Water Festival.

You may think you know a thing or two about rivers, as I thought I did, but there is a river here in Cambodia that bucks the trends. It is unorthodox and proudly so. It marches to the beat of a different drummer, if you will. This river is the Tonle Sap and it flows into a lake of the same name from the Mekong River, and as the weeks and months mount, the lake swells to something like twice its normal size. Then about this time every year, it decides for no apparent reason, like a trendy teenager in touch with what is cool, that south is the new north, and it switches its direction on a whim.

What this means is that all the people in the rural provinces come flocking into Phnom Penh for three days of boat races, fireworks and concerts with laser light shows. Then of course everyone who lives in Phnom Penh comes out on the town presumably to clog up the streets and the riverfront area even more. Everyone, that is, except the foreigners. The foreigners flee like bombs are falling from the sky, and most of them, I have been told, head for the beach at Sihanoukville.

As it happens, we at World Relief have our annual leadership retreat during this same time, and coincidentally or not, we also choose to meet at the beach.

We came here yesterday, Sunday, which was the second day of the water festival, so I was still able to join Ming Visal and the kids Saturday evening for the festivities. We went across the river where we were actually able to get a good view of the long boats gliding past, filled with clone-like men simultaneously huffing, puffing, rowing and chanting, led by a whistle-happy captain at the helm.

Back on the city side of things, the streets near the riverfront are barricaded against all motor vehicles, and this is strictly enforced by police officers, who make absolutely zero exceptions, except for rich people in Land Cruisers and the occasional extra-persuasive moto driver. Walking these streets though, is unbelievable. It is really just a stampede in slow motion. You’re shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people on whichever particular street you happen to be on, and then you turn onto another street and the same is true there, and on the next and the next. Many a heel is stepped on and if not for the convenient fact that Asians lack the concept of personal space, tempers would run high.

It occurred to me that maybe places like New Delhi and Dhaka are always like this, and maybe if I was there in such crowds for long periods of time I would experience the culture shock that has yet to phase me thus far.

We walked pretty far out of the way to eat at Mando Burger, presumably because the place is thought so highly of. I ordered what appeared to be a cheese steak on the picture menu but turned out to be a rather disappointing hot dog. Afterwards we braved the crowds once more and, passing vendors selling soda, beer, fruit, anemic meatballs, and flashing neon toys, we made our way back home where I could retreat to my bedroom with all the personal space a guy could ask for.

Holiday.

Yesterday in America it was Halloween. Here it was the King's birthday, so we had the day off. I went with the family to look for a plantation full of this particular kind of fruit tree that grows my favorite fruit, the one I mentioned earlier that has this clearish mucus-like stuff in the middle, that also happens to taste fantastic. You have to be careful when cracking them open though. You have to check the top, the part where the stem comes out. If it is white, it is fine, but if it is dark, it means a worm has gotten inside, and worms are generally not preferred when eating fruit. Anyway, it turns out this plantation was too far out, but in this certain area on the outskirts of the city on the other side of the river, a Muslim community, basically every house has these trees. And Ming Visal was kind enough to point out every single one of them to me. "See Tim, tree," she would say, steering with one hand and pointing with the other.

After this we went to Takhmao, a town south of the city where the family's cousins live. I joined some of the kids out in a field where we threw clods of dirt out into a flooded field that had lily pads in it. We all had a good time watching our projectiles create splashes while also raining down on our heads the dirt that detached midflight. Some kids who lived there managed to get the string for a kite stuck in a tree, and the water bottle used as a spool also got stuck up there. So thanks to my practical problem-solving skills (being a college graduate and all) we began chucking clods of dirt up into the tree. We actually dislodged the bottle enough for it to be sent higher into the tree, where dirt clods sadly don't go. These kids are nonetheless probably still throwing chunks of dirt into the tree even now.

We ate an early dinner at a road-side restaurant with chain link fence walls and a tin roof, the kind where people stare at you, wondering why a foreigner could possibly be eating there. We had noodles and soy bean smoothies. The family has been great about showing me a thing or two about dining etiquette, even down to which hand you use to hold the spoon, which one for the fork, and then what you do when you have chopsticks and utensils. I should point out that I know how to get the food from my plate to my mouth without all their pointers, but they are teaching me the "correct" way to do it. It is all very common sense to them, and they find it comical that I don't inherently know all the ins and outs of their system. It is kind of annoying, actually, being corrected all the time. It got to the point where they are taking the plastic seal off my bottle of water along with the lid and sliding it over to me with a wink and a smile, as if to say, "Don't worry. We got your back." I know they are just trying to be helpful, and I appreciate it, but sometimes I think they forget I have a brain. Of course, this is coming from the guy who in kindergarten was the only one in the class never honored with a shoe on the wall with his name on it, not because he never learned to tie his shoe, but simply because he never learned the "correct" way to tie a shoe, even though tying two loops in a bow works just as well as the unnecessarily confusing "standard" method.

Last night we headed down to the riverfront for a fireworks display in honor of the King's birthday. The royal palace right across the street was all lit up like Christmas, and as we pulled up in our air conditioned car, I almost forgot where I was and that it was muggy outside. As we walked up to the river, there were all these families who had laid down blankets on the grass for the fireworks, so then it began to feel like the Fourth of July at Long's Park. The place was packed out and there were vendors everywhere, though the funnel cake stand was noticeably missing. But what we ended up having was this strange Christmas-Fourth of July hybrid, all in honor of the King's birthday, on Halloween.

And, in typical Cambodian fashion, the fireworks never happened. But, as the locals would say, "Apanyaha." No worries.