Friday

Braved the rain last night and did a California 2, Sharky, Howie, Walkabout circuit. Here's what I remember:

California 2 Guesthouse: (Open Sunday.)
Swung by California 2 last night because I thought he was open for business. He isn't, but the place looks GREAT. It was a lot of work but the staff pitched in. Fucking great, man. New, higher ceiling, new lighting, and a killer old-wood bar top. You might think you'd walked into an FCC Annex. But hey,...fuck that. It's still Jim's place. As you'd expect, the sound system rocks. Jim knows music, and he knows where to put the speakers / sub woofer. The sound is loud and clean. Finally, a bar stereo that can do Zappa justice.

Sharky Bar: (Live music tonight.)
The rain kept things quiet at Sharky. Mellow scene. I noted a new group of cute Viets (well, some new, some just re-appeared after a long time away.) The stage and lighting are ready for tonight - they got a blues-rock band from Cleveland. The Curtis King Band has played in town before and I hear they're pretty good. They want to get a foothold in the local music scene, so check 'em out. No cover. (BTW: Check out the lamb special. Damn good.)

Howies Bar (Free grilled sausages tonight)
Watching the brisk business being done by the late-night burger carts across the street got Howie thinking. He's put a grill in front, and tonight, he'll be showcasing his culinary talent. The next Martin Yan? (Yan can Cook.) Maybe. The important thing is it's free while supplies last. The sausages are from Dan Meats; they'll be on the "menu" for $2-$2.50. Good luck, man.

That's all for now.

Rain, pain, and Mary Jane

It's Wednesday night and it's been raining all day, and although the parasites in my stomach cry out for cheap vodka (it's $ night at Sharky), my wallet is bare. Beyond that, my hand is throbbing. One of the sisters was chasing me around the apartment with a broom, and in a bid to escape I leaped over a pile of dirty socks, cut a hard left to avoid the coffee table, and ran straight into the wall. A scout from the US Special Olympics Team should be calling any minute. (I hear they need an alternate.)

The hand is still aching. Mary Jane isn't killing the pain much, but at least I don't care about it. All in all, it was not a very eventful day in the Kingdom.

Despite the rain, I managed to make it over to Lucky Market. I don't relish wading through pools of raw sewage to buy dinner, but it got me out of the house. Besides, I like Lucky Market. I have (polite) sexual fantasies about many of the girls who work there. If my hand stops hurting, I'll be able to indulge in some of them later.

I end it here. By now you know this is no place for intelligent commentary on life in Cambodia. Just to make sure you get the point, I put in a poll. Vote early and often.

Gettin' your daily bread...

Gourmands, bite my ass. I do all my cooking on a camping stove, but it's all anyone needs. Just get a wok, some oil, and throw in some food. It's a simple way to get your feed on. Here's how I did it today:

Breakfast: 2-big ass NYC-style Egg Sandwiches

• 2 large loafs of fresh baked bread: 1000r
• 4 large eggs: 2000r
• dab of cooking oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder: 100r (est)
• butter (est): 500r
• cheese (est) 1000r
• Tack on: 1 STRONG cup of black coffee from the VN brothel down the street: 500r

Total: $1.35

Lunch: Fuck lunch....(but if you must):

• 3 sets of skewered beef "balls" w/ cucumbers and hot sauce: 1500r
  

Total: .30

Dinner: BBQ Pork and rice stir-fry w/ vegetables

2 sets of (pretty good) BBQ pork w/steamed white rice: 5000r
1 egg: 400r
Dab of oil, garlic, stir-fry seasoning, pepper (est): 500r
Some kind of vegetable: 1000r
Diet Coke: 2000r

Total: $2.25

And thus, for $4.20 per day, you can eat like a King (of a really poor country.) So, save your money for important stuff like sex, drugs, and air conditioning. Hang loose folks, and have a Happy Monday!

AVN feed added to the site. Still no breakfast

Check out the Adult Video News (AVN) feed. I put it up while waiting for SK to come back with my breakfast. That was an hour ago. I'm thinking my breakfast fell victim to video slots. I hate those fucking things. They prey on the poor, weak, and addicted. They should be shuttered. (POST HASTE!)

What these girls should be doing is gambling online. Check out PNH Confidential in the next few days and learn how you can get an account for your girl. (What I mean to say is: Wait til my affiliate program is up and running.)

You can fund the account from home and feel safe in knowing your girlfriend is holed up at an Internet cafe playing penny slots, and not #$%$&@-ing some dude.

More on this soon.

Countess Chocula

We met at My Lien and then shot off to Sharky Bar. Be warned, the motodops near My Lien and Tom's Irish Bar are bunch of douche bags. I spit on them 10,000 times. (!!) Of course, this is NGO-land. They are used to dealing with spineless morons. My humble advice: Set the price before you go, and don't be afraid to tell them to fuck-off.

We made it to Sharky and started to mingle. Everyone seemed to be out last night. It was an atmosphere fueled by liquor, marching powder, and the wonderful promise of dirty sex. They all make this place special.

Most of what was said was hearsay, gibberish, and nonsense. Some of it I remember:

• The California 2 is about ready to re-open. He had a small pre-opening party and by all accounts, the place looks really good. Congrats.
• There are unconfirmed reports that a Nigerian scamster accidentally fell off the balcony the other night. If it's true, I'd like to congratulate the balcony. (Damn fine work!)
  
• The price of vodka has risen. Stoly used to be $3.70/bttle. Now it's up to $5 or $6.
• If there are no red rings around the base, it isn't a wart.

I even bought "fecalpheliac" girl a drink. Some drunk dude kicked her out of his hotel room once without paying, and she was just drunk enough to shit into her hands and smear it all over his door. (Steaming anger?) May she be reborn as a chambermaid. (Or maybe a Japanese porno star.)

Hemmingway had Paris in the '20s. This is better.

2am was approaching. I bopped around from Martini, (killer chick-guy ratio, African had a drunk Asian tourist interested in an exciting business venture), to Howies,(where French people demanded our weed), and finally, Walkabout, where I hooked up with Countess Chocula because she know how to work mr. jimmy. Mr. Jimmy got worked.

And that was it. The usual Friday night/Sat morning shenanigans. I didn't find a cure for cancer, create the perfect shoe bomb, or try and change the world in any way. I found a Chocolate Countess who knows how to work the jimmy. Is that so wrong?

Ms. World

Friday night. I'm watching MS World 2006, from Poland.

Random thoughts/quotes:

Ms. Poland: wants to, "...build big house for little people....."
Ms.Kazakstan: Kaz. can do a lot better than her.
Ms. Norway: "...I love shopping."

Ms. Ireland: impossible to understand
Ms.Scotland: ditto
Ms. Denmark: "...this year I want to have a job.."

Ms. Hungary: ""I speak 4 languages; also Polish"
Ms Portugal: Knows, "I can't change the world.."
Ms. Slovakia: Pornstar hot

Gotta boogie.

Kampong Cham for the fuck of it

Thursday morning in the Walkabout working on getting it on with the one bar girl willing to talk to me when I received an unexpected offer: "Come to Kampang Cham to meet my girls' family."

He sweetened the pot, "It'll be fun.....it's festival time.....chicks'll be digging the only foreigner in 100 miles...I'll pay." Who could resist? We hit taxi central at 4am.

The rest is a long dull story. I spent the day sleepless and hungover - being stared at by a pack of neighborhood children. They huddled before me; they muttered conspiratorially. I kept an eye on my boots. I came back alive.

I made it back at 5pm Thursday. The sisters met me at the door like a couple angry aunts, "Go WHERE?! I worry too much!! I go everywhere!! Here food.Now NO good! (And the implied, "No, you won't be getting back that $5 I borrowed from your wallet Monday...")

Maybe there was genuine worry. My family.

The Cure for Anger

Allegory: symbol that serves as a disguised representation....(I think)

I can dig it.

The problem is...it's 1.30am and I'm not sure if I should save it for tomorrow. Martini is good til 3. The Walkabout'll be ok past 5. The brothel down the street...scares me a little - I'm staying out of there.

But I need to do something because I've been more pissed off than usual, and I think I know why.

Wish me luck.

(It's a good thing no one reads this.)

Thailand 2.0?

Great. A coup. I haven't been to Thailand in a year and have no burning desire to go back. But hey, next time I have a hankering for McDonald's, shopping malls, and 1am bar closings....I'll slap myself.

Unfortunately, new changes in the Thai visa process and last night's coup may have the effect of driving hoards of whiny, Thai-based expats and tourists this way. The effects could be devastating. We've already seen a wave of shady BKK-based Africans hit town bringing with them fake drugs, fake money, and fake diamonds. What's next?

Angry old men on steroids complaining about....EVERYTHING, speaking pidgin Thai to EVERYONE (this is Cambodia fuckwit!), and bribing DJs to play a steady stream of Beatles, Air Supply, and....Meatloaf. I fear it's not long before we see packs of shirtless, mullet-wearing, beer swilling idiots stalking through Hun Sen Park.

Is this the next Pattaya? Is Paradise Lost? I fucking hope not.

Monday Night Travels

9 pm: We decided to talk business - sober this time. Plans were made. Ideas kicked around. Prices quoted. Good meeting. Then we noticed the White chick across the street undressing in front of a window. Nice ass. A good omen.

10:45 pm: We decided to celebrate with a quick one in the neighborhood. One drink and home to dinner and a good book....or maybe internet porn. We decided on My Lien on Street 278. This is NGO Land, so the bar has a steady stream of aid agency people (the kind with money), contractors, and embassy staffers. A good place for a quiet drink and flirtatious conversation before they go home to the wife and kids.

The girls fit the standard My Lien profile: young, cute, savvy, and unbeatable at Connect 4. They quickly pegged me as the type of guy who would never buy them a new Honda CRV, so I was able to skip the agonizing bar hostess interrogation:

"Hello... What's your name? Where you from? You come holiday? You have my wife...?"

I'm rambling. Let me sum it up. I FUCKING HATE hostess bars but My Lien is all right. The mama-san is cool, and if she knows you, she'll run a tab. They have a dart board and vodkas are only $1. Kicks ass.

12:30am: Our "quick drink" turned to 3 quick drinks. Mama-san was ready to close, so we headed down 278 to Equinox, a French-owned place next to the Golden Gate. I knew 2 things about this place - it's French (read: expensive and dull) and it's "gay-friendly" (in PNH, this usually means: Fuckin' Queer) But Davis said it was cool...

It is cool. Nice layout. Great music (funk, soul, jazz-fusion...) and free internet. They incorporated the bar into a 2nd floor balcony and worked in an art gallery and clothing shop in the back. It's also smoke friendly and for that it gets 2 BIG thumbs-up. Drinks seemed to be in the $2-$3.50 range.

1:50am: We shot the shit for a while, rapped with a French dude who owns the Thai restaurant next door, and decided it was time to get laid. The Walkabout was hopping. By now I was too drunk to fuck. Unfortunately, that usually doesn't stop me from trying, but I opted for the $1 crotch massage while you drink option and settled in. The gang assembled and we got to catching up. What's the word?

• A guesthouse owner and a bar manager continue to feud. Their last blow-out involved a kitchen knife and a crowd of nervous bar patrons. No blood was spilled.
• A resident tweeker blew $700 in 3 days and came by a friend's pad at 8am demanding his stolen rice be returned. A 15 minute search of the kitchen failed to turn up any rice and the tweeker stalked off. Hasn't been seen since.
• Another German fired from an ESL job. Not pedophilia this time - just that he was coming into work stumbling drunk. Can't blame the school. It wasn't that easy to understand him when he was sober.
  

3:20 am: Time to go. There was time when only a raging idiot would be walking the streets at 3am, and I suppose it's still not all that safe. But Cambodia has come a long way, towards stability(knock on wood), and a brisk 15 minute walk is usually enough to burn off bedspins. I made it home in one piece. Another one in the books.

Mondays aren't so bad.

Festival of the Dead

It's that time of the year: Cambodians are making offerings and Buddhist monks are making blessings at a temple near you. It's Pchum Ben, the Festival of the Dead. Cambodians visit temples to make offerings for fifteen days in memory of their dead relatives and loved ones during the festival.

It's been on for a week or so but this morning (about 4am) it'll kick into high gear as Cambodians head to the Wat with their candles and 10,000 real packages of rice, incense, etc... If you have a chance, it's nice to see people "gettin' their religion on."

Happy Festival of the Dead Cambodia!

Village idiot rides again

A quiet Saturday night....was what I had planned. I went out anyway. First stop was Sharky to meet up with some friends. Got there and one had already almost singlehandedly downed a bottle of vodka. We finished the last of the booze and started talking business. He liked my ideas - had some of his own. Intelligent discourse followed....for about 2 minutes. Then the show started.

Entertainment provided by, "The Village Idiot." Yes, the Pride of the Canadian Maritimes is back at it. Tonight it was a tantrum at the pool table over some minor point of play. It began when he grabbed the cue ball and refused to hand it over. It ended when his head was slammed against the pool table by a large, fed-up bar manager. Said bar manager then marched village idiot off - arm twisted behind his back - and demanded he pay and leave. And so the village idiot was led out of yet another bar by yet another set of security guards.

An embarrassment to White men everywhere.

Unfortunately, a group of Khmer visitors, who had been having a great time, were disturbed by the scene and left. What can I say that hasn't already been said? He knows better.

If there is one bright spot, it's this: Bad examples like him are worth more than a thousand good ones. So members of the community: Check yourself.

Saturday Night's all right for.......

Dear loyal readers (AKA: my imaginary friends):

It's Saturday night and in light of my current financial situation and the hole that black coffee and vodka have burned in my stomach - I think I'll stay in. Had a good one last night. Hit Sharky Bar around 11 to see who was out. Tranquilizers and booze make the women look good. Actually, the women always look good. The tranquilizers and booze help me believe that I look good.

I was already a little numb when I hit the bar. Unhappily, I found myself next to a short, fat, unwashed 40-something Canadian with a matted beard and coke-bottle lenses; he had a litany of complaints about Cambodia. He just had to let the waitress know about them. I could see the murder fantasies being played out in her mind.

He kept looking at me for moral support. I refused to make eye-contact with him. It's important to avoid people like this. They should be in Pattaya getting ripped off by ladyboys - the ladyboys they claim they didn't know were ladyboys until after they had finished a 20 min 69 session, busted their nut, and exchanged cell phone numbers.

Anyway, the night went well. Good energy in the bar, good chick-to-dick ratio and good (heavy metal) music on the sound system. Conversation went from movies to porn stars to Cambodian politics to dirt bikes to VD to the (US) trade deficit to the best viagra clones. (PS: Don't count on the liquid stuff to act as a breath freshener.)

California 2 Guesthouse closed for another week

Heads up to anyone looking for fish tacos or a good, cheap (bottomless) cup of coffee on the riverfront : Jim is closed for another week while he continues remodeling the front of the building and the bar/restaurant. He's got an army of people working their asses off and it's going to look damn good.

Local pundits say he doesn't need it but hey, what the fuck? It's his place and he wants to trick it out a bit so - cheers to that!

Dig it.

Friday night in the big city

Another working week gone by. Gave SK (My girlfriend...kind of) money to get my phone out of hok and she gambled it away. Not too surprised since it's not the first time this has happened, but I am pissed off none the less. Ahh...never a dull moment in this tropical paradise. But maybe I'll go out for a bit tonight since UBC Sports decided that Golf would be a better choice than the UFC. Fuckwits! Golf sucks. Golf on TV is.....beyond comprehension.

But hey...it's Friday night, and so far, things are good. Got the Gap Band on the stereo (Party Train), there's an ok movie on TV (the Rock is shooting up a town in the Amazon now), and I started a pretty good book last night - "Slow Kill", by Michael McGarrity - his character is a police chief in Santa Fe. And, while I don't have a phone, the upside is - I don't have a phone!

Alas, I may be headed home for the first time in 3 years. Only for a month (!) Any more than a month and the tax man will start hasslin'. Any more than a month and I think I'll go insane. Besides the boredom, there's the weather. 40 degrees'll be enough to freeze my ass off at this point.

Inaugural Post

Why not blog? I bet there are thousands out there like me. I hated my job although it paid well. I left it. Moved to a 3rd world capital and now lead the life of a lechorous, sometimes drunken, and often broke ESL teacher in Phnom Penh. Cheap vodka, good smoke, dirty sex, strange illnesses, random death, insane expats, rip-offs, corruption, poverty, landgrabbing, injustice, true justice, blood diamonds, black money scams, shady North Koreans, and some of the coolest, most wonderful people in the world, .... It's an X-rated comic book, and if my camera hadn't been stolen I 'd post photos....

Anyway, I'm recovering from $1 spirits night at Sharky's. $1 night usually ends with a Walkabout sunrise and a brisk stumble home around 5am Thursday. Thankfully, today I was able to make it to work on time (at the crack of 5:30pm.) I'm waiting for a call from 2 Koreans who may be interested in opening a garmet factory here. I'm thinking they already know China or Vietnam would be a better bet, but business is a good excuse to come here. And maybe they'll get something going, and maybe I can help them out and make some money. But probably not. Their visits do give me a chance to hit the full-on karaoke bars. The Koreans love them, and once in a while they can be fun.

Right then...gotta bone up on my Hank Williams.