Entries Tagged 'Asia 2005' ↓

Back now. Two days into my new job. My body clock is fixed while my imitation Franck Muller wristwatch is already on the blink. The luggage remains unpacked. (I left with seven kilos and came back with 48, but I left five kilos of excess body weight somewhere in Phi Phi.) My enthusiasm is waning and this will be the last of the entries. Thanks for reading and thanks a lot for your messages of support.

The trip ended, post-trekking up north with a drunk called Noi, with dinner for two atop the Banyan Tree Hotel on the 62nd floor’s Vertigo restaurant. I had a nine course dégustation menu. Mrs K had soup and salad.

We went to tailors, we hired scooters, we ate in restaurants that served wine. We counted the days until we had to come back. Then we came back.

I’ll let the photos do the talking. Over and out.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the safest place to hide from wild monkeys is in the back of a stationary motorcycle taxi. Thanks to that prior knowledge Mrs K, Charmaine and I avoided serious harm in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Siem Reap is the home of Angkor Wat, one of the few true wonders of the world. The sunrises are spectacular. We woke at five o’clock on three consecutive mornings and managed to miss them all, though. The town itself is small and poky, a raggedy collection of touts and vendors, cripples and glue-sniffing five-year-olds.

Mr. Pros was our driver for three days. He picked us up, dropped us off and waited for us. He took us to the best place for lunch, ferried us around on shopping trips and yet we didn’t share a single word of a common language. He clocked on to the size of the girls’ bladders and stopped every fifteen minutes outside the public toilets without our asking, grinned, laughed and drove off again. I liked Mr. Pros.

It is said that Pol Pot nurtured his distaste for the monarchy and bourgeoisie when his sister was a dancer at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. Having sat through a “cultural evening with buffet dinner” and an hour’s worth of traditional dance I can state with some certainty that I may well have become genocidal had I been forced to watch it more than once a lifetime. To top it off, Mrs K got food poisoning from some dodgy “morning gror-ly” and spent three days contemplating suicide.

Prior to that she had the following exchange with possibly the sweetest and shrewdest seven-year-0ld girl in Cambodia.

-Hello
-Hello
-ooohhh you very very beautiful and he very very handsome. What your name?
-Mrs K
-ooohhh very beautiful name. Where you from?
-Malta
-But where you born?
-Malta
-No, you born in a HOSPITAL.
-And you, where you born in a hospital too?
-No … I born at home. Because I Cambodian.
- …
-(pause, followed by devious smile and sideways glance) You want to buy baby?
-You’re selling a baby?
-Yes, baby over there (points out baby)
-Well, it’s certainly a very sweet baby. How much?
-Ten dollar.
-Well, that’s a bit too much.
-Okay, Mrs K. See you later.

Welcome back. It’s been three weeks now and a lot has been going on. I’ll update in bite-sized chunks. It’s only four days now until I fly back to Brussels and start work again after a leave of six months. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it very much.

Mark Twain wrote a short story once about a jumping frog. He included it in a second anthology as a translation into English from a translation into French, with an attack on the Gallic language and its literary reviewers. I noticed that somebody in Italy had recently used Google to translate this website into their language. So I translated that version back into English using the same software and got:

As to kill time to Bangkok

It has been of five days of it appeal to-pleasure-hunting with Gus, posterior part still from the Laos. We have been to the restaurants Headquarters-Orientals and Japanese, the Irish banns and the Korean bars, the barbecue of the way, the bookshops, the cinematografi and the uneven place with a name like “Spanky” or “one night to Bangkok” in order to watch the human traffic.

• Squali of the blow to the world of the ocean of the Siam.
• They contemplate to go to the church to sing the carols, then change idea when, on I consult of the website ones of the church, you do not see nothing but the photos of small army of Institutors of the women white women-haired who ago the good actions.
• It carries out immense, a study detailed and comparable of the malls of shopping de Bangkok. Vibration chair is based in a store of electronics in one while watching one television $60000. It admires Ferraris and Bentleys on the concourse (you do not obtain that one to Bluewater) and eats the pastry shops imported cream cooked from a chef French with a famous face.
• It reads something from Paul Theroux (witty) or Michael Palin (verbose.)
• It drinks the tea of the mint and smoke one sheesha in little Arabia.

Beer or three is met me with Jerry Hopkins for one. Jerry has written the biography of Jim Morrison, nobody exits alive and is hour here a resident of long duration de Bangkok. It possesses a house upcountry with its moglie but it passes the greater part of its time in the city, that it has telephone lines. After a brace of the beers in its appartment we have gone to one bar. It was empty beyond we but there was traffic through the bar. Salt-job bar is transparent was one. “they do not sell the a.lot of beer,” Jerry here said. Therefore, been born them happy.

Mrs K will arrive after tomorrow so as to the free-time to modernize this will be to a prize. It will control or two times once within, however. I have of I have of I have and all that one.