Holiday in Cambodia… (I make the joke so you won’t have to)

Well, I’m sick as a dog this holiday season.  Something I ate, apparently.

Nothing serious, by my estimation.  But I’ll likely be offline for a few days.

So, I’ll say it now:  Merry Christmas to all!

Conrad.

Notes from Cambodia…

Walking through the city last night, I passed a small crowd of Khmer in a park.  They were playing aggressive rap music and dancing what looked like an Asian version of the hokey-pokey.

 

I got a strange phone call.  Someone called yesterday and said he wanted to meet me.  It sounded really shady.  He kept asking me where I was.  He was talking kind of quietly, and referred to my old job that I’d left.

I pretended I couldn’t hear him and hung up.

I stopped around at the school that I figured might have been calling to offer me a job.  (But why would they want to meet me?)  After a tortured conversation, the receptionist checked and told me that the man who called me was “in the provinces.”  We agreed he could email me.

That was yesterday.  Today, I got the phone call again.  He wanted to meet me.  He sounded bolder.  I kept asking who he was; I think he might have given me the name of my old landlord, several moves ago.  Finally, he came out with it:

My visa (he said) was no good.  Did I know the law in Cambodia?  He would report me to the Embassy.  He said something about the police, too.

Adventures on a Cambodian Toilet

After eating today, I had to use the toilet badly, which happens sometimes.  It was late and I had a long walk home.  There’s no seat on the toilet in my room so I went directly to the hall toilet upstairs, only to discover that there’s newly no seat on that toilet, either.

There’s a toilet in the bar, so I went there.  That had a seat, but no toilet paper.  So I retrieved a roll from my room, locked myself in the bathroom, cleaned the seat — an important step — and within a minute there was someone pounding on the door.

“Yo!” I yelled.

He pounded again.  “YO!” I yelled.  Some loud-mouthed bar boy, I figured.

Bad Ideas in Cambodian Traffic

A picture-heavy post.

This is just a quick post to explain why Cambodian traffic fills me with horror.  You’ll have to imagine the shots that got away — like the teenage girl on a motorbike making a turn against traffic in an intersection with no light while writing a text message on her phone.  Or the woman sitting on the back of a motorbike, facing backwards, holding the handles of a wheelbarrow-style vending carts, of the kind pictured below, so as to pull it along behind them like a trailer.

Whacko Kills 13: The Real Tragedy Is That This Will Make People Dislike Muslims, Imams Say

Yeah, okay; so the guy was under psychological pressure, and it’s a coincidence that he said, “Praise Allah!” just before he opened fire.  Isn’t a strong religious background supposed to help you cope with psychological pressure?

While the media wrings their hands about what a U.S. soldier killing other U.S. soldiers in the name of Allah will make the American public think about Islam, Muslims ideologues tell us how deeply hurt they are that people might think that Allah wants Muslims to murder.  It seems to me these folks are confused:  I’m fine with Allah not wanting Muslims to murder.  They don’t need to tell me; they need to tell people like Major Hasan.

A PowerPoint slide from Major Hasan’s presentation to the military.  This presentation raised eyebrows, but no red flags.  Officials explained they didn’t want to discriminate.

The Russians on Adrift

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen.  Peering through Google Translate, I see one of the Russians has written:

Adrift, a pancake.  So he rolled to the dogs, I will not play in this squalor. And the installer, and the player, and these fucking game, so they all burn in hell.

And these fools that write on it. Let killed.

–As a recovering Adrift author myself, I can relate.  (Let’s hope God doesn’t speak Russian.)

Might Be Going To Korea…

Because there’s not enough work here.  Or, there’s work, but it’s difficult to get many hours, and the pay is pretty bad.

I’ve heard things are better in Phenom Phen, the Cambodian capital, but the basic trouble is just that Cambodia’s starting to feel the pinch, and there’s not a lot of money going around.

Anyway, if you want a good free Korean language course, this is the one I’ve found:

the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) Korean language course, by Unit

the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) Korean language course, by Volume 

BTW, it’s shockingly expensive to fly to Korea from Cambodia — as much as it would cost me to go home!  What’s with that?

The Rainy Season in Cambodia

The rainy season came on quite suddenly, as I found out much to my chagrin.

If I look a little bugged-out in that photo, I have reason to.  After this, I took my poncho everywhere.

It hasn’t been too bad, all together.  But now, toward the end, we’ve gotten the tail-end of a local typhoon.  (In the States we have hurricaines; here they have typhoons.  The nature of the difference eludes me.)

I was at the bar I go to (Mary’s) when the typhoon hit.  It just started pouring.  Several of us were hanging out on the balcony.  Mary’s is a guesthouse, so I rented a room for the night.  Later, I found out that the host had made it on the house; or as the girl put it, “free for you.”

It rained so much that the river overflowed.  As of Saturday, this was the view from Mary’s:

The sanitation engineering is very basic in Siem Reap, so I don’t really want to think about what this girl is walking through.  The host on the day I took this photo said the previous night he’d pulled a leech from between his toes.

Beck-FOX death toll begins: FED slaying

Well, what did you think was going to happen?

After months of pumping incoherent rage into the media, some of Beck’s more loyal followers, some inbred-Jed types – who don’t understand that Beck is owned by FOX, which is owned by big business, and that the goal is not to tell the truth, but to torpedo health care reform – have taken action.

Let’s back up a moment.  Let’s see how we got here.

How have the conservatives run the country into the ground?  Let us count the ways:

1. Started a needless war in Iraq for oil, on false WMD claims.
2. …which siphoned military force away from the war that was about terrorism, in Afganistan.
3. Ruthlessly de-commissioned government regulation of American business.
4. Taxed the rich less, in order to…
5. Cut government spending that benefitted the poor, while…
6. Increasing government spending that benefitted U.S. businesses, which in combination with the Iraq war resulted in…
7. The creation of ballooning national debt.
8. So these “pro-business” policies caused the U.S. economy to implode, at which point the GOP had no choice but to…
9. Spend trillions of dollars to bail out the companies that created the problems.
10. And there’s some other stuff in there, about turning Federal criminal inquiries into a political tool, imprisoning people with no trial, torturing them, and (oh yes) appointing people to positions of great responsibility (running FEMA, sitting on the Supreme Court) because they’re old friends or support Bush, without regard for their competence or ability.

Finally, after eight years of cluster-fuck-ism, the nation has the audacity of electing a progressive moderate President, who is what a conservative ex-military acquaintance of mine quite candidly calls a nigger.

And Beck and his ilk spew lies villifying Obama and the Democratic party.  Obama is an Arab; he’s a terrorist.  Obama isn’t really an American citizen.  The Democrats want to create death panels.  They want to control what doctors you see.

And now we apparently have Inbred Jeds in Kentucky killing some guy and scrawling FED into his chest because he works for the U.S. Census.

It looks to me like this killing needs to be laid at Beck’s feet.  Beck didn’t do it, but he is the public face of the propaganda machine that created the anti-Federal sentiment that lead to the killing.

We really need to start getting a grip on the truth in this country.  The GOP managed to gang-rape the economy in the first place with repeated lies, about just about anything:  The swift boat thing, for example.

And the problem is that the news media play the lies without calling them out as lies.  Because they’re supposed to be “objective.”  Because being “objective” means being respectfully servile to anything that a politician says, even when it’s a lie.  And the GOP know how to use that.

So, now people are killing Census workers and carving “FED” into their chests.  Great, guys.  Congratulations, Beck.  You must be very satisfied to know that the hatred and lies you’ve been vomiting into the airwaves are working so well.

Jesus.

more notes from Cambodia

cows chased out into traffic - Those same three cows that I wrote about before…

…apparently just hang out in this neighborhood.  They were hanging out on the other side of the road, and wandered up into one of the open stalls, like the ones you can see in the background, where vendors sell cigarettes and such.  As one of them started to nose its way into the store, a nine-year-old grabbed a stick and, waving it uncoordinatedly over her head to give herself courage, ran at the offending cow.

The cow, seeing something larger than a cat moving rapidly toward it, ran out into the road, sparking the others to do the same.  Herd animals.  A guy on a beat-up motorbike blew his horn and veered around them; he was followed by a girl on a bicycle and another motorbike.  They slowed down, but barely.  The nine-year-old and her teenage brother looked on with, “Oh, yeah,” expressions.  The little girl seemed worried she might get in trouble; the teenager clearly didn’t give a crap. 

innocent Cambodians - When I had a beer with Cody, the other American teacher at my school, who’s ex-military, he said something I didn’t mention in the longer blog post, which I think is important.

He said that he finds Cambodians to be very innocent and child-like.  I think he’s falling for the flattery they give people who they figure have more money than judgement.  And I think it’s a stupid and dangerous misconception.