A quick entry
on Paul O'Connor (Cambodia), 08/Feb/2012 10:01, 34 days ago
Please note this is a
cached copy of the post and will not include pictures etc. Please
click here to view in original context.
It’s been quite an eventful few days. Firstly Tak’s house-building suffered a bit of a setback when the previous landowner turned up and pointed out that they were building on the wrong land. Tak’s land is actually a lot smaller than he thought and he’s disappointed that there aren’t any shady trees (“drinking places”). But it’s lucky that he hired particularly lazy builders who hadn’t done much work, so it hasn’t taken them long to relocate to the correct land.In better news Eng finally went for a scan and is having a girl, which everyone is happy about. I was a bit shocked, though, that the baby isn’t due until the end of June, because Eng is really quite fat already. I think I’ll need to keep a closer eye on my dwindling supply of Mars bars in future.And just a note about Tak’s mum. Tak told me the other day that he had a dream that he and I were in the forest and I got bitten by a snake. Tak’s mum’s reaction was to ask if I died and, when Tak said yes, to clap her hands repeatedly and say, “Good, good, good.” It’s taken me almost a week to understand that,according to her interpretation, it means I’ll be getting married soon and will stay in Cambodia forever. The logic is that the snake represents a woman, the bite is her choosing me, and that by killing me it means that she will stay with me until I die – which, after a snake bite, is presumablynot very long. Whether this logic is common in Cambodian culture or just among the slightly mental is still unclear, but I’m not generally convinced by Tak’s mum’s theories. She claims that visiting Angkor Wat in Siem Reap will make you live for a long time, because the temples are very old,and this week she banned Tak from eating chicken because she thinks it will damage his skin, given that chicken skin isn’t very smooth. Luckily for Tak, who is fond of chicken, he hasn’t taken any notice of anything his mum has said since about 1992.