See the gallery A society wedding & KL trip for photos from this post.
Happy new year! April is here which means three things – the ASEAN summit, hot season and Khmer new year (our third new year in three months: the 'international' one in January, the Chinese one in February, and now the regional one, also new year in Thailand, Laos and Burma). Khmer new year heralds one of the biannual trips all Cambodians make to their home province, and so Phnom Penh empties and lots of things get put on hold. As part of my new personal psychological maintenance plan, I organised myself and my fabulous friend Depika to go to KL for a few days, to bask in the ubiquitous air-conditioning and to scoff as much delightful food as possible. More on that later.
Living around the corner from the prime minister it's not unusual for me to get caught up in motorcades when I'm on my way to or from work, or just getting around. As Chair of ASEAN for 2012, Cambodia hosted the annual meeting at the beginning of April, which meant motorcades galore as the numerous officials and representatives of the ASEAN nations were ferried around the city with wailing sirens and as many black SUVs as could be mustered up. This also meant major traffic disruptions and whistle-blowing aplenty as every police officer and military man (not many women represented in these ranks) planted themselves on the streets blowing their whistles for all they were worth, holding traffic against the lights and waving it off to the side, until the precious cargo had passed. I fluctuated between highly amused (mostly at the whistle blowing) and disgusted as the holdups were often to allow the unhindered passage of just one official. One such delay became a bit tense one afternoon when a guy on a motorbike just ahead of me started giving out to the military police officer blocking the road next to us, and the MP started shouting back at him. Not surprisingly, the military police carry weapons and for a few moments I was a bit worried that this guy might pull out his gun and shoot the mouthy guy to shut him up. Thankfully the motorcade whizzed by and the traffic was allowed to move on. You might think that no one would shoot another person with so many witnesses around, but this is Cambodia. Check this out http://www.icem.org/en/78-ICEM-InBrief/4950-Cambodian-Governor-Confesses-to-Shooting-Strikers-but-No-Arrest-Made
Anyway, with all the extra motorcade activity I found out at least one thing that goes on in the Department of Logistics and Technical Materials which is at the end of my street. It's where the cops that ride the big-ass motorbikes for the motorcades have their bike depot. I've seen them streaming in on their shiny white rides trussed up in their fancy uniforms, and then back out again on their personal motos wearing regular poor-people clothes and flip flops, which makes for a strange montage.
As rainy season gets closer, and everyone rushes to tie the not before wedding season draws to a close (I'm not making that up - it's tricky to have a wedding in your rice paddy when it's full of water and rice), I've been getting my fair share of wedding invitations. I was invited to attend a very chichi affair, which I went to just for the gawk factor. Last year I managed all of the local aspects of a fairly large and signficant international conference on civil society developement effectiveness, and the manager of the hotel which was the venue for the meeting got married recently. His father is an Excellency, as is the father of the bride, and the main wedding dinner (the final part of the two or three day event) was held in three halls of Phnom Penh's convention and exhibition center. Estimates put the number of guests at around 2,500, and included the prime minister for some earlier part of the day's festivities. It was quite something. Banners on the stage (about a hundred meters away from my table) with giant photos of the happy couple, video cameramen dotted around the room capturing live-to-screen images of the party, bottles of 21 year old Johnny Walker on every table (retails at $150 a pop at Dan Murphy's – I checked it out), and a new outfit for the bride and groom every hour or so. Even the invitations were over the top – pink card with diamantes, gold embossment, and pink lace for the envelope, and inside, numerous cards, instructions, apology for not delivering the invitation in person, and agenda for the full two day program. Oh, and of course the obligatory envelope for guests to put their financial contribution in. The standard across Cambodia is currently $20, although I'm not clear if this is per guest or per invitation. A new piece of information that I have found out is that even if you don't attend a wedding that you are invited to, if the bride or groom (and I suppose their family) is someone you see often (e.g. In my case, the finance guy at work) you are still expected to send the $20 in the envelope. This is part of an ongoing remittance system, whereby you have to invite to your wedding every person who has ever invited you to their wedding. When you went to their wedding, you gave them $20, now they will go to your wedding and give you $20. Books are kept. Tallies are made. I'm definitely the loser in this equation, as A) I don't want to go to the weddings in the first place (except for voyueristic reasons as above, and even that was boring), and B) I won't be getting my $20 back.
A little while ago I realised that pretty much every time you order food in any type of restaurant here, it's served on a lettuce leaf. I'm anti the lettuce leaf. It serves no real purpose as far as I can tell – I guess that it's supposed to be a sort of garnish, but it's just annoying. It gets in the way of the food you are actually trying to scoop up (pretty much everything is eaten with a spoon), is either soggy before or immediately after the food is put on it, doesn't actually add any aesthetic to the dish, and isn't really something you would want to eat. I think it's one of those things that nobody questions – some time ago, someone said that food should be served on a lettuce leaf, and so it shall be for ever more. It's like PowerPoint presentations. Every PPT that you ever endure in Cambodia is accompanied with a printed handout of the slides. Someone (or some NGO) came to Cambodia once upon a time, and behold their word – presentations should be accompanied by PPT slides, and these should be accompanied by printed handouts. And so this was duly adopted, and reams of paper are handed out at meetings and events, so that everyone can have their copy, because this is the way that it is done. I've started a revolution – I've convinced my organisation to stop printing PPTs. This is no small feat, and if it is my only contribution to Cambodia, then I'll be happy with that. Of course, as with all revolutions we are meeting with resistance – participants at our events are demanding the handouts, but we are sticking firm – the PPTs can be downloaded from the website – no handouts.
Actually I've started another revolution. A salad revolution. A while ago I started taking a salad to work for lunch. Most people go home for lunch, but there area few who bring theirs from home and eat at work in a group. They all share whatever they have brought, and it's a very nice, social, egalitarian occasion. I don't share, I just want to eat my salad, no rice, chicken feet or watery fish bone soup for me. Cambodians don't eat salad. Even though I've been bringing my salad to work for a while now, it still, every time, elicits a discussion about the contents of my salad on that particular day, how it might differ from the last one that I had, and for anyone joining that lunch who is not a 'regular', there will be an explanation (not from me) of the types of ingredients I often have in my salad, along with the justification for salad dressing, and what that is. This has evolved into discussions on healthy eating, balanced diets, and informal lectures (given by me) on carbohydrates, protein, and high and low GI. A couple of weeks ago, one of the lunchtime regulars snacked on a carrot. Some of them have started bringing salads to share for lunch. So perhaps I will make another contribution to Cambodia after all.
I think that I've probably got the message across by now that a lot of strange things happen in Cambodia. While many of the once eye-popping things like babies being transported on motos, or traffic driving on the wrong side of the road, now no longer earn a second glance from me, I'm amazed that that I am almost daily still amazed, befuddled and bewildered by some of the things that I see here. Many of these are traffic related. I was part of a rather surreal experience recently when on the way to work one morning, we (my morning moto driver, Meng, and I) turned the corner into the street where my office is located, to discover a funeral tent had been erected and was straddling the whole width of the street. This in itself was not the peculiar thing – this is one of the 'normal' sights - but when we proceeded to drive straight through the marquee, between the banquet tables while the funeral breakfast was underway, it was a first for me. If you've got eight minutes to spare, here's a video that I made of parts of a fairly typical ride to and from work. Not many amazing sights, just a window into what I see every day, set to a soundtrack of some classic 1960's Cambodian psychedelic rock. (It's kind of a big file so might take a bit of buffering)
http://vimeo.com/40841256
So Depika and I went to KL for the new year, to escape the heat, eat fantastic food, and generally get out of town. KL is famous for its shopping, but I really had no idea just how BIG shopping is there. We were like the country cousins visiting the big city - looking up all the time and marveling at all the tall buildings, looking around and being in awe at the excellent roads, pavements and landscaped greenery... There are more mega-malls there than I know what to do with, and when I say mega, I really mean it. Westfield Bondi Junction has got nothing on these places. And there are countless numbers of them with every international brand you can think of. Neither of us are 'shoppers' but we both had a couple of things on our list, so we knocked that over on the first afternoon, along with a hit of sushi – oh how I miss sushi! After a super-cheap dinner on the street we splashed out on a cider (it was Strongbow and expensive despite being 'happy hour', but oh how I miss cider!) on Bukit Bintang, and called it a day. Note: I am spoiled forever more with regard to drinks prices after living in Phnom Penh. With $1 being the standard price for a draft beer here, and $4 expensive for a cocktail (this is happy hour price at Raffles), the idea of paying $6 for a beer is a mind-bender. In a jazz club that we went to one night, it was $8 for a vodka – I pay $5.50 for a bottle of Stoli in PP. Needless to say, we didn't spend too much time in bars in KL.
KL has some fabulous architecture and over the next three days we checked out some of it – some examples of moghul architecture dating from 1894, art deco shophouses and market in KL itself, saw some amazing buildings in Putrajaya – Malaysia's Canberra, and wandered around the UNESCO world heritage city of Melaka. Melaka is very quaint and we had a delightful time wandering around its streets, touring museums and being entertained by the outlandishly decorated bicycle rickshaws that often have very loud sound systems on board, so that everyone (and I mean everyone) can enjoy the JLo.
Of course weird things aren't confined to Cambodia, and we had our fair share of peculiar experiences in KL – a taxi driver who sucked his thumb (and delayed changing gear for as long as possible to extend his thumb sucking intervals), a shop assistant bursting in on me in the change room and insisting on rearranging a dress I was trying on, a boat load of tourists from Lebanon wearing very questionable makeup and fashion choices – but the cake-taker was the choice of venue for a really interesting exhibition on loan from the da Vinci museum in Florence. We really paid our dues to get there – an exhibition centre out in the sticks that required a couple of train changes and a taxi from the station – and when we got there was almost completely deserted. It must have cost a fortune to bring the exhibition to KL, and when you consider how cutting edge da Vinci was, you would think that you would want to display it in a cutting edge kind of environment, but this place looked like it hosted its last exhibition in 1985, and really, no one knows that it's even there anymore. Such a shame – it had some amazing displays but was let down by the atmosphere.
On the afternoon of our fifth day we set off back to the airport for our 3pm flight back to Phnom Penh. All was going according to plan until we had an unexpected half hour wait for our train almost to the airport (it's a bit of a stretch to even call it an airport - for the Air Asia shed – worst airport ever – you have to take a train then a bus transfer to the actual airport). This threw off our timing significantly, and by the time the bus pulled up at the airport we had only 20 minutes until our gate would close. We jumped off the bus and double-timed it to the entrance, at which point I realised that I had no idea where the international check-in was (unlike the rest of KL, it isn't clearly signed). I heard Depika call out 'this way' so I stopped and turned around but couldn't see her anywhere. I stood there and looked and looked, but she was nowhere to be seen. So I thought that she must have turned right and dashed inside so I ran in there but then there were people everywhere and I couldn't see her so I looked for the board with the check-in counter numbers and could see the sign where the check-in counter was but I couldn't work out how to get there so I ran around for a bit and eventually worked out that I had to go through security and expected to see her at the check-in counter but when I got there she wasn't there and because I was so distressed that I couldn't find her I didn't think to ask if she had checked in already, I just assumed that she had and had gone to the gate so I checked in and ran off and then realised that I couldn't work out how to get to the gate so I ran back to the check-in counter and the guy told me to go 'over there' but I still couldn't work out how to go 'there' and eventually he told me I had to exit, so I ran around the security things and toward immigration while my shoes kept falling off, expecting to see her there but I didn't see her there and I went to the front of a line and asked the guy if I could go ahead of him because I was going to miss the plane, and because I had spent so much time running around like a goose I thought she must be at the gate already but I got there and didn't see her so when I got to the front of the line I asked how long until they closed the gate and was told five minutes so I stood there until the last possible minute and then I asked an Air Asia person if Depika had boarded the plane already and she said 'can you wait a minute?' and I said 'not really - I'm going to miss my plane and I've lost my friend and I don't know if she's on the plane already' and she said 'well I just have to do my job' so I stood there and waited until time was up and I didn't know what to do - I didn't know if I would be even able to find her if I decided not to get on the plane and then I thought it would be a bit stupid to be standing at the gate and miss the plane if she was already on it so I went and got on the plane and hoped that she was there but she wasn't and then a flight attendant came down the back and called out her name and I said 'that's my friend, is she not on the plane?' and she said 'no - she checked in but hasn't come through the gate'. And then I swore a lot and felt really really bad because that was the last flight back to PP for the day. I was busting to pee but of course couldn't because the plane was about to take off and then when the plane took off I thought 'I wonder if this is one of those things that people talk about when they missed a plane but then the plane crashed so it was lucky that they missed it?' and then I thought 'great, I need to pee so much that if this plane crashes I'm going to pee my pants - what a way to go', so as soon as the seat belt sign was off I went to the bathroom and then we hit some bad turbulence and the plane was shaking and I had to hold on to the handle in the bathroom and then I thought 'great, the plane is going to crash and I'm going to be in the toilet'. But we didn't crash.
Depika spent 15 hours in the airport waiting for the first flight the next morning. I will remind you that it is the worst airport ever. What a way for a holiday to end.
