Anything he can do I can do better

AKA a blog post which could also be called "If he can put up pictures of his pants then so can I!" or, "If the world really is going to end, I'm getting the last word..."

As Gordon mentioned here, in a rather overly-sensationally titled blog 'Pants: how Victoria saved the Beckham's marriage', you go through rather a lot of underwear here, taking a clean pair of knickers every time you have a shower. It's a struggle to find cotton ones here, I was regularly running a bit short, and getting a bit bored, of my plain black and plain white pants so I put out an SOS to my lovely mum.

She didn't let me down.

Yes, those are pants with stars, stripes, polka dots, flowers, and even ice cream cones.

Told you I could do it better! ;-)

Pchum Ben holiday - Melaka part 2

As I mentioned in Melaka part 1, the food in Melaka was delicious. Two of my favourite things were the roti john and the chicken and rice balls.

I love roti anyway - doughy, thick naan style bread but made of many layers of finely stretched out dough - but eating it for breakfast with curry was great. We had a savoury one with the curry and shared a sticky sweet coconut one afterwards.

the nearly finished savoury roti on the right and the still to be wolfed down coconut one on the left

Chicken and rice balls is pretty much exactly as described. What makes the rice so good is that it is cooked/soaked in the chicken stock. Eating it by itself is not the nicest thing as it is a bit wet, however, combine that with tender pieces of steamed chicken, which is quite dry by itself, and it's heaven in a mouthful. I can't believe this dish hasn't spread further. It's so simple yet darn tasty.

We had to queue outside the shop to get in (always a good sign) and I was watching everyone tucking into their lunch, sucking on the bones and sinew of all the parts of the chicken. Chicken in Cambodia, and I presume in lots of Asia, doesn't come in the sterile form we're used to in the west. Take the bird, take a machete to it and then take what you're given. This includes the head and the feet. You can imagine how delighted I was when it came to our turn to go to a table and the man said, "I give you half a chicken, just the breast and two plates of rice balls, yes?"  Yes please. Thank you very much kind sir.

As we ate, big metal buckets of cooked chickens kept getting brought out from the kitchen behind us ready to be chopped up and eaten. It really brought home to me how many animals are killed every day for us to eat. Gordon and I were 'meat reducers' back at home - we tried not to eat as much meat and the stuff we did eat we tried to make sure was free range/outdoor reared and preferably Scottish. In that one restaurant alone I would guess they would go through a good few hundred chickens a day, just for lunch. I'm sure the chicken wasn't free range or organic but some choices have had to go out the window sadly. And even the meat reducing is not happening as much in Cambodia as it's a very meat-eating country. Both choices will be back on return home though. Fear not!

Gordon was slightly less keen than me on the dish (though still demolished his share) but I would eat this at least weekly if I could, even given what I've just said above. Alongside the best sweet & sour pork I've ever eaten (from Kampong Cham) this rates as the favourite food I've eaten since leaving home.

Another one of him eating. The two he took of me I had my eyes shut in one,
and the jar of chillies covering the food in the other.

I dread to think how many chickens this man chopped up in a day...

chicken graveyard

Other fun stuff
As we were wandering round at the end of a day, we came across what looked like a bit of a street party (in Chinatown). It turned out some residents were gathering to watch the painting of a mural of eight running horses (more details on the mural here). We were invited to join and, later, treated to free food!

the outline had been sketched earlier

the painting begins

the finished article

Trishaws, the Melakan version of Cambodian cyclos, are now decorated to the max. Many have fairy lights, for night, and sound systems.

the Cambodian version by comparison

We went to a tea appreciation ceremony in Melaka too. Neither of us being great tea drinkers this was a bit of a strange choice for us, but recommendations from friends and some cracking reviews on TripAdvisor meant that we thought we'd give it a go.

that's a big slab of rather expensive tea on the left, and lots of jars of tea in containers behind

We learned how to drink the tea, out the tiny wee cups you can see on the right, in 3 slurps (and you have to slurp, not sip). I'm still not sure I love tea, but nice to try some different Chinese teas and sit and get a little drunk. On tea. Seriously.

Biggest karaoke stage ever seen
On the Saturday night, as we passed the big stage on Jonker Walk, there were some older ladies all dressed up waiting to perform on it. I think they might also have been doing karaoke (we didn't see) but on the Sunday night, it was definitely free-for-all karaoke.

I'm a big fan of karaoke but we decided to wait until everyone was gone before we got up on stage.

As always, there are too many photos and too many stories to put it all here (I'm impressed if you're still reading.) Briefly, therefore...
- we walked out to see the Straits of Melaka - one of the most important shipping lanes in the world (according to Wikipedia). It wasn't a very nice walk, it was dark, I was tired, and all we could see was a big black expanse of water when we got there. I wasn't overly impressed hence no photo (and it really was pitch black by this point so you wouldn't have seen anything anyway)

- we saw a REALLY weird ceremony in a temple on our last night. I honestly was a bit worried that someone was being sacrificed. However, the other people (mostly locals I think), who also stood outside the gates and watched didn't seem too concerned so I'm hoping it was just some kind of harmless incense-wafting, loud chanting, hand waving ceremony instead...

- also on recommendation from friends (thanks John and Olivia), we went to the Baboon House. A restaurant that was a little too expensive for us to eat in (plus we also wanted to go to Little India to eat, and also hadn't tried some other must-try delicacies) so we just shared a burger as a mid-afternoon snack, then left. Amazing place though.

- people regularly point at Gordon because he's tall. Seriously. They also come up and measure themselves against him (mostly when he's not really looking) so they can show their friends just how tall he is. Occasionally he also gets asked to be in photos. This is the first time I've had the camera ready to capture it.

- Melaka is famous for pineapple tarts. They're pretty good. Good enough to take a photo of anyway (take note, Straits of Malacca). Pink dragonfruit juice is also worthy of a photo. Amazing colour AND delicious.

- this guy has statues in at least two places in town, because he's strong. 

 Turns out, so is Gordon :)

 Turns out I like a strong man (no, completely sober before you ask).

And that was Melaka. Phew! Singapore, the second leg of this five day (yes really) holiday to follow...

Pants: How Victoria saved the Beckham's marriage

I don't think that we're getting acclimatised to the heat in Cambodia, more that we're just getting used to sweating a lot. One of the effects of constantly sweating is that you end up changing your clothes quite a lot, especially your pants (or since we have American readers, your underwear). This means that you tend to need new ones after not too long, which is where it got rather interesting in my first few weeks.

I first had to go and buy new pants after only being in the country for about four weeks, and was still in Kompong Cham. I went to a shop and had a look around but could only find pants that didn't have a hole at the front - you know the flap thing that men can open to allow them to pee standing up. For those of you who don't, below is a picture of the standard British design from good old Marks & Spencers.

You can tell Markies make quality pants, because these pants have lasted this long in Cambodia - much like Duracell batteries and Fairy liquid outlasts all pretenders.

Undeterred, I went off to the market on my search for pants with a hole. Markets are Cambodia's equivalent of the internet (they do have the internet hence this blog) - you can find anything and everything there. But shockingly, all I could find were more pants like the ones in this picture.

No hole, just a line down the middle.

Figuring that I must be doing something wrong, I attempted to ask Toll, the night porter at our hotel and beer seller at the riverside, if pants with a hole/flap thing are available in Cambodia. At this moment, I would like you to turn to the nearest person to you (or phone somebody if alone) and try to describe the hole thing in a pair of man's pants.

It's not the easiest thing to do, and certainly not when he is Khmer and I've been in the country for four weeks. I didn't manage to get any answers to fill the 'hole' in my knowledge. But I put this lack of pants with a hole as an example of the different challenges facing people outside of Phnom Penh and that soon I would be back there and able to buy proper pants.

The Russian Market (so called because all the Russians went there during the 1980s when the Soviet Union was a big influence) is known for stocking clothes more appropriate for your western man. I even managed to find a pair of flip flops big enough for me there. So, I strode in pretty confident that I could retire my Markies pants to be replaced by brand, spanking new ones...

And it was then that I found the secret as to how Victoria had prevented David Beckham from ever cheating on her again. Using their peerless power to control fashion, she ordered the sewing up of all the pants in the world as this holeless design proves.

I had to make this picture large so you could see the branding on the badge.

I hope we're all well
Flash Gordon

There's nobody playing ball

Just a strange aside to get us going is that I've noticed many schools in Cambodia have basketball courts, but that they are never used. It seems a nation of smallish people are not that interested in dunking into a ring ten feet from the ground.

But they do play football, and whilst waiting at a large intersection (it had lights!) with my team-mates there was a screech of brakes as a moto crashed into the back of another one that had stopped at the red light. Standing beside us, about 10 yards from the crash, were two policemen. Glancing up, they decided to ignore the arguing moto drivers and continue their chat.

My fellow foreigner and I found this a little strange, but our Cambodian friends found it strange that people would want the police to get involved. If the police became involved, rather than one person paying for the damage, both would probably have to pay a fee to the police for some kind of traffic violation.

I have been told that some intersections are actually sold to policemen by their bosses because they give the policemen an excellent opportunity to boost their wages by pocketing fines. Policemen earning $60 or $70 a month may feel that this is their only option. Similarly, teachers charge students to pass exams or attend class, health workers charge patients for treatment, and the woman at the Royal Palace overcharges everybody by 25 cents for entrance. If a teacher earns less than a garment factory worker then this might be expected to happen.

Whilst poverty may be the cause of this corruption, it does not explain other examples. Banks are rare, so salaries like everything else are paid in cash. By the time it goes on a few journeys and handled by a few people, those at the bottom are getting even less whilst those at the top are getting much more. These people drive flash 4x4s and live in gargantuan mansions. Hunger in the belly cannot be their reason for corruption.

The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has recently decided Cambodia would only receive their $47m grant if it is no longer managed by the Government's National Malaria Centre. An 18 month investigation found huge irregularities, plus a coffee maker that cost $1590. In Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, Cambodia ranks 157 out of 174 - behind Syria, Congo and Yemen.

And whilst we in the richer, donor countries feel that we are the paying the price of this large scale corruption, we are not. The one who is paying the price is the 8 year old child who drops out of school because her family cannot afford the daily (illegal) fee. Or the family who lose a father because they cannot pay medical fees.

It could be that the horror of war for nearly 30 years has left some people to think only of themselves and maybe their families. Certainly, the leaders of industry and government are likely to have been teenagers or young men fighting in civil wars or surviving the Khmer Rouge, only then to struggle for lives in refugee camps. If these are the people leading society and setting the example, the example is having a car worth more than your salary.

In ER, after Dr. Ross (Clooney) has already left, Dr. Greene (Goose from Top Gun) leaves the hospital for the last time. He walks past and takes a basketball from Carter (not famous for anything else really) who is shooting hoops. Carter feels lost and worried about what will happen to the ER now that its leader, Greene, is leaving with Ross already gone. Greene gives the ball to Carter and tells him that it is now up to him to set the tone.

And that's the problem in Cambodia - the leaders aren't playing ball.

Gordon

PS, referencing TV shows will not be a permanent theme of all future blogs. Although, I could maybe try to take requests and see how they could be linked in some way to life in Cambodia!

Pchum Ben holiday - Melaka part 1

For Pchum Ben, a Buddhist holiday that took place in October and is about paying respect to ancestors, Gordon and I decided to leave Cambodia and explore a wee bit more of the big wide world. After much debate - after all Vietnam, Laos and Burma are close by and China, Japan, Bali and even Australia are not that far away - we settled on Singapore and Melaka (Malacca), a port town in Malaysia.

Flights to Singapore were under $100 each, return, so it was with slight trepidation that I waited to board the Tiger Airways flight. However all passed without hiccup and the flight was pretty good. A gold star for Singapore's budget airline.

We arrived in Singapore but were immediately heading to Melaka. After a slick journey on the MRT (their under- and overground system) and a friendly greeting by our bus company rep I was worried I might not want to return to Phnom Penh. In Singapore you can walk on the pavements - and they're not cracked and broken, or filled with rubbish, or have motos bearing down on you as they spot a shortcut through the traffic. I thought it was probably a good thing we left the city sharpish!

Our four hour bus to Melaka was one of the most luxurious buses I think I've ever been on. Super comfy seats that reclined to practically horizontal. Bliss! There was one other person on the bus when we got on - a Scottish guy from Glasgow. What are the chances. He had left his job at Bauer Radio (radios Clyde, Tay, Forth etc) and was travelling for a few months.

Melaka is an historical port town and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Malay, Chinese, Indian, Dutch and Portuguese influences abound which makes for some fabulous food.

After dropping off bags we headed down towards Jonker Street where they have a night market every weekend.

he hates when I take pics of him eating

tasty fried noodles

one end of Jonker Walk - the end with the MASSIVE stage

hustle and bustle on Jonker Street - taken right beside the MASSIVE stage

Jonker Street is lined with food stalls and market stalls selling all kinds of wonderful stuff. We did a spot of Christmas shopping as well as buying some new bike lights, me an Angry Birds t-shirt (it's awesome) and Gordon lots and lots of snacks.

The buildings and streets in Melaka are a photographer's delight and I spent most of the next few days with my camera glued to my face. 

dragon on Kampong Kling mosque

top of Kampong Kling mosque

I particularly loved all the buildings in the Chinese part of town.

They'd used the Chinese lanterns to form the body of the dragon the
whole way down the street. The photo doesn't do it justice.

We went on a boat trip down the river, passing all the amazing decorated buildings along the way. Right at the end we also finally saw one of the monitor lizards that are meant to be all over the town. I managed to snap a quick photograph but it is not of a high enough quality to make the blog so you'll just have to take our word for it. (Dad has also requested that I put less photos in the blog as when he prints the blog out for my Gran to read it's getting to be too many pages. Don't say I don't listen to you Pops!)

Part two of our Melaka trip to follow, I hope, shortly. In the meantime, here are some more shots of lovely things that tickled my fancy...

multi-lingual!

Haaallllooooooo!!!!!!

Haalllooooooo!!!!! Not so much in Phnom Penh, but in the rural areas, you will be cycling along a dirt road and a little kid will wave his hand and shout Haallllooooooo at you. As will his siblings and friends. Your role is to wave back just as vigorously and reply in the same manner.

What is strange about this little conversation is that rather than saying hello in a way that would be normal, you find yourself imitating their style and barking Hallooooo back at them with a hand wave nearly as manic as Paul's in the opening credits to The Wonder Years. Sometimes, they will feel brave and ask for your name or how you are. Obviously, we're not speeding past like Bradley Wiggins or Chris Hoy so there is generally time for us to answer. However, if we do and then ask them the same question, this usually results in them running away - about as fast as Paul in the opening credits to The Wonder Years.

This time, they weren't so scared of the lanky white boy and I ended up with two kids sitting on my rear wheel rack.

In Phnom Penh, foreigners are all a little bit more common, so this happens infrequently. But when it does, you get that little feeling again of happiness that you live in a country where people are so happy to see you that they scream at you. And if you scream back, it makes them even happier - with a little tinge of fear at the crazy white people on bikes.

Except one slightly chubby kid in Phnom Penh. It is rare that you see naked kids in Phnom Penh, but cycling home one night, I was passing (slowly) this unusually chubby kid who was naked, and maybe slightly too old to be naked - about 5 or so. Sitting in front of older siblings, he raised his hand and bellowed haaallloooo at me. Slightly unsure about this one, I tentatively replied hello rather soberly. At which point, he showed me one of his bare cheeks, slapped it and blew a raspberry. The next time I passed him, he tried it again, but this time there was not even a hiya in return to his shriek.

I'm going to post this before another month passes without me writing a blog, this despite me having so much more to say than just hello. But anyway, I always think it's nice just to say hello.

Take care
Chooks

Culture vulture

After nearly ten years working the arts, and being lucky enough to see some form of great performance at least once a week for the last seven years at Horsecross, I wondered how I'd get on with a reduced dose of culture in my life moving here. I wasn't expecting that there would be nothing cultural to do here, far from it, but I knew that I wouldn't have as much or as easy access to it. Sitting at my desk at the Concert Hall I would regularly be able to listen in on rehearsals or walk a few steps and pop my head into the auditorium to see what was going on onstage. Knowing some of the great music and theatre performances I've missed since leaving Horsecross has made me a little homesick so I've really enjoyed the cultural fixes I've had here in Phnom Penh.

Unsurprisingly, the Khmer arts had a rough time of it during the Pol Pot regime. Artists were killed, along with other intellectuals, and there was no place for the arts, unless you count propaganda songs. After the overthrow of the regime the arts slowly, slowly began to come back to life with the handful of survivors who remembered the traditional dance, music, arts and crafts.

A few weeks ago we went to Sovanna Phum Theatre to watch one of their shows. Sovanna Phum have resurrected traditional music, dance and shadow puppetry. While there was sadly no shadow puppets in the performance we saw (next time!), there was drumming - all the musicians looked like they were having a ball -  dance, and the monkeys. Who were hilarious ...

This last pic shows me trying to play the Sralay - the guy to the right is the musician and he was really kind, letting me have a go. It's a bit like an oboe but you play with the reed actually in your mouth and it's perpendicular, not horizotal. Hard to explain, even harder to play. AND you need to be able to do circular breathing to play it! Fascinating to try.

Another night we went to the circus! A tent had been specially built and acrobats from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos came to the city for three nights to perform.

never a good sign when there are
more performers than spectators

me and the circus tent

The show was meant to start at 5pm but when we got there at 4.50pm, to make sure that we got good seats, only about 20 people were there - in a 1000 seat tent... We waited till after 6pm and still nothing had started. We also wanted to go the opening of an arts festival that happened to be on the same night. Our City Festival is ten days of mostly contemporary visual art and architecture. I'd been helping them with press, and giving my two cents worth about design, so was invited to the private opening at the beautiful UNESCO building.

UNESCO building

So, we decided to scoot over to the opening, hear the speeches, watch the dance performance, look at the art, scoff some brownies and a glass of wine and then head back to the circus for just after 7pm.

We still saw over an hour of circus action - some of it amazing, others less so, but all in all a great night for $3!

amazing feat - firing an arrow from a bow into a balloon using your feet while doing a handstand! (Cambodia)

clowns from Laos

aerial silk acrobatics from Cambodia

the finale, complete with hula hoops covered in tinsel. Love it!

The next night we went to see Khmer Arts Ensemble, which was part of Our City Festival. The Ensemble are a Khmer traditional dance group who only perform in Cambodia every now and then. As this was part of the Festival the tickets were free and there was a bus to take us out to Takhmao (in Kandal province - one more province ticked off!). Their outdoor theatre is absolutely stunning - this is the backdrop

photo from Vinh Dao taken from Our City Festival Facebook page

We weren't allowed to take photos of the performance but I've borrowed some from the Festival's facebook page (all photos by Vinh Dao). All the dancing was done to live music and, while there wasn't a lot of jaw dropping 'how do they DO that?' moves, it was quite beautiful. 

The really unbelievable thing was the hand movements, or more specifically, the back bend of the hands. Hopefully you can get an idea of them from this photo. I can't even force my hand into these shapes, never mind do it while dancing!

And so, we hopped back on the bus and on to our other event of the night. And talk about one extreme to the next.

We went to a fundraiser for Tiny Toones. The website explains properly what TT do but basically street kids can go every day, for free, learn break dancing, hip hop, English, Khmer, computing and maths. These are some of the most disadvantaged, marginalised kids who don't really have great prospects in life - many will be begging or scavenging to help what family they have. Lots will take drugs. TT really does prove the power of the arts in transforming people's lives.

And so for the extremes. We went from a very sedate, beautiful structured evening to a hip hop night in a dark, smoky (yup, those rules haven't quite reached here) pub. It's very strange seeing eight year old kids in a pub...

We didn't see their whole show but did manage to see the older TT members do their final show (video above). They had a space about 3m square to dance in - very impressive!

-----

It's taken a while to write this and since then we've been to more cultural goings ons. And like buses, they all seem to come along at once!  On Friday we saw Tiny Toones again, this time dancing with a French company called Racines Carrées. It was another free show (loving the free stuff!) and absolutely brilliant. Gordon said at the end that he thought it was the best dance thing he'd ever seen. There were no pictures allowed and I'm not even going to begin to try and describe it - suffice to say, smart, impressive, funny and great hip hop dancing. And there was a tuk tuk on stage. Excellent stuff.

Then the NEXT night (which is actually last night as I type) we finally got to see the Battambang circus school, Phare Ponleu Selpak (which means, the brightness of art). They're another organisation that is using the arts for social good, helping young people out of poverty by training them to become professional artists and performers. They've got a temporary website here as their other one had been hacked (even this temporary one is one of the best websites I've seen in Cambodia...) I think the Cambodian performers we saw at the circus (in the big circus tent) were all from PPS.

The show was about a girl called Sokha who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, escaped to the refugee camps (I presume) moved abroad but then came back to Cambodia to help other survivors. Or this is what I took from it as there was no talking. It seems strange to say this about a circus, but it was one of the most moving things I've seen. Simple facial gestures, body movements and symbolic actions conveyed so much and I really found myself welling up at points. 

he's balancing on a board on a metal tube. With two people standing on his shoulders!

that's five men being held up by one...

The girl who played Sokha, and frankly the star of the show for me, was also the girl that we saw shooting the arrow into a ballon, with her feet, while balancing on her hands, at the circus night above. She did the same trick in this show but it was so much more impressive. The segment showed her falling asleep after she had left Cambodia and then the, really rather scary, Khmer Rouge invading her dreams and giving her nightmares. She then proceeded to 'dance' with the dream Khmer Rouge soldier, finally overcoming her dark dreams (symbolised by a balloon draped in dark material) by shooting them with an arrow. From her feet. While balancing on her hands. As you do.

She's sort of upside down here - face down into the ground,  body curved up and over
 then with the guy balancing on her hips!

beautiful acro-balancing

shooting a balloon while doing a handstand. I never quite managed that one in the playground at school...

It was impressively acrobatic, the live music and live painting (!) were brilliant and the acting was also top notch. Another fantastic night out.

So, I'm really pleased to say that I'm managing to get my cultural fixes here in the Penh. What's been great (and this is not meant to sound patronising) is the best things I've seen are the Cambodian arts. The Western arts I've seen here have been lacking. We went to one classical recital by a European trio which left me a bit cold (and not just because of the extreme air conditioning) and heard a European jazz duo which was frankly terrible (and cold - what is it with excessive air-conditioning!). There's a European jazz group who I really liked, even if the lead singer was doing his best to be Jamie Cullum, however, they perform in a bar on the Riverside which is full of old, generally fat, white men dining and drinking with young, generally beautiful, tiny Cambodian girls/women which is all a bit depressing. I'm a big fan of Khmer arts and looking forward to exploring it more. I'd love to give some of it a go so I'm off to start bending my fingers backward. If you hear squeals of pain, you know what it is!