Quite Random

Smoke and noise

You ever get those days when you’d just like to crash out in the house, enjoy the peace, read a book and contemplate life? I had one of them today, but I still have to leave the house because the family downstairs are driving me insane.

I think Khmers are actually at their happiest when they are making a lot of noise. From weddings with music loud enough to puncture eardrums to the ice cream carts that play pop music at full blast, to the occasional high-pitched wailing of the women cooking rice on the street stalls (imagine the noise a Jawa would make if it were psychotically angry) to various mobile phones, moto horns, dogs, children and monks on PA systems, sometimes it never seems to stop.

I was happily crashed out in the living room just now watching Battlestar Galactica, then a large motorised generator got started outside my bedroom, so I had to watch the TV with subtitles. Then a lad downstairs started playing an arcade game on his phone that throws out lots of loud ‘pew! pew!’ shooting noises. I could still watch the telly so I carried on. Then, and this is the straw the broke the camel’s back, someone started smoking fish right under the living room window, so smoke came billowing into the living room and I was trying to watch the TV with tears in my eyes while I was getting smoked myself. You can’t shut the windows here. No windows. To top it off, someone is now banging a pan lid around for some reason.

So I’m off to look for somewhere peaceful where they aren’t trying to smoke me. Maybe another country, because they’re all barmy here.

The Grinch’s Christmas Speech

Saying I can’t stand Christmas gets me accused of being a grinch, a grumpy old sod, and any number of other things, but balls to the lot of it. If there is one thing I really hate, it is being told to have a good time and looked upon as some kind of defective scrooge if I’d rather leave it all alone. The more I get funny looks, the more I feel the urge to lock myself in the house and come out again in the new year.

Participation is not mandatory.

I feel like I have said this all before, and that is because I have. This shit repeats itself every year, just like the fuss over the Christmas number one, just like all the Bible bashers whining on about the secularisation of Christmas (and for the fifteen millionth time, it was a traditional folk festival for thousands of years long before Christianity re-branded it), just like cloying M&S adverts and just like the Boxing Day hangover.

It’s all so crap. Sorry, longer and cleverer words fail me. Deck the halls with bowels of Holly, or whatever the hell it is, spare me. Leave Holly’s bowels alone. As for conspicuous overconsumption, that’s par for the course here in Siem Reap and has been since I got here, so I feel no desire to up the ante even further. At least in Cambodia I have been spared seeing Kerry Katona on TV every day hovering over plates of mass-produced bacon-flavoured salmon lips in puff pastry, or gargantuan turkeys that taste like packing material.

I was Santa yesterday, and I will be again this afternoon. An occasion when I am actually encouraged to let my gut hang out is always going to be good, but wearing red velvet trousers, fur-lined boots and a beard is not when the sun is beaming down and the temperature is in the 30s. The children love it, and for them it is simply a party, with sweet things, gifts, and fuss. To be fair, this could happen to them on any other day of the year and often does.

Imagine a world without Christmas. Would you still get together with loved ones when you had the time? Would you still buy gifts or tell people you loved them? Would you still eat well, especially when the days were cold and dark and you needed comfort and sustenance? Would you still say a prayer to your god, or in the absence of a god, express your appreciation for the world that supports you, and would you help those less fortunate than yourself? I’d like to think that the answer to all of the above is yes.

So regardless of Christmas, I want to say to my family and closest friends that I love you very much and I am thankful beyond words to have you in my life. I miss you at home and I will see you soon. To all the people I have met here in Cambodia I want to say that I have had more fun with you and enjoyed being with you than I could ever have hoped. And finally, I want to say how happy I am to live in a world that still manages to be so beautiful, varied and fascinating, despite all of the mediocrity, fundamentalism, terrorism, melting ice caps, George W Bush and Iceland adverts.

Have a good day.

Shantaram’s stalker

I didn’t realise that I was following in the footsteps of Gregory David Roberts until I read Shantaram. Then again, I’m sure neither had several hundred other people that had got a taxi from Mumbai airport into Coloba and stayed at one of the crappy hotels on the sea front just down from the Taj Mahal Intercontinental. He described the experience of getting off the plane in Mumbai for the first time infinitely better than I did.

I stayed at the Sea Shore Hotel, in the same building he stayed at when he first arrived in Mumbai, and ate in Leopold’s, where he ate regularly and fell in love with a woman named Karla. I had no idea of this at the time. The Sea Shore Hotel is conveniently located for the main drag of Coloba, and Leopold’s is an institution, visited by thousands looking for respite from the scam artists and hectic traffic of the Causeway.

I’m still reading the book, but seeing as how I haven’t yet joined the Mujahideen or set up a clinic in the slums of Mumbai, I think this is where the shared experience between between us ends.

Off

Men don’t get periods (well, we did joke about whether Irish Dave was the alpha female of the group and whether we were all going to synchronise with him the other week), but I often wander whether men are just as susceptible to some kind of cycle. And that’s not the kind with a bell and a basket on the front, though they are still a danger round here.

I have felt rotten all week, but there’s nothing really wrong with me. I’m lucky. One girl has a nasty ear infection, another has been laid out with what the doctor thought might have been salmonella or typhoid (or both), and another fell off her bike yesterday and now has a bad back. I am describing the plight of numerous women here as I am surrounded by mostly women. Most of the people who come here to volunteer are female, leaving the few remaining males overwhelmed, very happy, or craving conversation about anything but shopping – and often all three.

I could have malaria. It turns out that one chap went to another country feeling a bit ropey, and it turns out he’d had malaria. And dengue fever. I’m thinking however it is more likely that I just can’t be bothered to do anything, and I’d rather sit on my arse with Johnny Cash on the stereo.

Workplace stress

Words and phrases I traditionally associate with workplace stress include Underground, Office Politics, Reply To All, Meeting, Presentation, Room Booking, Season Ticket, What’s For Lunch, Deadline and… did I mention Meeting?

Here in Cambodia, the picture is somewhat different. Earlier today I was trying to write a report on my students despite a small child being sat next to me pressing random buttons on my laptop. Delete. Return. Switch off. What started as ‘ha ha, yes that’s how the mouse works’ ended with ‘no, don’t touch that, oh bugger, you had to go and touch that’.

Then there are the bank holidays. Now a holiday is always nice, but in Cambodia they tend to warn you about these things anything between two days and one hour in advance, and not so much warn you as utter something cryptic about how there’s something happening and it’s up to you if you want to come in and teach lessons, but the kids will either be watching karaoke on TV or fishing in a puddle somewhere. This is just unsettling if you like even the smallest bit of structure or predictability in your life. An Australian nurse tried to get to the bottom of what was happening with lessons around the holiday earlier today, and after five minutes of asking the same question in slightly different ways (‘Do I need to come in and teach?’) and being given several different answers, all equally confusing, was no better off. Cambodians have the equivalent to the Indian head-shake (rolling the head from side to side as if pivoted somewhere just below the nose), which is just to smile sweetly. It disarms you but leaves you just as clueless as when you started, if not more so.

In my classroom, I have to contend with mosquitos, cockroaches, and ants. They get onto me and irritate me, nest inside the computers doubtless shortening their lifespan, and generally have no appreciation of the wonders of education. There are the insects, and then there is grand mother Voth regularly entering the classroom for pots, pans, rice or whatever else is in the store cupboard, but as I’ve already said, I’m terrified of her so she can do as she pleases.

So all in all the main problems you have here are kitten herding on a large scale and total confusion about what is supposed to be happening on a day to day basis, but at least there aren’t as many meetings.

Facebook lunacy

There’s the Instant Messaging application. And What Kind of Flirt Are You? Then there’s Likeness. And True Match. And Send Sunshine. And Are YOU Interested? And Booze Mail, Are You Normal, X Me, Superpoke, Super Wall, Compare People, Top Friends, Hot or Not, Vampires, Growing Gifts, Pirates vs Ninjas, Zombies, Werewolves, Cute vs Sexy, Hugs, Snowball Fight…

Holy Christ in a rusty bucket, it goes on and on. There is so much utterly pointless shite on Facebook. Some friends have installed the lot – it takes a full twenty minutes to scroll down through their profile just to write on their wall, dodging aquariums, pop videos, pictures of fat naked women with amusing captions and pirates.

I’ve only mentioned the applications. Then there are the groups. Groups for people called Bert, groups for people who suffer from perpetually soft stools, groups for people who love Pete Doherty, groups for people who hate him, groups for people who like joining groups with amusing names, groups people join and then do absolutely nothing in before leaving the same group a month later.

Hannah now refers to Facebooking people, not emailing them. I like email. Gmail is nice and simple. You choose someone to get in touch with, you write to them, that’s it. You’re not prompted to attach a poke, sheep, hug, drink, horoscope or any other truly pointless time-wasting annoyance. I am going to try and back slowly away from Facebook and get back to old-fashioned email. Yes kids, email is what we had before Facebook.

Other things we had before Facebook –

• not being regularly updated on every small thing about everyone you have ever spent more than ten minutes with
• good old-fashioned falling out of contact with people
• not having your movements, preferences and habits being tracked my anyone more scary than Sainsburys Reward Card
• not being invited to buy a drink for someone that isn’t even a drink, just a pointless icon on their profile that says I got them a drink
• not being bitten by a ninja zombie pirate

So if it is all so pointless, why am I always on it? That’s it. I’m weaning myself off Facebook. I did it with Tetris, it can’t be that hard.