back in the city

This morning I woke up early and got a bus from Kep to Phnom Penh. The guy at my hotel literally stopped a bus going down the street and convinced the driver to let three of us on. He relented, but we were placed in the very back of the bus. This is not a good place to be on a bus going over gully-sized potholes for 4 hours... My back and I survived the ride, partially due to making friends with this older dude from Amsterdam. He has lived in Southeast Asia for twenty years and was telling me all about his life. What an interesting life. He was telling me about how he used to fly to Thailand in the early 90's on crazy military planes out of Romania, and how he drank the Romanian military guys under the table at the "airport" (a giant hangar). He told me literally his entire life story. The man liked to talk. He was nice and I wish him well. We got back to Phnom Penh around noon. I had already arranged for Jack to pick me up at the bus station in his tuk tuk so after a couple off phone calls we got to the same location. Aw, Jack- Jack's adorable. He looks 12 but he's 25 or 26. I say 25 or 26 because he doesn't seem to know- he's told us different years and ages. This actually makes sense when you think of the history of the country at the time- who knows if they even had paperwork and birth certificates back then. And I think Cambodians might count from birth instead of from year one- I think they do that in some other countries as well. Can anyone back me up on this? I might be making this up. I'm good at that.

Anyway, I invited Jack to lunch. He was busy, but invited me to a BBQ in the evening. We planned to meet up then. I got to the B-Team's apartment before Megan was back, so I left and got some pho. It's funny that I just got back from Vietnam, where pho is from, but I'm eating pho here in Cambodia. Kind of the same as the fact that I ate massive amounts of sushi in the States after returning from Japan I guess! Pho is yummy- if you've never had it, you should go get it right now. It's a soup of sorts with vegetables and some sort of meat (usually beef or pork). It's delicious.

Megan got back and met me there. We went to pick up the textbooks. I had left them at a translation place for a price quote. I need to be a translator for sure. They make BANK. They were trying to charge me ten dollars a PAGE!! That's RIDICULOUS. We said, no thanks. I'm going to just have to wing it without the textbooks for now, which kind of sucks, but what can I do? I don't have thousands of dollars from the budget for translation.

We got back to the apartment and chilled and caught up on each other's trips. We got ready and headed to Feeling Home to meet up with Julia and Robert. We did some work catchup for a bit. I played on the internet for awhile then headed back to the apartment in time for Jack to pick us both up. Megan had a meeting but planned to meet up after. The BBQ was at the Top Banana. It was packed! I think everyone staying there plus some loyal customers and their friends came to the BBQ. It was a feast- YUM! BBQ chicken, pork, and they even had frog, which I didn't eat- not because I'm not curious, but just because I found out about it after it was gone. We hung out there for awhile drinking and what not. Fun times!!

I headed next door to another party that was starting at Elsewhere, the bar with a pool. There was some sort of First Friday party on there, but when we were there it was a little to early. I was pretty drunk already and trying to hold a conversation with my boss wasn't the easiest thing to do :-) But we all met up and hung out there for a bit, then we moved around the corner to the 60 cent draught bar- much, much cheaper. Taylor has a friend in town, Lindsay, who is funny as hell. She was really entertaining. We stayed there for awhile, and Jack and his friend came as well. We took full advantage of the cheaper beer, but later headed back to Elsewhere which, while we were away, had gotten super crowded. By this point we were all in our own worlds so we kind of split off. I met up with Kat and hung out with her for awhile. Little Jack had had his fill of beer by this point and went to pass out in his tuk tuk :-D That's where he sleeps when he's too drunk to drive it all the way to where he lives- good thinking. Some of the tuk tuk drivers were being jerks outside of the bar- I got my butt grabbed and a smack in the arm. It was a bit rowdier than usual, probably because the tuk tuk drivers saw so many foreigners and had money signs in their eyes :-) Can't really blame them- they live off of driving foreigners around everywhere.

I ended up crashing at Kat's because she had snacks and I didn't think we had any food at the B-Team apartment. Luckily there was a Michael Jackson video marathon on which I watched until I fell asleep.

Tomorrow: Happy 4th!!

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