A Fun Friday

Friday was a good day. Normal day of work in the morning. At 11:00am I got a call from my camera repairman. After nearly three weeks of working on my digital camera (which got a bit of water/condensation in it on our boat trip in Kampot) and completely taking it apart, it was fixed for a mere $35.

Picking it up at lunch, I then met Shanti at an oasis of a coffee shop/restaurant called Java Café, which has wireless Internet access, a jungle-like deluge of plants, and a view of the Independence Monument. It’s an ex-pat stomping ground and it’s got great food. I had a delicious mozzarella cheeseburger with the best fries I’ve had in Cambodia thus far.

Friday evening, Shanti and I met a Kiwi friend, Anna, at her house before going out on the town. She was home with another Kiwi, Rachel, and a fantastically interesting Algerian guy named Irad. We had met Irad at a dinner two weeks before and it was really good to see him again. He’s working for the Catholic church as a doctor, spending most of his time in rural southern Cambodia and a few days a week in Phnom Penh. He had some fantastic stories, like:

• how at a hospital in Algiers, a gang fight between two rival factions broke out with him caught in the middle. He hid in an operating room as the two groups fought, peeking out occasionally to see if he could escape. Seeing a doctor caught in the middle, the two gangs agreed to “pause” their fighting and let him escape.
• how when he got his Cambodian driver’s license, he, a proud Algerian with a seemingly French background, was given an “Indian” nationality because the Cambodians didn’t know any better.
• how a fake policeman pulled him over in Cambodia demanding money. He drove away and stopped on a quiet side street, while the man claiming to be a policeman followed him. He got out of the car, took the key to man’s motorbike and then started demanding money from him. Unbelievable…

Anyways, after hanging out for a bit, we went to a bar/Pakistani restaurant called Monsoon. The owner, an Australian woman is good friends with my friend Nick, who I worked with at CSIS and who worked in Phnom Penh for a year. The food and drink there was quite good and it was a particularly interesting scene this evening as they were celebrating their second anniversary of being in business. The crew was mostly ex-pats (as opposed to tourists), with some American, some Aussies, some Europeans, some South Asians, and even a few Africans.

After a bit of time at Monsoon, we went to a nightclub called The Heart of Darkness and known affectionately as “The Heart.” We entered to gothic interior, thumping bass, and hundreds of Cambodians and a few tourists and ex-pats letting loose. There was a middle-aged Cambodian man doing an informal pole dance, an older Chinese man trying to dance, but failing miserably, a young Cambodian who dressed like Jimi Hendrix and danced like Michael Jackson, and Irad, who danced in cheery French manner. Kris Kross and other early ‘90s hits blared on the speakers along with recordings that clearly didn’t make it to the American markets.