...this is the detour we must take if we want to go to the bank...wonder when that little bridge will fall down.

looks like i will take off to kratie tomorrow  as yesterday was a brilliantly busy day at the restaurant: amongst others: a group of 16 with insufferable brats, and missionaries: i do not have much good to say about those zealots, but their rugrats are well behaved: they probably hit them over the head with the bible on a regular base.

 on the less fun side: the pump was stolen out of the well and Obama my white rooster was stolen too, the garden lights ditto.I hate this town and have defititely decided to sell the place and move closer toward the real world and my friends: maybe Phnom penh or kompong cham....

...and the dust blows on

Hope that all of you had a wonderful chrismas and wish you a happy new year!
here business pretty much as usual, whatever that maybe. the seson staggers away, sometimes marvelous, sometimes sluggish. had hoped to get to Kratie for a new years party at crazy chicago joe's restaurant - the place is on the mehkong and goes by the delightful name of 'red sun falling down'. but it looks like i will not make it there this year...
the city fathers and powers that be came up with a new bubu: now they got rid of the last of the tarmak in town- all the way to the bank- about 2 km out of town: the detour into town is still under construction... and they dug some more and closed off several streets- including mine- with huge heaps of earth, and everybody staggers over debris and that will not change anytime soon...

soo much red dust!

as it is dry and windy the dust is not far behind (or ahead as may be the case..) big clouds of reddish stuff alight on the horizon to join our own plentiful red dust that follows every car and moto, and heavens!- indeed- when the missionary plane hits our sorry excuse of a landing strip, it looks like all the forces of alexander the great are ready to storm our little outpost or... maybe ghengis khan.. but it is only the missionaries arriving (just as destructive if you ask me)...as my restaurant is not on the road- not good for business but better visibility, the dust is not too bad here, not like main street; today lian brought the cambodia daily from pp in his taxi. I read the rag and when i had finished it felt just like sand paper... reason beein' - the powers that be decided to spruce up da town and started by demolishing main street to become a boulevard of fifty meters wide: so everybody had to move their houses back by about ten meters or so. then bulldozers came and destroyed the street. plowed up all the old trees and left ; a dust bowl. then some kind of earth moving equipment was brought in to dig the monsoon drains. and so they did dig: now the street had holes- deep ones too. ( there was some fun when the bulldozer fell into its own hole and it took them several days of satisfying mucking around to get the bloody thing out).
then the powers that be decided that 'they maybe make mistake' and now everybody has to move back their houses yet again by several meters. did not go over to well with the natives indeed. so now everybody is fighting and the dust blows on and why do we need a boulavard anyways? beats us.

the dark days befor xmas..

as the dutch call it:.
...it has been awhile, sorry:
first because nothing was happening and then things happend and kept me trotting at a nice but not too dramatic clip: it was evident something like the season has started. for a little while the place was packed and so was bill's. so we made some money and started paying debts and stocking up and then... no more; the customers were gone and ...nothing. Now, this happens every year: the turnover between the people who want to be home for christmas and those who leave their country to flee the merry season..(still not an enjoyable moment after the 'crisis had hit our businesses rather hard...)..so until yesterday we were broke again, and then the first of the xmas haters arrived: just the people we like. not the ncv's, the dreadlocks, fake tatoos, recently artificially 'balded' 'price- of- cheap- banana pankakers'- discussing gap year idiots, but genuine people: writers, designers artists, photographers, and so on. a fun crowd, interesting and now we wait for the pp crowd to show up to lead these nice professionals astray... and off we will be...
when the eternal rainy season goes on and on, we always say; oh if it were only dry, and then it is and then we realize we did forget that after the rainy season the sunny , crisp( now that's an euphemism, we call it freezing) and.. aww.. the windy weeks start; it blows straight from where? manchuria? vladivostok or some such and it blows and blows. hard, enough to make my building and bed shake, to send the bullies under their blanket shivering and to make us wear multiple sweaters. how the banana plants survive this is beyond me- though they do look a tad tattered and ratty at the moment and tend to keel over prefferably onto power lines or on unsuspecting tourists. we do have a horrific time hacking the bloody things over before they do any serious damage-
..aw the ncv days aint't quite over yet. just had two: belgians, believe it or not....cheap as shit they were.( belgians as a rule can not resist a good meal and a few cold ones when they do they are seriously hardcore cheapos).
do not think any more customers will come tonight; it is cold windy and dark....
sooo an early night. ..

perfect days in paradise...

well, the season is off to a spectacularly sluggish start: yes there are customers and quite a few, and all of them give credence to the saying it's not quantity but quality. quality they are not.. they are on the whole dispicable and then some....
fat and blond and cheap are predominant: yesterday a sizable specimen rolled in after dark: ooh i have not eaten all day. and she ordered a lot and drank some and then she said can you change 50 dollars, and of course i was not able to, this being one of those interminable holidays of two weeks or there abouts- banks closed an all that.... oh i will pay you tomorrow- she said and bored me for another hour and the next day when i did need the money to buy cooking gas she was nowhere to be seen and when finally she came she said she was sick implying my food-( turned out she drank iced coffee in snuol of all places; i did not eat there she said, and you had coffee with that ice there in it i said??? wow that is stupid!!! i thought and she heard me...in the end she coughed up all twelve dollars that she owed me and will come back for more food(?)tomorrow)-to eat- i perceive that as a threat!).
but then yet it was it is one of those days today:
as by now we are truly poor bong sereri has taken to selling the fruit of our trees; and we make quite a bit of money from our bananas, milk fruit, guavas and so on. the bananas are quite a lot and ripe and have to go: so do the coconuts, but that is another` story all together..
the bananas: banana is the biggest grass in the world- also the heaviest as it turns out; the bananas- the fruit grow and grow, the plant: the so called grass lists and lists as the fruit grow, and those things get quite dangerous and one has to cut them down... the fruit by now getting to twenty kilos or more.. so we cut them and down they come shaking the earth and having bong serrei and me running for our lives more often than not...( the other day i tried this alone and the plant fell on me and i got stuck and it took me forever to dig my way out from down yonder, and a few bruises, now how ridiculous can it get bruised by bananas, try to live that one down....).
why are we doing this to ourselves bong serrrei and me wondered let the sellers get the fruit off the plants and we get a dollar less. then so be it we said ( as in depression without champangne is not worth it is as my friend fay would put it so nicely) so now the sellers/buyers come to the land and have to cut the fruit themselves.. so do come their dog; and the bullies killed it.. the dog, not the seller quite.. yet... : the dogs were trying to bite us...( ensuing discussion: you owe for dead dog. no dog bit us. and anyways- says bong serrei :you eat dog anyway..so you want money i get dog i eat myself..) the buyers bought that one .. pouff!! lucky break that one ...we did not have to pay for the dead mutt).
meanwhile: big crashing sound in the bar, glass`works a lot- breaking: damn rats i think and run into the restaurant: no rat, although most of the last remaining wine gasses are broken: stuck on the wall- mortified: caruso the ghekko: sorry he mumbles; there was this juicy spider and i.. i.. just ran into those weird things- , i did not even see them..and the spider behind...' 'getta move on, caruso' i say, and chase him off and remove the shards or our last vestige of civilisation...

teutonic

..another good one when it comes to English speaking hereabouts:
a few years back at Christmas the big tsunami hit the west coast of Thailand.
My manager happily explained to my – (German) customers: no, the cyclops not make the tsunami, tsunami happen when Teutonic plates shift....
( nobody on the hill ever said tectonic plates ever again.of course....).

yesterday i will fix...

..the mouse- another mouse is behaving beautifully and the little arrow stopped meandering all over the screen all on its own without being prompted to s, oo, luxury!!!

the weather seems to be holding up: some clouds and the odd shower while the sun still shines and one or two rainbows are visible..

The terrace lights blew the other day, big time. Polly- the 'politician's brother' and Polly himself, the politician ( I.e. Electrician)- Polly's brother still has not figured out that the word is electrician*)- say we need new cable to fix the problem- from phnom penh- the stuff here is worthless. Which is true. So dark it will stay for the time being, except for candles and maybe some of those unsavory things that I can load up and then hang in a tree just to have them give the ghost at the most inconvenient time..

the nights hereabouts fall with an enormous and quick thud, and the moon is down to a pretty but inefficient sliver... and fireflies, pity one can not train them... so dark it is and American couple got caught in the dark with their hamburgers. Luckily I found a candle or two that had escaped the lightening of the barbeq. Things seem to be moving here and are looking up or so we hope: to day my laundry actually dried!! all of it!!! ( for month on end the only way to get really dry clothes was to just put them on, no kidding.

..the jack fruit tree, seen from my terracde upstairs

*) Polly's brother will start working for me in about two weeks, that will be fun, a classic conversation: the light not broken. Me: ooh ??? not broken?? but they do not work!!- yes ( uttered with some enthusiasm) not broken. Me :then what?, not broke!. Me :so? Him not broke! So we fix! Now I get it : he means broken... another one: ' yesterday after school I will come and fix okay lights not broken!? ' - this will be fun!!!)

seems like the rains have left us for now, maybe even for the duraton of the coming dry season: sunny days, almost hot, and very nippy nights that leave us with a second blanket ready to use and use we do it..
tentatively the first tourists venture into town again- nothing to write home about yet, but it is a beginning.
The garden looks overgrown though beautiful, the river is retreating to manageable proportions, and the jack fruit tree sports a hammock that is almost over the water...and the mouse on the computer will not work to day at all an i am giving up writing for today..

of spiders and collegues...

..i just so wish that for once something nice would happen...

.in the aftermath of the cyclone, the tourists stay away, and will do so for at least another week, and the restaurant is dead and I'm broke and it is boring, like watching astro turf grow or chewing sand so it feels.

Last night a miserable soul stole my garden lights, the ones that light out the path so my customers can make it to the restaurant... ( I think that just maybe a certain lodge in this town pays somebody to make my life harder:the other day they sent some of their customers to spy on me, those people bored me for an hour and did not even buy a bottle of water. Also they 'stole' or shall we say 'took over' jack's elephants while he was in England. Now I do find jack a superb asshole, but stealing his elephants and mahouts is pretty crass.).

As for the chickens, Dumbfuck the second is a calming presence and for the first time in month the chickens seem rather well adjusted: unless I am late feeding them, then Dumbfuck jumps on the terrace, stamps his feet and crows at house party volume until I dish out the feed...

Had a bit of a run in with a spider, a big one , sitting on a beam right next to my bed; at least as big as my hand, legs out to here, scaly looking and quivering and striped, meant to impersonate a snake- a banded krait- I presume... ' I'm here and what are you gonna do about it ..' the spider insinuated: quiver quiver the legs... - now I draw the line somewhere; NO SPIDERS IN BED! So I grabbed the broom – ouh ooh the spider went and vanished behind the beam, when I looked around the beam, I found Caruso, our foot long house ghekko, munching, crunching on the spider, some legs,-about four- scaly and striped still quivering outside Caruso's mouth.. Caruso all but waved to me, and I am sure he would have said ' ' thanks' mate' , if he did not have his mouth so full!

Dumbfuck the second ,der Nibelung and Queen Latiffa

....let's face it, chickens are about the most stupid creatures that walk the earth: besides that, they are also extremely distrustful- they think everybody wants to eat them- and let's face it; they do have a bit of a point there. But chickens are also mean: and some are meaner than others: there was Josephine, ( a good momma, we have to give her that) but man, was she mean and just crazy.... violent too, if one can imagine a violent chicken, but she was, she was.... until she keeled over, presumably of old age as we could never catch her.

Her descendants make up my chicken coop after thefts and the ravages of the rainy season: three hens and a rooster. All as paranoid and as mean as Josephine. Plus the rooster is the brother of the ladies. A three legged chicken does not seem to be too bad an idea to me, but somehow I do not think that it will work out quite that way. The ladies seemed to have figured out the same thing: they are of laying age but no eggs so far. So when Bill presented me with a new rooster a genuine jungle fowl; he , Bill that is-seems to get one a year- with the impending moon festival from a phnong family, and as he prefers coq au vin to a live chicken, I wind up with the gifted rooster: not that I mind, this one is as nice as the last one, Dumfuck (the first), and this will be Dumbfuck- the second....friendly, almost tame, big and pretty he is....

My resident fowl did not agree: the ladies walked off in a veritable chicken huff, and` Der Nibelung, the rooster went after poor Dumbfuck ( the second), who still was a bit wrinkled from his day long jungle trip in a rice bag. Dumfuck ran, der Nibelung followed, and Dumbfuck lost a lot of his baroque tail feathers. And der Nibelung would not let up...

That's it I decided, this month is a bad month for chickens in Asia:` all these festivals, and each and every one needs a sacrificed chicken.... soo there a re no good ones left in the marked and I am out of coq au vin.....

so after dark I raided the chicken coop: grabbed der Nibelung and put him under the chicken pen for holding until his turn came to join the food chain. the next morning, a veritable racket in the front yard:

Dumbfuck running for his life, and der Nibelung pursuing him: the little creep had chewed or shall we say, beaked his way out of the coop destroing it good. Dumfuck left for higher ground and spent a miserable day on the terrace: der Nibelung does not dare to come too close there.

In the evening I caught him again:this time I wised up some: I was not nice and bound him. Put him under what was left of the pen. Just to find him, there in the morning, but the rest of the pen reduced to splinters. ( choy' said bong serrei when she saw the damage, s'one 's Josephine's, isn't it ?' she mused. And let's kill him. And she did.)

I cooked him on open fire, with lots of my last red wine and he turned out great, lot's of meat on him too: shit yeah, said bong serrei, the bastard sure ate enough rice!.

Tentatively, Dumbfuck-( the second ) came out of hiding: the ladies seemed slightly charmed by him, especially queen latiffa, the big whit hen, spitting image of her mother Josephine in more than just beauty, unfortunately....

so the chickens charmed the rooster and vice versa; until it got dark... the ladies had figured that the chicken house was not safe, so they flew into the jack fruit tree's branches. Dumbfuck tried to follow.. and.. fell into the river: the ladies s sniggered and I had to jump in and rescue him as the waters are still running fast after the taifoon...

soo now dumbfuck – the second sits on the terrace drying up-poor guy....he gives sad clucking noises,`wrapped in a` towel he is...

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ouch!

...the rains are abaiting and the insects make up for lost time, it seems.
The electricity is still feeble and slightly soaked. The unmistakable sound of a new electric fire- the problems in the kitchen had been solved by polly my neighbor's son: he learned how ' to be politician'  from the ngo's- according to his brother who is learning english, but somehow can't get the difference in sound between politician and electrician (or electricity for that matter: you have problem politics? he asks, when i come looking for his brother...)
well anyways there was that sound again,but by now it is far too dark to trouble the 'politician' so i just turned off the outside lights that were making that hissing sound and hoped for the best...
and it worked - until i went to the toilet. dark there of course, but i know my way around found the pot and sat down .there must have been something on the seat.... ouch!!! i must have sat down on an ant.. ouch... aouch again! this is NOT an ant! no it was not, it was one of those mean 2 inch big  and very painful cambodian hornets...that i flattened with my sorry hide, and it took revenge. ouch, and i am out of hystamines.. and in a foul mood, it hurts!!!
yet another fun night in paradise!!!

high winds, feeble sun..

..after a rather scary night, the winds are still high, but a feeble sun is trying to break through the clouds...
not much damage luckily, apart from some of my passionfruit vines beeing ripped off the roof and a small electrical fire in the kitchen nothing seems amiss. The river did go up a little bit, but not too much and is receeding slowly now.
due to the electrical` pericles there is no current in my kitchen and i am separated from my kitchen motors for now. Moni is supposed to fix it, but has not shown up yet....
everything is dripping wet, and as soon as a ray of two of sun have made some inroads a quick shower drenches everything anew...
Seems that the storm did very much damage in the lowlands of cambo and flooded at least the komong thom area, but that is about all we know yet.

waiting for the cyclone to hit....

cyclone Ketsana is about to hit da nang in less than two hours...That is still quite a`ways from here, but we do feel the storm all right already: torrential rains, fierce gusts of wind that do not howl but screech, its cold and wet and the river is- very- high again....there is nothing one can do but batten down the hatches- provided one has them- and wait and hope for the best....strangely enough i did have customers for lunch and have a reservation for tonight (provided they can made it down of course) seems the weather creates an urge of impulse for want of a better word, in westerners for... comfort food. so comfort food it is....

..and the jungle stands in ominous silence?....

it has been a busy week at the restaurant, loads of fun customers, and i kept trotting at an if not brisk at  at least a fun pace.
 today the rains are coming down again as if there will never be sun again, and the stream of guests has dried up again so to speak.
But.. i am quite tired, so i will go to bed early.... and sleep: if  nature will let me that is...
you must all have read at some time of other,those wonderful books where the hero/ and or/ heroine gets to spend the night in the jungle- involontarily most of the time. and the text will go; ' as the night falls, the jungle stands in ominous silence' - or some such... Are you kidding??? somebody- the writer in this case has not done their homework). the jungle, silent??  the jungle never, never shuts up (nor the creatures that live within, as it may be. the case.) there are always the crickets, of course: chrischris chris chrischrischris and so on. that is only one kind of course; the next cricket  goes 'chrickchrik- chrick chrick'- and the next one sounds like a cellphone, the old fashioned kind going off- all night . then there is the sound of small creatures getting killed by bigger creatures: squeek, sceetch-craaw.!! as in : game over. then there are the frogs: they sound like a myriad of symphony orchestras tuning up( all night).: brooh. boon brrooh boon... (quite soothing actually)
Add some gibbons in the distance- those are a noisy lot: bobblegobble ouuukouuk, brraaah! and some insistent night bird on some mission ofrother going: boon, booon- boon- boon. all night....
ad the wind, the river and the odd ouwl Huueehhuuhee!
ominous silence it is not....- it's a bloody racket!!

 I guess it is time to get back into the kitchen and work....and I will need customers, that is for sure... am still hurting, and think i would like to take a break in Phnom Penh

I' like to imagine Iddy sitting own little lotus flower, attentively looking up at Buddha. And Buddha will patiently explain: wait for nine days and rest, then your soul will be free to roam the worlds for ninety nine days and on the hundredth day you will be reborn, and as you only brought joy to the world you may choose who you want to be. And Iddy will say really? Truly? And Buddha will smile and say, yes it is true, and Iddy will give a little chirp. wag her tail and happily jump  so that lotus flower will shake ever so slightly, and then she will curl up at Buddha' s feet for seven days.

RIP,iddy.

one does think, as one gets older that one gets immune to grief, or at least that one can put it into its place and leave it there and let it wither away by lack of attention. not so, if only...
iddy died last night in my arms, and i can not stop crying...its just a dog, i try to tell myself, but that is not what is- was, not at all.She was a character, a personality and very much a part of our life here. just growing up, beginning to be a person, and then there were the things she stood for; the two years or so, that i cooked for bhp, and iddy, my treat for completing my little share of the project (well, i hope),a reminder that- what? that it can be done, than one can triumph over adversity, logistics enz. and have fun doing so....
i can not look anywhere without thinking that i will see her, skipping about, chasing a chicken, barking at a bill collector, or hiding one of her many treasures carefully behind the jackfruit tree. her reddish fur a streek of colour in the rainy season's green as she decides to' do something' about our neighbors cow..
iddy was proof that one 'can run away' with the circus' and get away with it, but in the end: the circus runs away with us, and make no mistake.

Iddy Troubles

literally overnight our little Iddy seems to have hit puberty and has become quite an insufferable little menace: it had been raining for days and days without let up. Needless to say, the dogs` who hate water in any form or size stayed in as much as possible and began to suffer from something akin to cabin fever, and of course they did blame me for the rain: as far as they are concerned it is my task to stop that wet foolishness outside.
Every night I had to get up several times to check out the river and make sure that we were not in any danger from flooding and subsequent drowning. ( That in turn did wonders for my disposition, and left me pretty tired too). So when after several nights of this I had to get up yet again, barely conscious I crawled outside, no the river had not yet gone over the rim, good, back to the house close the door, grab a towel- the last dry one- and back to bed and to sleep. Ohh my Iddy is making a racket... took me several minutes to figure out that the noise came from outside! When I opened the door- feeling terribly guilty ,of course, in she marched, ecstatically happy to seem me to begin with, and then: she started kicking her back heels, the way male dogs do when they want to make a very strong point to other male dogs.. and she kicked her legs and kicked them and then some more..reminding me vaguely of a kid trying out four letter words.
The next day she really started kicking her heels sending mud, earth grass and dog turds flying every which way. And she kept at it too. Jarring old Elvis's patience who happens to think that kicking heels is his prerogative. Does Iddy have a case of gender confusion, we wonder?
Next thing we know is she starts following bill, back to the coffee shop when he comes to do his Internet here in the mornings. Bill who is a gentles soul and then some, will retrace his steps down the hill as soon as he discovers Iddy and deliver her back home (actually Dt did her one better there: she went through a phase when she would stow away in my customer's suv s, just to pop up on the seat next to the driver miles from home on some difficult jungle stretch forcing them to turn the car around to deliver her back home. Fortunately Dt outgrew that one.).
Of course, Iddy is smarter than all of us combined, and once she figured out that bill will deliver her back post haste, she left before bill, who found her at the coffee shop, bleeding from a tear under her eye, obviously she had gotten into a scrape and gotten roughed up pretty good. When I arrived at the shop to take her home, there she was, leashed, proudly grinning her best Mona Lisa grin, all but willing to go back home. Fought me tooth and nail on the motor bike, and is now doing time on an -albeit long- leash....I do not want to get unduly worried about her new behavior, but the question is is...how` much should I let her get away with... and ,I can see Elvis's patience wearing thin, as she kicks him wakes him up pulls his ear and does her very best to provoke him.... Dt is not much help in this she looks on, not unlike a proud mother who's brat can do no wrong......

Iddy is really on a protest jag.. and is driving us all quite crazy; first thing this morning she waited till I was in the bathroom, truly at the point of no return – me thus-( about 6 am, we do get up early here) and she took off.. Elvis followed her to the gate and when I finally made it there, he said to me; she went that way, she can't do that!! well she did, so i phoned Bill and sure enough she had arrived at the coffee shop. ( this is dangerous, she can not just wander around like that, there is traffic and the very real danger of her getting stolen:let's face it, she looks expensive and she is still not very massive and it is a holiday and people need money...)Bill had leashed Iddy, he had no string, so he used a piece of electric cable. When I came up to the coffee shop Iddy had stripped most of the cable of its insulation, feverishly working on the rest. She was not very happy to see me. So I went to the market, when I was finished there I picked her up, tierd to get her onto the moto; she did not want to come and fought me tooth and nail- scratched me up really good. When I finally got her home, I did leash her, and she still managed to pick a good fight with Elvis- probably for telling on her- now Elvis has a limp, Iddy is foul mooded- still leashed – and a Vietnamese ceramic( majolica) elephant- 4 feet high, a veritable monument to bad taste that I dearly loved -lays in smithereens....
About to despair, I thought back' :Elvis was no better at that age!!! there was all those times when he stole mangoes at the little corner market in snookyville, and he would streak down the road with a mango in his mouth followed by a formidable and very enraged market lady armed with her flip flop. And all those times he took off and I searched for hours just to find him sitting in a most disreputable gambling table in one if those renegade gambling parlors watching the crap games..
..or he would be crapping right on the garden path leading towards Rodolph very upscale restaurant next door- actually we always enjoyed that one, Rodolph being an asshole.
Soo.. Elvis should be talking..
so, well,he turned out all right, I remind myself time and again... but all you out there any bright ideas???? please, i` am a bit- now that is an euphemism - worried!!!!

...and it shall be sustainable...

The other day I heard a wonderful; story:
in the fairy world of local` ngos the word sustainable is very fashionable and gets used in every second sentence' everything has to become; sustainable ( that ngo's and sustainable are about as oximoronic as America and culture seems to bother them not.)
So there was this very rich ngo ,who invited another very rich ngo to watch the latest sustainable project they had just finished: a well (sustainable) and a filter installation (sustainable) to clean the village's water to make it all sustainable... the well was beautiful” I.e it was pretty and it actually worked, I.e. There was water coming out of it. Now they went to the filter installation (sustainable) housed in a very sustainable hut, pretty local( sustainable) materials and inside the (sustainable) water filter installation: and it worked!.. only the locals had modified it to some spiritual and of course sustainable goal: neatly reassembled the filter installation had become a very ( sustainable) distillery,` happily churning out the local moonshine... and so the project was finally, truly sustainable, (although the ngo s didn' t think this funny at all...)

..half a tea`bag

the rains are still doing their very  best to make our lives as miserable as possible. surprisingly, the guests keep showing up at the restaurant, and most of them, even more surprisingly are absolutely delightfull!!!!
but, there will always be a hair or two in the soup so to speak: today two french ( of course, french) arrived, classic NCV"s ( no commercial values): they ordered two cups of hot water with one(1!) teabag- for half the price- of course. i told them that i do not do half tea bags, one bag p.p. or none. They went for - oh horrors- one tea bag each!!!

rain rain and rain ,and more mud of course

it has been raining now for days on end, the river gets higher and higher and has me worried; it is not yet quite at the door, but it looks like it might be so soon. the wash hangs on the line getitng soaked and more soaked and begins to rot, garmets that have been taken into the house and hang from many places fare not much better....
we all are , wet and freezing, depressed and wondering if we will ever see the sun again: or have a shadow for that matter, aww, well ,we can always- as a form of compensation- admire - like narcissus-our bedraggled appearances in the many newly emerged rivers, puddles and streams.. 
strangely; the restaurant is doing very well indeed- i should have no customeres at all, but for some undefinable reason, a steady steream of tourists brave the rain, mud and slippery garden path- the odd one gobsmakking  onto the ground.. and they want' food, food and more food' . where do they come from? i do not know.. but they are nice people too, and the restaurant is more fun than it has been in a long time....
meanwhile the river rises and it feels a bit  like dancing on a vulcano....

three is a crowd

The relationship between DT and little Iddy has always been, well, guarded at best. Now it seems that the ‘murder of the mutt’ changed all that… the ladies seem to have bonded, paw in paw they lay on the couch, undoubtedly hurting from the fight- anybody who ever beat up anybody will know what I mean- but there they sleep, snoring and farting and totally happy. but , three is a crowd and poor Elvis is decidedly not well come in this new feminist structure, he looks on, snorts ambles over to me, lays his head on my knee and mourns with a sigh and a barely concealed whine….( I tell him never to mind those bitches, and pet him, and he almost believes me..)

When Iddy is not sharing the couch with DT, she decided that I need protection. So there she lays in front of the so very steep stairs that leads from the loft to the restaurant. And it does get very dark here at night and of course she does not tell me that she is guarding me and lays there... several times now I have been sent flying: into my library- section south east asian history, - plenty of hard covers- ouch…

And Iddy does grow, ever so often I think, that she is small for her age, and barely grows, and then the next morning it seems as if she shot up an inch over night. The collar has been let out to the last notch to accommodate her quadruple chins, and she is almost as high as Elvis, though not nearly as wide nor as heavy.

For a long time she was able to sleep under the tables at the coffee shop, when she got too big for that she moved up onto the footrest/ newspaper shelf under the table. Now, well she still fits but it is a tight one: paws hang out on one side, the tail on the other, then her head goes outboard... needless to say, we all have to hang tightly to our beers while this maneuvering goes on, until finally, she still somehow manages to fit. Still. For how long that will last? We wonder…

aww, life can be nasty out here

..sooner or later, thus had to happen, but still   we all are a bit upset, although each of us for different reasons: me because I fear that the neighbors might be pissed off, Iddy because she thinks she does not get enough credit,   Elvis because he was at home and did not participate and Dt because I did not let her take home what? Our neighbors’ dead dog, the one DT and Iddy sent a better- next incarnation with scary precision and efficiency….

..we were walking down from the coffee shop, just rounding the bent towards my property when one of the neighbors three mutts decided to attack me, I kicked it- Iddy grabbed it by the ear, and Dt let out an almost human screech and just went for it.. And I... let her. (. I still carry the scars from one such attack- enough to prevent me from ever wearing a skirt shorter than ankle length- and they still hurt), and bad person that I am just looked on... in the end i lifted off dt by her collar and reeled iddy in- too late, i think, the dog crawled away and there was a lot of blood, i propelled my beloved renegades home- just to find that all the blood on them- a lot – was not theirs.. and there was almost nothing for me to disinfect…

What now, should I punish my dogs for doing their job? No way, they did exactly what they are supposed to do: take care of their human…. Still, coming from the west I find that principle a bit hard to stomach, I am glad that miserable mutt is gone before it hurts one of my customers, or- another child- he had already bitten a kid, who was just walking by on her way back from school the other day….but still, it was bloody…but as there is no legislation here to prevent any dog in  the streets to harm just anybody just walking by in the street…kids even, and no police will come and do anything about it/ and people refuse to either train or restrain their dogs… well…still….

lightening the cable

A few spectacular thunderstorms have kept us wet and inside. This morning, the internet did not work, upon inquiring what could be the matter- ( I had been trying to pay my internet bill for days, but found nothing but incomprehension at the office, so I feared some higher power had turned me off..)- I received this enchanting piece of literature by way of text message:

“Hello madam. Today the connection error because of lightening the Cable. All place have problem. Please we are repaired thanks.’

Well indeed we are ‘repaired’ now, and my bill? Still unpaid as nobody knows apparently what to do with the money. Fine by me….

'the unruly traffic has to be diciplined' ( the police)

Since about two weeks this country has traffic rules. Actually the rules were there for about a year or two, but now they get enforced. That this is a lively source of income for the patrolling policemen goes without saying and goes a long way towards explaining their ardor: according to the phnom penh post 60 000 vehicles got impounded in the first two weeks ( I did not know we had that many in this country). Needless to say retrieving an impounded vehicle is expensive, so one can either pay the boys a dollar each time one gets stopped- that gets expensive too in the long run, or one can actually comply. Needles to say that the necessity of any road rules passes most Khmer totally by. And fun activities such as speeding, drunk driving and biking without a helmet or lights will be sorely missed by all of us…

Amongst the more absurd dictates is that each motorbike has to be equipped with not one but two mirrors (they can be purchased from the police directly- as can helmets at slightly inflated prices).

Grandma next door got sick and tired of paying dollar after dollar to keep vehicle and grandson out and free. So she purchased a pair of mirrors. I found her wielding a screwdriver musing,’ the dear lord Buddha only knows why they need those and why two, surly they do not want grandson to squeeze his pimples while driving, so they should not face him- no, it is more likely’, she says, ‘it is more likely that the police will want to squeeze their pimples when they stop us, and of course there are always two of them, of course, they will want a mirror each to themselves..’ and she screws the mirrors on, facing forward towards the road. ‘That should keep ém happy’, she says….

ooh, well as Mrs Child would say

..as I cook for a living and like doing so, and finally got internet, it stands to reason that I would take al ok at what the rest of the world is cooking these days: my god the net abounds with culinary sites: so to read I went, and read and then some more, but ooh…. most cooking seems more to be a spectators sport than anything else these days; vanity, vanity and vanity abounds, chefs on TV, fans of chefs on TV, and fans commenting on fans of chefs on TV(: Julia and Julia or whatever being a case in point.).all of a sudden I do feel so very far away from the rest of the world- which of course I am- but also, I realize that I do not mind too much: when the sites do not talk about chefs talking about chefs *), it gets really sad: when people actually decide to deal with actual food it does get even scary at times::there is this one person who read somewhere that stock is made of bones-and to give her credit, ( oh the dare, the dare!) she tries and succeeds to make stock from bones!- wow.. (For the culinary uninterested: all stock made of bones, and no, it should not come out of a package!!!!).On the more professional sites: oooh horrors, the American legislation tries to force restaurants to put the amount of calories each dish contains on the menu- (they gotta be kidding)-. There seems to have gone quite an amount of suing going on about people getting fat of the restaurant food. (Hey guys ever heard of stopping the eating part when you had enough???).

And on I read and more of the same and I begin to wonder: what about the food? And finally I find a refreshing read; a gentleman actually went, found- and bought a pig’s head and went to cook and did it/ HE DID IT! I laud his effort, but I wonder: living in cambo, where every meat stalls has the (whole) heads of the hogs lined up for purchase to be cooked; doesn’t everybody boil their hog’s head??? They do not of course.

Then there is the slow cook movement, I laud their efforts and think at the same time, how sad, how very sad that we do need a movement to enjoy, what? Old fashioned food.

So, I cite Alice B. Tocklass: every deed in the kitchen begins with murder… a fact; people in the west seem to be unable to stomach these days.

Ooh well, to speak with Mrs., Child…..

*) Btw: all chefs who meet chefs hit each other on the shoulder and call each other chef! Chef! Chef! We all do that, we are all guilty of that one, even in Phnom Penh…

unspeakable things 'n rumtopf

Little Iddy has not been on speaking terms with me for the better part of a day: she came home from an extended foray in the garden, where he had amused herself with unspeakable things, even Elvis normally the uncondended master when it comes to rolling in lovely debris, took one whiff, was truly impressed and went off presumably to find the source of this particular heaven. Iddy, who by now was proudly stinking up the restaurant got caught and transported to the bathtub, which is now –thanks to half a liter of bleach- free of leaches. She got her bath, got dried off and took refuge under the big table where she took turns sulking and torturing the cat.

When it was time of our walk, she came around.

the dogs have been out of sorts today anyways, well deserved as it turned out. Yesterday evening they did greet our guests with a lot more than their usual enthusiasm, they jumped and smiled and barked and danced. Took me a while to figure it out: the guys were very, very happy and very, very drunk…:

One of the specialties in the restaurant is a German rumtopf: a dessert/drink concoction of rum, (tropical) fruit and sugar... In the west this thing takes about six month to get ‘ripe’ enough for consumption, here it takes about three days. After a while, the left over fruit and rum will turn and blow bubbles and get very, very alcoholic and should not be consumed anymore. This load was a goner. And as two bottles of rum are on their way up from phnom penh, I told Bongserrei to throw it away…. So she did, only instead of throwing it into the toilet or the river, the threw it out of the window, and well, the dogs found the fruit and ate it….

On the goose, or should I say left over gander front: Maxilmilan is on death row. In a bamboo cage that looks like something out of the deer hunter.

He attacked a group of guests, Elvis went after him, nailed him, Maxilmilan passed out again, I grabbed him and threw him into the cage. He woke up very quickly, stuck his long neck out of the cage and still managed to bloody Elvis’s nose. (I nailed a plank over the hole and feed him plenty of food until his time…).

Iddy is growing into a very well behaved and adjusted young lady indeed, although her barking policy leaves some to be desired: for example: she goes off at any chicken not mine that comes onto our land as if al chickens of Cambodia were descending on us to murder us in our sleep, throw us into the river and take over our garden. Whenever Iddy goes off, my snoozing bullies get into action, thinking we are under some kind of attack,

Eher? Where is the danger? They yell, get all excited and upset, just to…find, a chicken. They are not amused as barking is only allowed for bill collectors of any kind. I suppose Iddy will learn eventually, as she does most from the bullies, the good and the bad I might add….

One talent of the bullies so far, luckily, escapes her. Bullies, (and I hate to admit it) are accomplished farters. The abundance of fruit to be found, stolen and eaten in my and the neighbors garden goes a long way, of course. So far Iddy does not let fly nearly as badly as the rest of the gang. Good thing too….the bullies can clear the bar in three minutes flat.

Well, there have been some incidents in the past, there was that time when Dt- who, lovely bully that she is, is the uncontested master when it comes to letting fly. Did so and farted the bosses of the United Nations demining committee of Cambodia- who were guests of my corporate guests- straight out of the place. When DT settled between their chairs during dinner I knew we had it coming so I tried to call her over to the bar to contain the damage. It did not work, Ian, who was sitting at the table too, saw what I was trying to do and promptly cracked up, so now the big UN guys thought it was Ian who. farted, and were shocked but too polite to remark upon…everybody thought that was funny, very funny except the UN'ers, who didn’t get it and left shortly thereafter* (*everybody else got spectacularly drunk after they had gone)….

.. A few days later a very pretty and lovely young Japanese lady, an investment banker sat at the bar. The corporate gang had finished their dinner, and were boozing and roaming around... one of the bosses decided to make a play for the Japanese lady, Ian followed him to the bar, so did Dt… Ian, always ready to instigate mayhem started getting between boss and lady- (hey, Ian is not an opera singer for nothing.) so he went: ‘…actually he as we are gay and legally married…’-(He, Ian is -but not to the boss, his spouse, Chris, had already left, presumably to avoid a hangover)... Of course now the young lady, thinks herself save, ‘oh how nice’, she says somewhat, well wondrous would be the word... the boss – had a few (so had we all), but he don’t get it, ‘yes, married’ he mumbles... meanwhile dt, who had followed the exchange with interest so far, decides to settle down and sure enough under the bosses chair and she lets off some of her better ones; ‘ooh not again!!’ Yells Ian. ‘Not again please!’don’t do it now!!’ ‘what? What?’ says boss, who after eating a year in my place seems to be immune for DT’s misdemeanors. The Japanese lady looks rather puzzled, sniffs carefully, and flees right into the arms of a spectacularly ratty Belgian backpacker. They leave- together. ‘What was that all about?’’ the boss says and oh noo,’’ and as it dawns ’she did not think that we were married? And that I did the farting? And ooh man that stinks! ‘’

( he was pretty angry and did not find this funny in the least, actually he has not forgiven Dt nor us- either yet or ever- I think,. -Actually the man lucked out, later we found out that the young Japanese flower is an accomplished martial arts master)….

Iddy's Collection

..After a few busy days in the restaurant it was time to restock- for as far as that is possible hereabouts: there is a ‘Vietnamese Depot’ i.e. a barn like dark and dusty endeavor that sells whole sale, what? A whole lot of things- most of them use less, provided one can find them at all. But, yes, they do have beer and pretty decent coffee. While stocking up on those items, I also found a small pink rubber ball. I bought it for Iddy. She used to have one just like this. A while ago a depressingly new age Norwegian family- from Goteborg- came to the restaurant, their four year old brat being brought up in the ‘anti authoritative’ manner ( I thought that one went out with the arc… not so). The brat managed not surprisingly to annoy the shit out of my staff, me and a group of expats from pp, who had already suffered several days of this toddler’s unchecked tantrums at their guesthouse. Somehow the brat got a hold of Iddy’s ball and chewed it to piece while Iddy mournfully looked on. Everybody except the parents saws it, but none of us found it necessary to inform them that their off spring was dining on the probably very germ ridden chewy toy of my dog… the remains of the ball got carefully hidden amongst Iddy’s other treasures behind the jackfruit tree, but for playing it was useless by now. When I bounced the new ball in Iddy’s direction, she jumped up and after it. So did Elvis, who grabbed the ball, sniffed it and said:’ man you stupid, whaddaya want this for? Can’t even eat it’… Iddy, bowing to peer pressure promptly lost interest too.

When I hid ‘the ball behind the tree, in the hope to rekindle her interest, her latest treasures included:

Three wine corks, the head of a chicken that my neighbor sacrificed to the spirits in her garden, part of an umbrella spoke, a lighter, a pack of cigarettes and a flashlight… made me wonders: , what could she be possibly up to, behind that jack fruit tree???

those geese are more trouble than they're...

Seems that our goose problems are far from over: Iddy has learned that one can win from a goose…So yesterday she decided to give chase on old Maxilmilan, who was actually just minding his own business – for once. Maximilian fled in horror, pursued by Iddy; he somehow managed to stay out of her reach by about the length of a tail feather.

Aww, said Elvis who was soaking up a few sparse rainy season sunbeams on the front step: that’s not how it’s done! And he got away before I could get a hold of him. And sure enough, he had Maximilian crucified in the greenery faster than I could reach them. Iddy jumping up and down excitedly, yelping kill him Elvis, kill him! Don’t I yelled, and tackled Elvis by the collar , pulled him off Maxilmilan and sent him flying with an unusual, though well deserved kick in the cojones. Meanwhile, Maximilian lies prone, though no blood is visible. I pick him up by the wings, lifeless he hangs, reminding me of Swans Lake for some reason.

Iddy still tried to grab his tail feathers, I chased her off and she joined Elvis a few feet away. Meanwhile Maxilmilan hangs still lifeless in my arms. I check him, no his neck is not broken, a heart attack? I think faintly when a shifting, crunching sound underfoot gets mine and the dog’s attention. Aww, and I told and told the gardener, put some wood over that old well, instead she chose to use corrugated iron, not strong enough to bear our combined weight, all three of us jump back- fast. While the iron sheet slowly slides into the abyss and we scramble for solid ground Maxilmilan the little shit decides to wake up from his dead faint, turns his-unharmed and surprisingly agile neck and promptly bites my shoulder. Hard. Ouch! Now I am ready to kill the little monster, and the dogs know it, ‘see....’ they say and grin. ( the only reason I did not commit cold blooded murder then and there is that I do not want to give a bad example to the dogs, and besides there resides already a frozen goose in the freezer, and there is no more room for yet another. Maybe I should send an n sms through the local expat community, ‘Sunday dinner will be roast goose!’)

...nonono, not a Georgia O'keefe, just one of my orchids close up. it just bust into almost- spontaneus bloom

Aww, more Ncv’s and French too- the worst kind, except for Israelis that is: let us be honest here, when French are good- as customers that is- they are good, but the good ones are few and very far between indeed. These were typically bad ones, six bitches abreast, saying oh it is too expensive and we are students, and go for the brunch menu, and take kebabs- I throw in fries for nothing and the water they order - I do not charge for water… ..And as I am down to my last 200 riel (about 20 cts,) I am in a bit of a bind here, and no position to argue, as much as I would like to throw them out, I frankly can’t afford it. Plus they come recommended by some very good French indeed- so I am stuck with that twittering bunch, fries, best beef in cambo for the kebabs- that are meant to accompany some other dish at the expat brunches... well I will do my best I keep telling meself in the kitchen enz. Enz and I do and they twitter and twatter and ask for more water and more fries until I have to tell them no more potatoes- true too, so push to shove dinner for 6, twenty four dollars in total, and then they hem and haw and want the bill split, and I say no, and of course they ask dumb questions and want my life story, not at that price I think and they niggle and naggle and how can somebody not French speak such good French and I say.. Well it happens you know and then my nasty side kicks in (as I am severely fed up and a true bitch) and they insist on my life story, I give them, well a new one: as in sob! ‘Fell in love with the wrong guy and he was with the French secret service- and now I am getting quite a bit of fun out of this one and go on… the truth: my family lived in France for quite some decades… and the truth also is much wilder than the story… now those hateful cows have scrammed and at least I will be able to feed us tomorrow, and stock up- up to a point.. As I think maybe there will be some nice and fun people arriving in the next day or so…

eclipse in cambo (style)

ooh yeah, an eclipse, and a big one too, we heard... after the fact, phones and internet had been down. And it is rainy season too: did we have an eclipse?, i asked Bill. oh yes', he said, kinda forgot to tell you.. remember the other day, when it was so cloudy and then it got so dark and we said, wow, that's gonna be one big rain.. '??". "yeah i do remember". well," Bill said, "that was an eclipse." Oh. wow.

It's Creepy crawler fest all right.

It’s Creepy Crawler fest

.. As a rule I do not have a problem with all those critters, six, eight or whatever legs or none at all... In the rainy season of course they tend to move inside, as like everybody else, they do not relish getting wet. Most of the time a can of spray will do the job. This year is particularly good for spiders, small and big, they weave their nets, and weave and then some. spider webs everywhere, so, I do take a broom several times a day to them, and manage to keep those at bay. Not so the newly homeless spiders that skitter and scatter everywhere in search of a safer spot for their nets.

Most of the other critters do get taken care of by Caruso the monstrous gecko- about a foot tall, tail not counting. He is a noisy fellow who lives in the roof, and is only very rarely to be seen-mostly at night in the half dark to scare the wits out of anybody to come across him. Caruso is at perpetual war with the cat; so far it’s a draw.

There is one little critter I do have a problem with, and sure enough I met one yesterday.

Our bathrooms are open air, quite romantic provided it does not rain.

I even have a bathtub and a water heater. Although it does not work: we do not seem to have enough power to run it. Every time I tried to use it so far I knocked out the power in the entire neighborhood. Not quite an option. So I heat water on the stove like everybody else, or shower- cold. A few sunny moments, made me lust for a bath. Leaves and debris had accumulated in the tub, so I set to clean it… and there it was: a red and black millipede, stinger poised. Aww, I hate and fear those. Although their sting will not kill you, you might wish it would, the pain is excruciating. This one, well not the biggest I have ever seen, but still. As they are not the strongest swimmers, I plugged the tub, and put the faucet on. That did the job- after a while. Fine or it would have been were it not that on closer inspection, all the leaves drifting in the tub had come to life. aww!! Leaches, hundreds of those nasty little heat seeking bloodsuckers, like weaving like little needles.  I have not too big a problem with them, but I hate to give them a free meal!!! (And pretty they are not. A tourist on a trek once asked me: how do leaches mate??? Normally we would have looked that one up, but then decided we could very well live without any knowledge of the secret sex life of leeches. Ehem).

 

Now the question is how do I get the leeches out of the tub?? Not even gloves will keep them away; they will just climb and suck on and climb some more until they find a nice piece of skin and get to work…

 In the end I left the tub for what it was and took a shower….the leeches? Still floating on leaves in the tub.

 

 

.

and may the force be...

Telecommunications in Cambo.. Have gotten a lot better over the years, at least in the lowlands, up here, well not quite yet. We still gleefully call out ‘may the force be with you’ whenever somebody tries to use a phone, say, during a thunder storm.

 The three big providers are not called Mobihell, camshit and scammitel by us for nothing. And now after month of precarious and expensive- internet via the mobile phone that did not work most of the time anyways, it seems we are getting ‘real’ internet, or so they say. A Vietnamese company is taking advantage of the proximity of their country to our little outpost. So of course, I paid up: come today they say, make cable today, tomorrow internet. (That was a week ago.).Yeah sure, of course they did not come. So I made a stink as the powers that be that had not given me a receipt… and a young man with a ‘station’ came, looked around and said not bring cable. And left. That is what they did not do, and I did tell them so. And back to the shop, tell them again, and a fourth time, and a fifth. Now it seems they are doing something in the street, the cable or whatever- presumably. My friend Olga from wwf says that once you have it, it is surprisingly good, yeah, but when, when. The telephones service meanwhile has broken down completely in town...

Something somewhere must have been hit by lighten, a storm or both yet again... ahh the joys of the rainy season!!!

And here it is, and fast, a miracle!! (The installation was well a bit fun, Elvis tried to bite one of the monteurs who was stringing the cable from tree to tree, the geese did bite!!

Then they did not quite get that I will use the lappie in two (!) locations- oh horrors!!- easy pug-unplug, move-plug back in. or so one would think, no cannot do they said ( can of course, so I let it go and move the thing around, got them to leave me with enough cable for just that. How these guys ever got Angkor Wat together is beyond me!!!), but who cares: internet, hooray, finally!!!

 

What is it with people and sharpies?

The bullies look truly fearsome, and I would think that when they approach a stranger,-

  Running towards him or her looking like something just recently and hopefully only temporarily released from Hades or some other unsavory Stephen King place, they would scare the daylights out of whomever. Not so: it is happy little Iddy, skipping away like a baby goat, tail wagging, from whom the strangers flee in horror: just yesterday she was merrily chasing three Korean businessmen trough the banana trees. The businessmen yelped “chine dog! chine dog! ooouaah!” It took quite a bit of diplomacy to calm them and get them to sit down and have a beer…. (The whole thing ended with the bullies going free and Iddy doing time on a leash- grossly unfair. But it seems that she has to learn not to approach strangers. I’d rather not that she- nor do the other dogs for that matter do such thing anyways. But that is because I am afraid that the dogs might come to harm, i.e. being stolen and eaten or tormented in some thoughtless way as in children and so….

In the end the Koreans stayed - a big thunderstorm that hit helped of course. All went without further mishap: as Koreans are notoriously accident prone hereabouts, it was a lucky break: in my old guesthouse in snookyville I would automatically reach for the first aid kit upon their arrival, usually highly necessary- one once fell out of his bed and broke a collar bone…they also tended to drown when going to the beach or get their toes into the spokes of their motor bikes.(don’t ask.).

Iddy tends to get into inappropriate barking jags though: it is not always easy to shut her up, I tell her, in a rather sarcastic tone that she:” acts like a Dutch keeshond, is she a Dutch kees hond? - ooh how utterly utterly baaad.” That tends to do the job.

As none of us has been able to go to Phnom Penh recently, we all are out of dog food, and have to find other ways to feed the beasts: rice, and boiled bones and some meat tend to do the job. Yesterday a friend told me she fed hers with instant noodle soup. Great idea!! So I bought some and dished it up: three dogs and a cat looked at me like:” what is this? Are you a chef?? Surely we are not supposed to eat this crap???”” Is all you getting “I said. They looked me up and down and filed out to the avocado trees to steal some…looks like noodle soup is out…

 

rain and more rain and NCV's

..As the rainy season drags on and on, roads get muddier, bridges give the ghost and we hope for the odd sunny day to do some basic drying out.

 Strangely enough, quite a few tourists still do make it into town. Certainly there are more of them around than there were in the years before.  Sadly most of them are what in the local service industry nastily and gleefully is referred to as NCV.s: or – of no commercial value (s). There they are, expecting a room for a dollar a meal for 50 cents whilst carrying   500 dollar backpacks…and 5000 dollar cameras...

Basically they expect us- the restaurant and guesthouse owners (Khmers and westerners alike) to finance their holidays.

The other day a young Frenchman arrived from the bus station on a moto, sat down in the coffee shop (together with the driver) got a cup of coffee, and began to annoy us is stupid questions. Bon. A customer is a customer is a… so we answered and answered and answered then some...  No, he finally said, 8 dollars he would not pay for a moto bike (with driver) to go to the bousra waterfalls (32 km each way). He would walk, he said and left (without paying: neither for the coffee, nor his moto driver) and for all we know he is still walking.

I am sadly reminded of my sihanoukville days when a sizable number of guests started every sentence with: what’s your cheapest /- room/ beer/ food/ boat trip etc...

 Well they found our little outpost here all right.

Needless to say it is a bit of a challenge to keep the quality of the food in the restaurant up to standards. The logistics are challenging at the best of times, now with the supply routes interrupted regularly by storms and rain and mud slides it gets stunning. (And could be quite fun were the customers inclined to pay which they are not. Of course I could buckle down and feed them crap and get a bad rep in the process. Nor an option).

So I soldier on and hope for better customers, dreaming of making pates, roasting chickens and ducks and serving Chateaubriands again, and of course I dream of being able to go to pp for some nice shopping as in olive oil, butter, cheese, cream and so on.  Instead I cope with the market. In general I do love markets, hustling and bustling places and one never knows what one might find. Not so the local market, hustling yes, bustling,  no. Mud everywhere and we have to wear our jungle boots just to get through...

There are some bright moments though: a few kg’s of snails. (Here my customers divide sharply: those who do eat them and those who do not). Some shrimp from Nah Trang or even some tropical sole on a very lucky day.

Well, the sun has come out for now, off  into the garden, the avocados, the ramboutans and the passion fruit are ripe… and of course there are always bananas… The stalks are very high, some more than 4 meters. So if we want bananas, we have to hack the stalks over. The other day I was confronted by one of those formidably outsized pieces of weed. So I away I hacked with my machete, but must have calculated something wrong, the bloody thing fell the wrong way: timber! I just managed to save my life, not so that of the fence of the vegetable garden nor that of the leeks. Which got flatted well. (The bananas survived the crash somehow and were pretty good ).

Ps. did you notice that central computers have no real sense of humor???

Take ad sense: I bitch about the French rubber barons out in bousra, and what are the ads? Everything and anything to do with rubber and, sure enough plantations. Then I make fun of missionaries, and what do I get: an ad for some nasty cultish club, man, I happen to find that offensive...As the rainy season drags on and on, roads get muddier, bridges give the ghost and we hope for the odd sunny day to do some basic drying out.

 

Little Iddy, the Sharpei puppy  is not so little anymore, she is almost 4 and a half month old now.

She is soft and sweet and well adjusted, housebroken and still compulsively collecting ‘treasures’ behind the jackfruit tree and she guards her blanket, (woe betide the one who touches it, human or beast...). She sits and gives paws, comes- almost always when called and is a holy horror to all the neighborhood mutts…

They flee in terror when she approaches, no matter how big they are.

 Elvis and DT, the bulldogs decided to love her, and they get along, well, most of the time.

 Not so Iddy and the geese, which were rather mean to her at the best of times… Whenever Iddy decided to take a kip in the rather spare moment of sunshine in this rainy season, the geese would approach and bite her tail, and Iddy would be frantic, angry and... scared. Until yesterday: I was upstairs on my sleeping loft, when I heard a racket so hard you would not believe it, when I finally made it down the rather steep wooden ladder, a sight to behold greeted me: somehow the geese had decided that the rains were too much even for them: so they  walked straight into the restaurant, just to encounter the dogs, who would have none of  that :Elvis, Dt, and  Iddy (who got quite into the spirit of things), were chasing the geese around and around rather big main table., the geese too stupid to figure out how to flee running  around and around and so they went, the geese crapping all over the floor and the dogs having the time of their lives. Feathers flying every which way… Finally I managed to stop the merry go round by catching the geese by their throats- and getting quite scratched up in the process- and so I threw the geese out into the garden, the dogs looked at me like,  hey, whatdya do that for, it was so much fun’!’, (killjoys those humans!!!)

Soo, today, the geese had quite recovered from the shock and there was: Iddy snoozing away in the weak cloudy sun, and three guests- rather mean spirited, humorless  missionaries approaching down the garden path, the geese, in a bind: who to bite first? Iddy or the missionaries?? They decided on Iddy, meanwhile, the missionaries approaching stealthily. Iddy went: aww. You’re just geese!! And she went for them, geese all over the place, geese- followed by Iddy- and, as the garden path is slippery- some slip sliding missionaries somewhere in between– flying every which way, all over the place. Quite a mess. The missionaries did not have a sense of humor,   so they kinda muttered some and slipped away- in a squelchy huff-(not that I mind at all) followed by the geese, followed by Iddy, and the rest of the dogs in hot pursuit….

Ooh man that was fun, and there will yet be another nasty piece about me and my dogs -and my customers on some religious website…, as the place was packed with  local expats  who were having their week end brunch- all in stitches and the some…

on chasing the Reverend

Aww times are hard, wet and boring – most of the time. The restaurant is too slow to be any fun, money is low and tourists, well after a good two weeks, now there are only ncv’s around ( no commercial value (s)- in expat speak).

But there is a big reservation in the near future, Duck as a main dish, we decide. See, the Reverend and Tammy Sue, my big black duck couple had a falling out. -That was after she managed to miscarry 20 (!) eggs and would have no more of him….

 First she moved to the neighbors, then she vanished (probably eaten by abovementioned neighbors), the reverend, moved to some other neighbors, after being bored and lonely, I guess. There he started a gay relationship with their mallard, but the neighbors there decided ‘no good would come of this’ (they are Christians converted recently by the rather rabid missionaries,) so they ate their mallard and mine was lonesome again. So I took him back – and that is when the Reverend lost the plot: het started biting everyone and was as mean as a duck can be.  The Reverend is one of those big ugly black walking ducks. They hiss and are big and waddle right onto their target or that failing they lay in wait and then bite…

 So, the Reverend had to go- the meat will need quite a while to get tender and then some and then I will need a recipe for wild duck if I do not want my customers to bite out their teeth….

 Now, one can say a lot of bad things about the Reverend – and Tammy Sue sure would agree and then add some too, but, stupid he ain’’t.

So when Bongserrei, my assistant came and we went for him, he kinda got the point and hid under the house. We yelled, jumped on the wooden floor, yelled some more, to no avail. Crawled under the house- and I swear I heard the little monster laugh at us! Then we decided to use the fishing rods to chase him out. Bongserrei took her short one and I found a very long hard tipped deep sea rod that I bought on sale in pp a while ago, (why I did so then, I do not know). And it worked: slowly the Reverend was forced to emerge.

Aww! this is fun the bulldogs said and as soon as the beast emerged, the bullies chased him back, and on and on it went.

..And for once it is a hot day hereabouts: we sweat, are muddy- and not happy at all, actually we are angry. After about two hours of this, somehow the bullies and we converge and the Reverend finally comes out from under the house. - And vanishes again under the house. By now the bullies have gotten the point and chase him out! Bongserrei is about as angry as I have ever seen her While I was stuck- or better said the fishing rod was stuck under the house at the front and at the back in the banana plants…she has changed weapons...

 When I finally  wise up enough to just drop the  rod, I find that Bongserrei is  braining the beast with a very big pierce of bamboo, and so, the Reverend keels over….dead out cold. Choi! She says: he deserved that… The bullies and the little sharpey are grinning, as in: we helped, right? how much do we get??? And me, aw well I am  just feeling me age…

 When we clean the beast, I am stunned; the Reverend qualifies as a small turkey….

May all the saints of the culinary arts of all cultures be with us cooking that one...

Ouch, sometimes on has to eat one’s words. Did I say no more snakes around since I got the chickens?: just had an unpleasant encounter in the river, so not formally on my land strictly speaking- but still... I was inside minding my own business, when some awful screaming got my- and the dogs and the geese’s attention. Sounded like a cat in distress to me, all my pets including kittens accounted for, still the screaming goes on and is quite blood curling. At the edge of the river where the bank is extremely steep and overgrown, I find the spot where it is coming from and try to see what is going on. Can’t see nothing, the screaming goes on. So I jumped into the inner tube and approached the bank from the water side, more screaming. Carefully I; parted the grass, and promptly fell in., sunk into the mud. Lost my crocks- and floundered for some, hanging on to the reeds, when… aww! No! the back of the head of a snake, a big one., as big as my hand… grey green and the ridges, oh me, I flopped backwards, floundered somehow- fear makes strong I guess- back into the inner tube, and eventually onto dry land…the screaming got week then stopped. I try to tell myself that maybe it was just a rat or some such, but I don’t think so, what is was we, will never know, what I do know, and could do without is: it was a pit viper and an awfully big one too. Looked it up in the snake book hoping is was just some harmless serpent, but aww, no way, looked again a pit viper all right.
Those beasts are fatal, normally I am not very impressed with snakes, even poisonous ones, but vipers here are aggressive and deadly poisonous and no antidote until snookyville…give me a cobra anytime over these!!!
We have those, king and spitting, keel backs, golden tree snakes, coral snakes, those are the more poisonous ones, and further more plenty of non poisonous ones, amongst the pythons.Ouch, sometimes on has to eat one’s words. Did I say no more snakes around since I got the chickens?: just had an unpleasant encounter in the river, so not formally on my land strictly speaking- but still... I was inside minding my own business, when some awful screaming got my- and the dogs and the geese’s attention. Sounded like a cat in distress to me, all my pets including kittens accounted for, still the screaming goes on and is quite blood curling. At the edge of the river where the bank is extremely steep and overgrown, I find the spot where it is coming from and try to see what is going on. Can’t see nothing, the screaming goes on. So I jumped into the inner tube and approached the bank from the water side, more screaming. Carefully I; parted the grass, and promptly fell in., sunk into the mud. Lost my crocks- and floundered for some, hanging on to the reeds, when… aww! No! the back of the head of a snake, a big one., as big as my hand… grey green and the ridges, oh me, I flopped backwards, floundered somehow- fear makes strong I guess- back into the inner tube, and eventually onto dry land…the screaming got week then stopped. I try to tell myself that maybe it was just a rat or some such, but I don’t think so, what is was we, will never know, what I do know, and could do without is: it was a pit viper and an awfully big one too. Looked it up in the snake book hoping is was just some harmless serpent, but aww, no way, looked again a pit viper all right.

Those beasts are fatal, normally I am not very impressed with snakes, even poisonous ones, but vipers here are aggressive and deadly poisonous and no antidote until snookyville…give me a cobra anytime over these!!!
We have those, king and spitting, keel backs, golden tree snakes, coral snakes, those are the more poisonous ones, and further more plenty of non poisonous ones, amongst the pythons.Ouch, sometimes on has to eat one’s words. Did I say no more snakes around since I got the chickens?: just had an unpleasant encounter in the river, so not formally on my land strictly speaking- but still... I was inside minding my own business, when some awful screaming got my- and the dogs and the geese’s attention. Sounded like a cat in distress to me, all my pets including kittens accounted for, still the screaming goes on and is quite blood curling. At the edge of the river where the bank is extremely steep and overgrown, I find the spot where it is coming from and try to see what is going on. Can’t see nothing, the screaming goes on. So I jumped into the inner tube and approached the bank from the water side, more screaming. Carefully I; parted the grass, and promptly fell in., sunk into the mud. Lost my crocks- and floundered for some, hanging on to the reeds, when… aww! No! the back of the head of a snake, a big one., as big as my hand… grey green and the ridges, oh me, I flopped backwards, floundered somehow- fear makes strong I guess- back into the inner tube, and eventually onto dry land…the screaming got week then stopped. I try to tell myself that maybe it was just a rat or some such, but I don’t think so, what is was we, will never know, what I do know, and could do without is: it was a pit viper and an awfully big one too. Looked it up in the snake book hoping is was just some harmless serpent, but aww, no way, looked again a pit viper all right.

Those beasts are fatal, normally I am not very impressed with snakes, even poisonous ones, but vipers here are aggressive and deadly poisonous and no antidote until snookyville…give me a cobra anytime over these!!!
We have those, king and spitting, keel backs, golden tree snakes, coral snakes, those are the more poisonous ones, and further more plenty of non poisonous ones, amongst the pythons.