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July 20, 2004
16-18 July - PP Weekend
16th – Friday night. Went out at night, met a cool crew of locals, Vinh Dao from California, who works at Regent School of Business, might have some business teaching hours for me. There was Caleb and gf, as well as a German bird Lydia. Hung out at the Ginger Monkey for a while then went to Viper. Viper is a multi story dance/nightclub complex. The second floor is the primary dance floor, which was playing moderately heavy techno. It’s usually filled with barangs and Khmers out for a dance, but there was no-one there. They had only a very expensive selection of spirits (no vodka!?), so I bought some cokes for us all, but even they cost $2 each! We hung around, waiting for it to happen. The only happening thing was a crusty old guy who looked like he had been, and still was, making the most of all the illicit drugs available and was walking, spinning and dancing like a slow-motion parrot (The parrot bit came from him sitting in a table-like thing with bars over it, looking like a cage).
17th – Saturday, not much during the day, but went out at night. It rained during the evening, so I wasn’t very hyped about going out. After the evening movie finished (at midnight), it had stopped raining and I decided to make the most of the Saturday night. I went to The Heart of Darkness, bought a drink and meandered (It was quite busy, half barang half Khmer). Chatted to various people and eventually stuck with Dave, an Adelaidian who had just arrived in PP on holiday. We spent the rest of the night drinking, dancing and chatting to various barang women. As usual, the ones that seem interested aren’t the ones you’re interested in. We left to get some food from a dodgy stall outside (not returning, which may well have hampered our attempts also) – now ‘The Heart’ (as well as a couple of other nearby clubs) has become so popular and busy on weekend nights that an enterprising person has set up a caravan selling late night foods at barang-restaurant prices, complete with a big white billboard of pricing and pictures (yes, believe it or not they even have kebabs! [quality unknown]). We went straight past and onto a Khmer stall, which was deep frying various processed meat substances. After having a bit of fun with the stall owner and a couple of Khmer girls in exploring the food selection and our order, we sat down (on those very short little plastic stools) and ate with the girls. They were quite entertaining, although mostly laughing at us! (It’s very cool to have a few Khmer words up your sleeve, numbers and a few expressions) Before leaving, they invited us to play pool, but they ran off when Dave was buying some water (plus, he was pretty tired) so we didn’t follow. We then proceeded to try and locate Dave’s guesthouse on my moto. We took the ‘long’ way, through various muddy sections of road around lakeside before it looked familiar to my compadre, making apparent the quality of the place and the reason for the $2/night pricetag!
Posted by Dan at July 20, 2004 03:40 AM