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.