Farewell night.

 

 

Friday night was my wee farewell party with some of the staff, which included a lot of the team I went to the Lake with.  They didn’t all speak that good English, and clearly I speak absolutely no Khmer, but we all seemed to get along ok. Jon the Director is away just now so unfortunately he couldn’t make it.  I feel quite sad to be leaving them; they are all such lovely people doing such excellent work for the underprivileged out here in Cambodia.  

We went to one of the ‘local’ Cambodian bars which had cheap but good food. I did say to Chantha I would leave the ordering of food up to her, but that I just wanted vegetable dishes …I got fish and of course rice.  But as ever, they were all just trying to fit in with what I eat, which meant fish for everyone.   Well at least at the start of the night, although they did sneak in a few meat dishes later on when I wasn’t looking!!  After the mojito tummy incident, (those cocktails will never be the same for me again) I have been trying to stick to wine, straight from the bottle, no handling required!   Much to my surprise, they did actually have wine at this bar, but only red and it would appear only one type of red wine, which they brought in an ice bucket.  But hey, maybe not so daft when it is 90F + out here!  It wasn’t your top quality reserve bin wine, so the cool worked well, although I did draw the line at them trying to put a huge junk of ice in my glass before they poured the wine.  There are some wine standards one has to stick with no matter where you are and what the temperature is!  Even more bizarrely, the guys, very quickly moved on to the Anchor beer, which they also put ice in and drank out of wine glasses!  Hmmm, can you just see all those Scottish football fans having their pre match pint out a wine glass with ice in it?  No, not working for you then?  Ok, so maybe this one won’t catch on in Scotland!!