Penny and Fred

Three weeks and counting…

Can you believe we have been gone for 3 weeks?

I wish I had sometime meaningful or inspiring to write at this time, but I have just finished a long day staring at the computer and my eyes are near falling out of my head.  I wonder what Fred’s cooking for dinner tonight?

Fred and I still don’t seem to have found our feet.  With the Khmer New Year having just finished, we have had a very limited list of things that we could do over the past week and a half.  In between, arriving, doing a little bit of sight seeing, moving into a new home, shopping for “stuff” to put in the new home, and starting a new job, I can’t say we have been able to enjoy much of the Cambodian experience.  I’m hoping the cultural experience will happen soon, otherwise we have moved a long way away from home for some better weather.

On the topic of weather…  It is still ranging between hot, hotter and stinkn’ hot.  For those that know me, would also know that I’m loving it, but my body is taking its time to acclimatise.   The “mango rains” have started early this year (or so I’m told) and at about 3pm every afternoon we get a downpour of rain and a bit of a lightening and thunderstorm to go with it.  I keep thinking that just one afternoon of these rains over Victoria’s catchments would do the state a world of good.  I tried to take a picture of it the other day, but it just wasn’t working.

Heh, did I tell you about the rat?  Tammy, you can stop reading from here if you want to avoid hives.

Last week I worked on a big funding submission, so after I had finally emailed it off at about 6:30pm, Fred decided he would take me out for dinner to the Micro Brewery up the road (I’ll let Fred tell you about that place).  We left to find a tuk tuk, no tuk tuk’s because of New Year, so we took ourselves across the street to a local restaurant.  A restaurant that we may or may not have been told to avoid.  What can I say, it was getting late, I was hungry and getting cranky and they had $2 Jugs, that’s right $2 Jugs.  I’m starting to sound like Fred, scary….

Anyway, we order our $2 Jug and a meal.  The beer, although served with big ‘hand-picked’ ice cubes to keep it cold (emphasis on ‘hand-picked’), was refreshing!  While waiting for our meals to arrive and trying to wind down from a crazy week, I felt something run into my foot.  Thinking that something round had escaped from the kitchen behind me, I half expected to look down and see an orange or sometime, but there was nothing there…  I took a looked around on the floor and off in the to near distance was a ‘rat’, running under the table of another group of diners and disappearing.  I got a little paranoid at this stage and couldn’t concentrate on the conversation that Fred was trying to have with me, I was pre-occupied with seeing the rat again.  Why?  I don’t know?

It was only the arrival of our meal that jolted me out of my unhealthy fixation and back to reality…

Our meal is a whole other story.  The spicy mango salad was great, but a little heavy with the dried fish, the rice with chinese sausage was pretty alright, but was devalued by Fred’s continual debate on the authenticity of the chinese sausage and finally, the spicy fried duck, which doesn’t deserve a rating or description.  I’ve got money on it not being duck at all, but more likely a relative of the rat that ran into my foot and mysteriously disappeared.

Surprisingly, neither of us got sick from this experience, not even a little bit.  If we had I’m not sure what we would have blamed it on, the ice - the fact that the ice was ‘hand-picked’, the chinese sausage - that may or may not have been authentic, the duck - that didn’t in the least bit taste anything like duck or the left overs of the rats wet nose on the bottom of my bare foot.

Frankly, I’m surprised that either of us are still alive…

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