh, I waited with great anticipation for the biggest night of the month-- the Elsewhere Party. Everyone Who's Anyone goes to dance, people watch, and possibly take a fully clothed drunken dip in the garden pool.

Fast forward to midnight...my friends and i lay on pillows like glassy eyed maharajas, sipping, smoking and people gazing the evening away. suddenly, a dense spot in crowd appeared and the chill vibe momentarily heated up.

too many gin and tonics or was their something fishy going on? we stood on our tippy toes and surveyed the scene. wait a sec...i think i recognize those ears...like Moses parting the Red Sea, Matt Dillon and his tuk tuk driving friend from the City of Ghosts emerged from the crowd.

Matt took one look at me and beckoned me to come close to him. We danced for hours in the moonlight, oblivious of the murmuring crowd of well wishers. Fine, fine, fine, I just made that last part up. Only in my Teen Beat dreams...

The truth is, Matt and Co were hounded by a mob of star crazed expats, and they left just as quickly as they came.

Which left my posse and i to debate the hottness or un-hotness the Mattmeister for a few minutes, and then to smoke, sip, and people watch the night away.

phnom penh monkey madness

Surely there's a better way. This sounds like one of Murdock's ploys to get B.A. on an airplane.

***A-team reference stolen from gavinmac on khmer440.com**



Bounty for 'gangster' monkeys terrorising tourists at Cambodian temple

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — Cambodian police have put a 250-dollar bounty on the heads of several monkeys who have been terrorising tourists at a key temple in the capital and destroying nearby residents' laundry, officials said Friday.

At least three of the large macaques, which have been biting tourists at the famed Wat Phnom pagoda and also tearing up Internet lines, are being targeted, deputy district governor Pich Socheata told AFP.

"There are more than 200 monkeys there, but only three monkeys that behave badly... they behave like gang leaders," she said.

"The other monkeys are afraid of people. But these monkeys are not -- they are scaring tourists visiting Wat Phnom."

Authorities tried several times to get the unruly monkeys to eat eggs laced with sleeping pills, but had always been outsmarted, she said, hence the bounty.

Wat Phnom is crowded with semi-tame macaques who occasionally cause havoc to nearby homes and hotels, tearing apart tile roofs and stealing any loose items that they find.

roofies, boobies, and coffee

i can't make this stuff up. i was at Quiz Night last night and a certain member of our team i will call 'A' didn't show up last week. i knew he had been in bangkok for a long weekend the previous week, so i asked him what the deal was. and this was his story...

he went out on the town for his last night in bangkok (go-go bars, etc) and returned to his guest house extremely drunk at 3 am. at this point in the story 'A' clarifies two things: one is that he is cheap and decided to stay in a dodgy guesthouse in a not-so-nice part of town. the second thing is that he came home alone. no hookers.


so 'A' returned to the guest house and remembers seeing the receptionist watch him walk by.

his next memory: giant boobs. there are two women in his room. one has huge
boobs which she is swaying hypnotically in his face. she holds a cup of coffee in front of them and tells him to drink it. he does.

36 hours later

...he returns to a state of consciousness on a flight to phnom penh. his cell phone and wad of cash were gone, no idea how he got on the plane.

apparently he made it to an Internet cafe and sent a cryptic, spelling error laden message to his wife. somehow he got the message across that he had been drugged. when 'A' didn't arrive on his flight, it just so happened that a plane had crashed in Phuket, thailand. needless to say, his wife was frantic.

the best part of the story was that this was not the first time this has happened!! the last time it was roofie-laced coffee as well (not sure if boobs played a part) at a sketchy bar here in phnom penh.
both times the thieves took his cash and phone, but left his SIM card and passport.

he reckons that he must seem like such a Nice Guy that the thieves couldn't bear to leave him totally penniless and helpless. but with a dose of rophynol that leaves you incapacitated for 36 hours they easily could have killed him.

bunna's nephew update

saw leann last night- -she just got back from the village. apparently they went to the free public hospital and they said they were full. lines outside the door. so they went to a private one and the guard looked at the baby and said he wasn't sick enough.

not f*ing sick enough.

they don't embalm here so as soon as the little guy died they had to get him back to the village for burial. people here are very superstitious, so the family had to cover up the dead body and act like he was just sleeping. otherwise nobody would agree to have them in their car or on the ferry. bad luck.

imagine that? new parents, their only child, dead. and they have to hold him, pat him, and pretend that their worst nightmare isn't true. since bunna took the child on his motobike, the village elders are making him sell it. it is cursed now. that bike is his only source of income. since his wife is 5 months pregnant and she was exposed to her dead nephew-- they say that her unborn child will cry for the first five months of his life because that is how many months old he was in the womb when he was cursed by the spirit of his dead cousin.

i wonder-- is the rampant belief in these sort of things a result of Pol Pot killing off all of the educated people during the Khmer Rouge era? people are so terrified of bad luck that they wouldn't stop to help parents who's only child has died.

i also can't help but wonder if some of these traditions are a throw back of contagious disease wiping out a village? i know in vietnam when a baby dies the parents have to burn everything that belonged to it. maybe not touching or having anything to do with the dead body is a protection against transmission?

i try so hard to understand, but its far beyond the realm of anything i can relate to.

bunna's nephew

got a call this morning from a friend, Leann. she's not going to make it to the Boogie Nights party tonight (where our other friend is dj'ing)... her driver's nephew just died. little kid living out in the village, 2 years old... developed a high fever so the family got money together and got him to phnom penh. the hospital took one look at them and wouldn't let them in the door.

my guess is they looked like peasants-- people who can't pay. the monsoon rain started, so the family went back to bunna's one bedroom shack to wait it out and think of another plan. the little guy's fever raged on, and the flood waters rose. they tried to leave again, but the water was too deep. the little boy died in the night.

the first thing that came to my mind is, "why didn't bunna call me? why didn't he call leann?" we could have taken him to a western clinic-- we could have paid. we would have helped.

then i read a post on the khmer440.com forum discussing the lack of infrastructure here in phnom penh. the whole friggin city was washed out last night, everyone was stuck until the water subsided. happens all the time during rainy season. yet the government officials all drive new Lexuses and new casinos are being built (all funded by the government). and little kids are dying because their parents can't pay to take care of them.

i remember in hanoi my maid's grandmother died out in the village. i knew she had been sick and asked Thu what was wrong with her. she just looked at me and said, "i don't know. she's sick." you get sick, you die. no diagnosis, no treatment, nothing.

that is life for most of the world.

Ugly American Embassy

i went to the good ol US Embassy yesterday to get more pages for my passport, and i witnessed some pretty appalling behavior on the part of a staff member there.

in the consular section, khmers had to approach a certain window if they wanted to get married or apply for sponsorship.

a woman sat on the other side behind glass and screamed questions and insults into a microphone. everyone in the waiting room could hear--- from her laughingly asking a man if he was gay because "what's up with the earring you're wearing?" (this guy was applying for a marriage license) to questioning the amount of money that another woman's husband sends her each month from the US.

another young khmer woman was interrogated about her relationship with her husband and then berated for not finishing high school. I believe the official's words were, "SO, let me get the straight--- you're not even educated and you just want to marry this american guy?"

i've heard some horror stories about asshole american immigration officials in airports but i've never seen this sort of power trip/public humiliation routine before. i understand the necessity of "sifting through" folks who are applying to enter the country, but i question the demeaning and public way it's done.