Back to Building

I'm happy to report that my arms aren't sore the next morning. I have a slight blister from a seam in the work gloves, but I put a bandaid on it yesterday as soon as I noticed the tender spot, and it is not a problem either. The group in general seems to have done as well. No one reports mosquito bites, dog bites, cow bites, chicken bites or landmine wounds from yesterday, either.

We load ourselves back in the punctual vans at seven a.m. and retrace the familiar route through the countryside to our village. I and one other member of the group who is making an effort to learn the language aimed to sit together but didn't jump fast enough and both ended up on less popular middle seats a couple of benches apart in the same van. We pass the phrasebook back and forth, not quite as productive as being able to share tips and pronunciations. There are more oxen hitched to carts piled cartoonishly high with goods. They stand placidly in their traces and appear to be free of sores and to have healthy hooves. But what do I know about oxen. They don't lead a life of leisure, but I don't think they work as hard as the people here do.

Once we reach the village, we know what we're doing this time, so bid some hellos and go straight to work. There are some floors left to do, but I know those go quickly and will be done in no time, so I go straight to building walls today. Under each house is a pile of green corrugated metal sheets. The first time I picked one out of the pile I didn't even realize that I had picked up three sheets together until we were lapping it under the previous sheet, and I realized how much thicker mine was. It's thicker than the stuff they built the Apollo moon lander out of, but just barely. There was no tutorial on wall-building, but there are local contractors working on the houses. We don't even share enough language to express up, down, left, and right. so it's kind of a matter of watching what he's doing, helping out where it's obvious and then watching to determine the process. We have to line each one up with the frame of the house and with the adjacent panel, giving it just the right amount of overlap, hold it straight and nail it on. I watch carefully while the contractor positions the sheet, and then he indicates where to drive each nail.

These nails are different from floor nails, as they have giant heads, the size of a nickel, but flimsy. If you don't hit the nail square in the centre of the head, straight on, with each blow of the hammer, the head either flies off to parts unknown or skitters down the shaft of the nail. And the head of the nail is necessary to retain the metal on the frame. When the nail head flies off, it's hard to pull the nail out, because normally you use the head of the hammer against a surface to get some leverage to remove a nail, but you can't push on the metal sheets at all. They're so thin that they would tear. Like any nail, you also have to drive it straight in so it doesn't bend

I start out standing on the ground, nailing the bottom edge of the sheets to the edge of the floor. This is simple enough, because I can always stand right in front of the nail I am hitting, with it just slightly over my head, and the edges of the floor are solid. So once I figure out the importance of getting these in straight, they are not too hard. The problem comes at the higher levels. The cross pieces for the walls are just little strips. I think they might be one-by-twos at a Canadian hardware store, except that these are rougher and not very even along their length. They are springy. Some of the time I spend working on walls, I'm just standing inside the house, bracing myself and holding a hammer against the strip of wood so that someone else can nail a sheet onto it without it springing away. Sometimes we stand inside the house and reach around to the outside to nail a sheet to the frame. This results in an awkward angle and bends a lot of nails. I notice most of the contractors, who do this all the time, bending nails from this angle, too. I really don't want to bend them, because when we do, getting them out will leave at least a hole, and probably a tear and a lot of ugly dents and flattening in the sheet metal. You don't want someone's home to look like that.

We do most of the wall nails from a ladder against the wall, which creates a bottleneck, because there are fewer ladders than people, and even if there weren't, there wouldn't be room to have enough ladders to reach every level at once. We have to put up the sheets one at a time so they overlap and line up properly. Some of the contractors direct us to put the nails in the convex part of the ridges, the sticky-outie part, which seems odd, because that flattens it, and it doesn't look as good. Others are okay with the nails going in the channels, which lay flat against the house, and I think look nicer that way. Another participant noticed that the contractor she was working with insisted that each new sheet of mental overlap the previously laid one, while having it underlap made it easier to get straight, because the friction helps hold the new sheet in place. Our theory is that these are habits that carried over from roofing for these guys. With roofing sheets it is obviously important that each lower sheet underlap the one above it, so rain can't trickle in the join, and similarly if you drive the nails into the channel, that creates a hole in the low spot. Much better to put the hole in the ridge, where water will never pool. I don't either consideration matters for walls, but at least it makes sense now.

While we build, kids are running around everywhere, just doing their normal things. A group of girls are playing what appears to be hopscotch. The grid they have scratched in the dirt is rectangular, and they play rock-paper-scissors to determine who goes first. It's almost disorienting to see this familiar game played here. When I was a kid you didn't learn any playground games from adults, you just learned them from kids, older kids teaching younger kids in a presumably unbroken succession back to the kids that invented the game. So how did hopscotch and rock-paper-scissors get to or from here? Our ancient common ancestors didn't invent them and bring them all the way from Africa through Mesopotamia, because that predates the invention of scissors and paper. Rock-rock-rock wouldn't have been a good game. I wanted to communicate, "We do this in Canada too!" I would have taken off my boots and joined them, but I probably would have communicated something more like "Canadian grown-ups are crazy." I tried to say, "Canada same!" while pointing at the game, and I tossed in a marker to show I knew how it worked, but I don't know that they understood.

At the house next to the kids playing hopscotch, one of the somehow cut himself on his upper arms, probably reaching around the thin sheets of metal. He didn't even notice, someone else had to point out the trickling blood. We've all had our tetanus shots, and he's not seriously wounded but I offer to go and get my disinfectant. As I'm walking away I suddenly remember the rule and come back and remind him to smile happily and come with me to the first aid supplies. I don't know that anyone cared, but apparently one year a housebuilding tool fell and struck a child, and after that they villagers wouldn't let work on that house continue, or even allow materials form it to be salvaged for another house. That one had become cursed.

Right on the road in the middle of the village there was a building where people congregated that we think was a store or a community centre of sorts. That's it above, and the kids at the top of this post are standing in front of it, too. It was a good place to get group shots of the local people just relaxing. At one point a little motorcycle with a big box on the back came up the road and stopped here. The driver opened up the box and it became a little mobile store. Here is where all the plastic came from: he was selling candy and snack food and other things in plastic wrappers. People who live in a society where everything is made of palm fronds and chickens don't learn not to throw wrappers on the ground. I watched some women admiring a selection of brightly-coloured combs. I think pretty much all the women in Cambodia have long hair. I didn't see if they bought any combs, but they definitely liked them.

The little boy on the bicycle with the girl was the subject of a lot of photographs. Photographers would take pictures and then always turn the digital camera so the people could see their image. Most people were interested or appreciative, but the little boy cried when he was shown his photo, until we spread the word not to show him.

At lunch I stuffed a bit of food into my mouth, then sat at the edge of our assigned stuff platform and took out an exercise notebook I had purchased in Phnom Penh. I drew a picture of a cow, one of their cows with a hump on its neck and long horns, and turned it so some kids could see it. I already knew the word, so I could tell if they got it or not. They did, and named it for me, "kō." I drew a chicken and let them name that, me echoing their word, trying to name it. More kids gathered and pretty soon I didn't have a hope of making out the consonants in the words, as they all came in a chorus. I would then point at one child to repeat the name so I could hear it, and then I'd try again. They would laugh and correct. When you're trying to distinguish between a voiced implosive dental and an aspirated alveolar, in a language for which you don't even have a complete inventory of consonants for, a group of laughing children is not the best source. But it was the best fun. I noticed in the back of my mind that the children I had been so carefully admonished not to touch were crowding around to press up against me.

After a while I ran out of things to draw that I imagined were in their experience, and tried to turn the pen over to one of the children. I've played this game before and found it an effective way both to learn vocabulary without having a common language, and to interact with people without having to learn any words. The kids were hesitant to take the pen. I drew some more things. I told them the English words for some of the things, and they would laugh at that, too. I kept offering the pen in various directions, and eventually one of the kids took it. At first I was disappointed, because he drew a car, a copy of the car that was the last thing I had drawn. They probably learn principally by rote here. It requires less teacher training and promotes classroom discipline, and of course it's better than no chance to learn at all. Another boy took the pen, and his car was a little different and more elaborate. Creativity emerges.

One little girl, picked up the pen and drew a princess. Not a Disney princess, but presumably a Khmer princess, with an elaborate hairstyle, earrings, some kind of beaded or fur gauntlets from wrist to elbow (she paid a lot of attention to adding texture and detail to them), and a dress that fell all the way to the bottom of the page. I wondered where she had seen such a thing. Other kids drew an ox cart and a scene of two people in a flat boat, one poling and the other I think fishing with a net.

Someone organized the kids to sing their national anthem, so we sang ours. One of the Canadians played the bagpipes. I'm not certain whether we had completed all the houses at that point, or whether some people finished up the remaining ones while most of us smiled at people and took pictures. We gathered the builders and the recipient families all together and our group leader made a little speech through a translator, then the other Khmer student in our group said a couple of sentences in Khmer, which I partly understood, because I had solicited coaching from my shopkeeper friend on how to say something similar. To make handing over the homes into a ceremony, and because apparently these folks somehow manage to be cold in this weather, we had a number of beautiful quilts from the Tabitha store to give to the new homeowners. I had the privilege of presenting one of the quilts to a woman standing with her family. I pronounced, with a crib sheet, the words I had learned for, "I hope you will be very happy in your new house." I think she understood. And I think there was a tear in her eye. Or maybe that was mine.

Our group leader asked through the interpreter if anyone had any questions. There was a lot of silence then someone dared to ask. The translated question was "Why are you doing this for us?" The leader tried to answer, addressing more "why are you doing this for us?" and detailing how the team chose Cambodia (past experience) than the reason we were doing it at all. I don't know if that was the answer that was wanted, but there were no more questions.

I think the plan was for more singing or something, but no one really wanted to make anyone stand around in the sun anymore, and the assembly kind of dissolved into wandering around, trying to meet people, and taking photos. I "met" one woman who was drying rice on mats in her yard. I was interested in how they harvested the rice, how long it took to dry, how much she had to turn it, how did they store it, that sort of thing, but all I could do was look.

When the Canadians gathered for a group photo in front of one of the buildings, most of the village gathered to watch. I would so much love to know what they said and thought about us.

We claim we came to build houses, but our real contribution is the one that you made, the funding for the houses. Our actually showing up and putting some together was more for us. Our presence makes us feel good, and certainly allows us to see that the money was well-used, not wasted, and went to people who needed it. The contractors probably could have built those houses in two days without our help. But they couldn't have done it without funding for the materials.

I think the whole structure of foreigners coming to build may be controversial in Tabitha. I suspect that there was quite a bit of politics in the organization--not ours, the Tabitha group--perhaps a power struggle starting as the founder is ill, and know that our group leaders insulated the group from most of that. They also had a stunningly dedicated commitment to making it a "no surprises" experience for the group, something obviously impossible where travel is involved. But just as in planning a flight, overplanning means that when something unexpected happens, it's as minor as possible.

I wish we could have spent longer, and many people I spoke to felt the same sense of disconnection as we just suddenly got back in the vans and drove away. The road winds through and around the village a little way and people waved as we left. We waved back, speeding away much too fast.

It is not encouraged for us to try to send letters or ever return to see the people in our village. I hope the houses hold up in the monsoons. I hope that boy's immune system is sufficient for his infected toe to get better on its own. I hope there is a good rice harvest. I hope that little girl someday gets to wear a beautiful dress, and that there are no landmines in any of their rice fields.

Khmer for Canadians

Before I left for the trip, I watched a few YouTube videos on Khmer, mastering only "Hello," "What is your name?" and the numbers from zero to ten. Except three. I'm not good at three. I hoped I could pick up more as I went along. The problem is that I'm a visual learner, and hadn't taken the time to learn the Khmer writing system. When I'm travelling I normally use signs and bilingual pamphlets to build vocabulary. Everything becomes my Rosetta Stone (the namesake, by the way, of a product line not available for Khmer). But when everything is spelled "squiggle," learning has to be at the pace people speak, and that has been in some variant of English, or too fast to follow in Khmer.

After the first day on the build, my little pre-blogging notebook was filling up, so I went out to buy a new notebook. I found it not at the big supermarket but at a street stall run by a young architecture student. She also had a locally produced phrasebook for sale, so I bought that, and as she wasn't too busy, I asked her if she would teach me some Khmer. She protested that she wasn't a teacher and that she didn't speak much English, which was true, but I countered with the fact that it was Khmer I wanted to learn, and she consented to help me with my pronunciation.

It's difficult. She had a textbook that showed her the 'proper' transliteration system for the Khmer writing system (which is elaborate, but phonetic). Between the different YouTube videographers and my guidebook, I had seen three different phonetic writing systems, and devised an inconsistent shorthand of my own, plus the new phrasebook had an entirely different and almost unusable system involving exclamation points to indicate short vowels, and dipthongs described in terms of regional pronunciations from various parts of the British Isles. "Like flour, said in a South London accent" really doesn't help me much. I practised reading phrases out of the book and having her correct my pronunciation until it was at least understandable, trying to get a feel for the sounds. She taught me how to say, "I hope you will be happy in your new house," in what I hope was a suitably respectful register. Khmer has so many registers for different levels of social strata that I never dared construct sentences with second person pronouns lest I pick the wrong one. Pronunciation was not helped by the fact that this was a corner news-stall, with vehicle traffic passing by constantly. Occasionally our lesson was interrupted for her to sell something to someone on a motorbike, or just to let the traffic noise die down enough to hear.

I mentioned that there was a b sound that was like a p (but not a p, as there's a separate p). There's also a kh that is separate from k, and you've already noticed consonant combinations that we don't do in English, like the Khm in Khmer. Fortunately I have some experience with Slavic languages so I don't stop short and refuse to pronounce a k and m consecutively with no intervening vowel, but am I pronouncing the correct k? Don't you just love it when you are trying to say something in a language and the person bursts into gales of laughter, and then says "no, no, no, not foo, FOO!" and the correction sounds identical to the, to them, hysterically funny error? We also have the problem that native speakers often do not realize the difference between spelling and pronunciation, so she is spelling the words according to strict transliterations, but I have noticed that terminal r, l, and n are barely pronounced, and terminal s is not pronounced at all. This spills over into Cambodians' accent in English. At first I just thought it was a normal pidgin feature of using the singular for the plural: one book, two book, e.g., but they pronounce rice like rye, their instincts telling them that an s sound written at the end of a word doesn't really mean it.

Despite all my interest in things linguistic, I have never actually taken a linguistics course, and indeed don't even know the international phonetic alphabet in any systematic way. This would be useful now, instead of my trying to come up with unambiguous ways to write phonetic pronunciations. I end up writing "rhymes with pay" to try and write a sound that could be spelled day, deh, dā, dei, and something like die! (including the exclamation point) in the most bizarre of my phrasebooks. In IPA it would be e. Or maybe more like ę or ĕ or both diacriticals, but I can't get them to stack.

I pay her for my lesson and she says to come back tomorrow in the afternoon. Not the morning, because she'll be at school then.

I do go back, and happen to meet her mother, greeting her, then flicking my head around to ask if that was the right greeting. (It was). In the end I ask if I may send her a postcard and she's hesitant about that, so proposes I send it to the business address. No problem. The address she wrote out in something that reads more like directions from the nearest monastery. I have her e-mail as well, so I'll ask her if she gets the card.

Markets and Festivals

The hotel includes a breakfast buffet consisting of some western food and some local foods: baguettes, real French (as in imported from France) butter, sliced pancakes, French toast, fried eggs, noodles with chicken, fried rice with vegetables, fruit juice, and excellent coffee. The noodle dish and the baguettes were really good. The French colonial masters burdened this country with their style of bureaucracy (there's a reason that word has a French origin) but tempered that with French architecture, city planning and baking. Parts of the city are reminiscent of New Orleans, which is only odd until you realize that the French had a hand in both places.

After breakfast a group of us hire a tuk-tuk, a motorcycle with a trailer (seats four Canadians, or approximately fourteen Cambodians plus a live pig) to take us to the Russian market. I suppose the market takes its name from communist times, either because manufactured goods were mainly imported from the Soviet Union or because the Russians were the ones who had the money to shop there. It's now a huge complex, not a mall, just a whole lot of ordinary vendor stalls grouped along dark, narrow aisles by type of product and absolutely spilling over with manufactured goods and foodstuffs of every description. At the entrance we came in, the vendors had tourist stuff like t-shirts of the local signs and beer brands. I can't remember if slogans went quite as low as "Someone I know went to Cambodia and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" but it wouldn't have been out of place. I remember being startled by a sandals stand, because all the shoes were displayed with fake feet in them. A young man is selling large silk cloths embroidered with elephants and his come-on describing their use amuses me because he is accidentally demonstrating a feature of the Khmer language that is confounding me. There are two separate b sounds, one like English and one that does not involve exhalation of breath. The phoneme is written in my guidebook as "bp" and I can hear the young man urging me to consider his product as a "bped cover" or "tabple cover." I have lately noticed the decrepit condition of the things covering both my bped and tabple, and they are both reasonably priced and gorgeous, so after a little bargaining I have two for $12. Other people try to sell us jewellery, scarves, wooden carvings, pretty boxes, incense, handbags, books, and more. I'm not sure if it's cooler inside the market than outside because of the shade, or hotter inside than out because of the confinement. It's hot, maybe mid-thirties. I buy a light wraparound skirt and a top that matches.

While I am negotiating for the skirt and top, a woman comes up selling cards made by landmine victims. The country is absolutely riddled with landmines that not even the soldiers who laid them have records of. Someone who tries to care for his family by clearing land for crops or grazing may end up crippled by a mine. The woman is herself a victim of something, not a mine, but she has been severely burned. Her eyes have been spared, but the flesh of her nose is completely burned away and I can see mottled scar tissue down her chest, too. Could be a cooking accident or maybe an acid attack. It's something you see, and then stop seeing, because she doesn't physically carry herself like a person disfigured, or otherwise seem to expect anyone to waste any time over it. I look at the cards. They are watercolours of local scenes. I ask if there are any with tigers, or other animals. I like tigers. There aren't, but she flips through and points out oxen and birds in various scenes. The cards are pretty, and I need something to send home anyway, so I buy a package of ten. She counts out ten envelopes to go with them. If you sponsored the house building project and requested a postcard, you may have received it in an envelope with one of these cards. And these stamps.

I've seen people wearing thongs (the shoes that have a strap between the toes) with socks here: they have special socks with one toe. I ask the vendor if she sells those, or knows who does, and she tells the landmine card woman where. I follow her through the various aisles of the market in search of the right socks. At one point she leaves me and comes back with a vendor and socks, and I choose a couple of pairs. It's good to be able to wear thongs, yet have some protection against sun and blisters. And I like strange socks.

We wander through the aisles of the market some more, switching from shopping to sightseeing. We have seen enough repeats of the same carvings and crafts that we realize we'll see these all over the country and don't need to buy right away even if we see something we want. The card woman comes back and finds us again, this time with an armload of placemats featuring tigers. They would have been the best thing ever when I was about nine years old, as they are plastic and feature 3D images, with lots of depth, the tigers jumping right out of the jungle at you. My tastes have moved on a little since then and I have to turn her down, but I'm impressed and appreciative. If you go to a place like this, a personal shopper is pretty useful. In some cases a tuk-tuk driver will be able to come and help you find or ask for what you need.

We wander deeper into the market and find ourselves in the food market area. A lot of the food is still alive, fish flopping in baskets and shrimp escaping down the corridors. There's no refrigeration, meat just hangs on hooks the same way handbags and second hand car parts do in their respective parts of the market. The meat picture is by permission of my roommate who has more skill and a fancier camera than I do. Mine wasn't capable of capturing images at the light level inside the market.

We get back in the tuk-tuk and go to another market, the Olympic market. This one is in an actual two-story building as opposed to an area mostly roofed in patchwork tin. There I buy another suitcase, as it's already evident that souvenirs are going to overwhelm the one I brought, and a pair of light cotton trousers labelled XL, and falling to about mid-shin on me. I'm not entirely sure they were designed as capri pants, but they'll serve that function for me. It's a conservative country and we've been warned not to wear shorts or tank tops, especially in the village. I don't really want to wear shorts, and risk getting that much sunburn, anyway.

It's time for lunch. We buy a couple of pastries from a stall on the ground floor, and then go outside and look at the food displayed there. There are a lot of dried fish, and they smell good, but they are entire large fish, or dried really hard such that they would have to be boiled to be reconstituted. They are such interesting shapes. I'm reminded of the discovery of the coealacanth. Only the fishermen who caught this stuff know what wonders lurk in the Tonlé Sap. We buy a couple of meals by pointing at things displayed and then nodding in response to questions we don't understand. Between us we have fish with noodles and a variety of fried things with rice. The food is displayed on the counter and then they deep fry it after you select it. It's tasty and we have delicious coconut pastries for dessert.

In the afternoon we go to Wat Phnom, the hill temple, as are many of the people in town for the water festival. It's not an ancient temple, but it's probably an ancient site, the latest of many rebuildings. The whole scene is completely analogous to any number of public holiday events I've attended in good weather in Canada or the US: lots of people in a park with things to buy and eat and just milling around smiling at people. There's a big garden clock near the base of the hill, paths up to the temple at the top, and vendors all around the paths at the base.

First we go up the hill. There's an admission fee of one dollar for foreigners. We'll see this kind of thing a lot, and I don't have any problem with contributing my share to something the others probably support with their taxes. Right after I pay my dollar, for which I receive a receipt, an old woman in white robes offers to tie a red string around my wrist. For a moment I think this is the equivalent of a fairground plastic wristband or hand stamp, and then realize as it's being tied that it's an optional service, a good luck blessing in return for a donation. It even matches my hatband, and the donation is about 30 cents Canadian.

At the top of the hill is a tiled terrace and a roofed pagoda housing a large number of Buddha statues. I take off my shoes on the terrace and realize that as this is a culture where you take your shoes off indoors, even in public places, the floors are very important. The texture of the terrace is very interesting to my feet and I'm glad to feel it. I wonder what else my feet have missed. Inside the pagoda there are musicians playing on the concave xylophones we saw at the restaurant, people praying (kneeling and bowing low with their hands pressed together fingertip to fingertip and palm to palm), people leaving offerings of fruit, flowers and money on and around the buddhas, and incense burning in pots of sand. We go back outside on the terrace and wander down the paths on the other side. There is another smaller temple a little lower down on the hill, with Chinese-language banners.

At the base of the hill is the most exciting part, the food. We didn't know what most of it was, and didn't have enough language in common with the vendors to ask. A popular item was eggs containing half-developed foetal chicks. I don't think there was ever any possibility of us deciding to sample those. A borderline item was what looked like very large frogs barbecued while held in split bamboo sticks. While trying to rationalize these we discussed our own fairground food. "They're frogs-on-a-stick, like corndogs ... cornfrogs!" We did not sample cornfrogs at this time. Our excuse was that a group meal was planned, and we didn't want to spoil our dinners. We did try some kind of roasted insect, they looked like grasshoppers or crickets. They looked exactly like grasshoppers or crickets, large ones, too. They were tasty, spiced with something good, but the hard parts of the insect stuck in my teeth for hours, the way the seed coating does with popcorn.

We just had fun walking around and looking. At one point I felt a hand and turned, suspecting a pickpocket, but it was a little kid being carried who had just reached out from mom's shoulder to investigate this strange milk-coloured person. When I turned, mom realized what was going on and stopped him, but I smiled to show no offence taken and then we all laughed and the kid turned shy. We sat down on the base of a statue to eat and people watch. A family came up to sit next to us and I made sure I made room for them all, but the littlest girl obviously wasn't sure she wanted to sit next to the scary foreign people, and sat on mom's lap. I caught a Khmer word I knew, thom meaning big and a gesture around the end of the mother's characteristic flat nose. They were discussing the looks of these peculiar strangers. I grinned and echoed the word and gesture with my own nose. Djaa, yes, I agreed, inducing giggling in the kids. I don't actually have a big nose, by Western standards, but it's not flat and broad like theirs, either.

I bought a small bag of crickets to take back and share, but got few takers. Not knowing the shelf life of roasted insects, nor how to tell if they have gone bad, I threw some away. That's the first time I've felt badly about putting dead bugs in a garbage can.

Dinner is at the FCC --Foreign Correspondents' Club-- obviously a fairly longtime enclave of privileged foreigners amongst the natives. I imagine it's the sort of place one can get a gin and tonic. I'd rather get frog-on-a-stick or barbecued Mekong eel or something else I've never seen before, but I also want to bond with my team, so a European meal won't hurt me. There's a group walking and another group taking tuk-tuks to the FCC. I elect to go with the walkers, but somehow get my times crossed and miss their departure time. Never mind, I'm a fast walker. I get directions and set out. "Straight down the main boulevard to the river, then turn left and just ask for the FCC. Everyone knows where it is." I clarify that it is the Foreign Correspondents' Club or if it has another local name, and am told no, just say "Eff-See-See," they'll understand.

The main street quickly becomes extremely congested with people, mostly walking, but a few embedded in the crowd on bicycles and motos, and occasionally beggars sitting on the ground in the midst of it all. The streets are partly taken up with booths, selling food, or mobile phone services, or things I can't figure out because I don't read Khmer. Again it's typical festival booths, just translated into a different culture. Many of the booths are blaring music or announcements. One might be a bingo game as I recognize a lot of numbers being said. Or maybe when numbers constitute over half the words you know in a language, everything sounds like a number. There are too many people on the street to move at a normal walking pace, but I've given myself almost an hour to go a couple of kilometres, and it looks as if I'll need every minute in this crowd.

I can see a decorated bridge ahead with people standing on it. (Fortunately I'm tall and everyone here is short, so I can see well, even in big crowds). That must be the river. As I try to keep going forward towards it, I'm not certain that it's a road that continues this way. I may be in a riverside park now. There is a Ferris wheel and other fairground equipment straight ahead, but I think that may be on the other side of the river. I turn left. There is too much noise from all the loudspeakers for me to easily ask anyone about the FCC, so I just go a couple of blocks, looking. There's a gated building with a security guard but while he's clearly willing to be helpful he doesn't understand my guidebook Khmer rendition of "Please, where is the FCC?" The thronging crowd presses me up against a metal barricade across the road, but I just need to make my way across to the gap in the fence. It's a roadblock stopping vehicles from coming this far into the festival. I repeat my FCC query to a police officer who is supervising the crowd, but he doesn't know either. He finds me another officer who speaks some English, but he also does not know what is this FCC of which I speak. He wants to know if it is a hotel. "It's a restaurant." It might be a hotel. "It's a big restaurant, lots of Europeans there." Europeans means white people here, the way Africans means black people in the US. I get uncertain directions to continue the way I am going. It's possible that there are out-of-town cops here for the festival, but this is the biggest city in the country. Most of them must be from here.

A few blocks later--or maybe it was half a block and just felt like a block--I spot a tourist information building. They speak English and have heard of the FCC. They mark it on a map and say it's about four hundred metres on, just past the National Palace. These sound like great directions and it's only when I'm back in the thick of the crowd that I realize that I can't see any street signs because of the crowd, that everything in this country looks like a national palace to me, and I couldn't read the words National Palace in Khmer if they were suspended on a two metre wide banner over my head. Which they probably are, but it's getting kind of dark now.

The river is on the right and I can see incredibly decorated barges sailing back and forth. Each barge has a superstructure which must be the height of a three-storey building, depicting a temple or a Buddha or a goddess, all illuminated with electric lights, probably LEDs judging by the precision and brightness of the lettering and designs. This festival dates back at least to the eleventh century and probably to the seventh, so at one time these boats must have been decorated with candles or bonfires or something. I pass something that looks like it could be a national palace, so I study my map. Wait, according to this map, either the FCC is on the other side of the street, in the other direction, or the person marked the map incorrectly. I think the last. I make my way to the sidewalk and ask again. A "European" (actually, judging by the accent, a southern United Statesian) is in earshot of my question and he knows where the FCC is. I suspect that my informant's "everybody" (who knows where the FCC is) consists of all European-descended people who have been in Phnom Penh more than two days. He didn't consider that I was going to ask locals. Silly Aviatrix. I'm told now that the FCC is about another block on, on the right, big white building, can't miss it. So I relax about being able to find it and struggle slowly through the crowd, appreciating the festival for a bit longer. It's remarkable how quickly it gets dark in the tropics. Fireworks start over the river. I know I'm late now, as part of the purpose of going to the FCC was to see the fireworks from their balcony. I hope they aren't worried about me.

After what I'm sure is well over four hundred metres past the tourist place and more than a block past the American, I still haven't found a big white building that says FCC or Foreign Correspondents' Club, so I ask again, this time smartening up and asking a white person. A New Zealand accent tells me that it's back the way I came, "You could miss it." This time I don't. It's easier to see from this direction, being kind of halfway around the corner onto the side street. By the time I arrive, everyone has pretty much finished their dinners. Some people were worried about me, but the group leader knew me well enough that he was fully confident I'd turn up eventually, so it wasn't too bad. I apologize for my tardiness and get a great meal out of sampling other people's leftovers. There are geckos running across the ceiling eating bugs. I wonder if they would have liked my spicy roasted crickets.

We all walk home together, as it's now much too crowded to get any kind of taxi or tuk-tuk down here. We start out on some back roads, which aren't too bad, and must have been the way the other walking party came, but then we merge with the main road and it's even more packed than it was on the way down. Now it's like the area in front of the stage at a concert, hot, everyone pressed up against one another and happy, smiling. Lots of people step on my feet, but they're all wearing sandals or thongs and they don't weigh very much. The motorcycle going over my toes is going to leave a mark, though. It gets to a point where we can hardly move at all. We've been trying to go the short half block from the main street to our hotel street for over half an hour. It's disconcerting when I realize that there are some food vending carts in the crowd--and I know the technology they use to heat things on the card is concrete pots of hot coals. We're packed tightly enough that there could be a real problem here. I don't know enough to Khmer to be able to yell something useful to prevent people from pushing forward if there was fire, or a child fallen, or something. There's a car embedded in the crowd near me. I could jump on it and grab children up to safety, hope people understood. I know how to say "Help me," and as there are no noun or pronoun cases in the language and it follows strict SVO word order, I can reverse that to declare "I help." A siren starts to wail and I realize that one of the embedded vehicles is an ambulance. There's not a chance of it moving. There's nowhere to get out of the way. People walking with bicycles or astride motos make it impossible for the crowd to push sideways, and there isn't any room anyway. We're already right out to the sides of the street. "Now you see why I was late!" I explain to the people still within earshot, but admit that it wasn't this bad on the way down.

We all get home safely and watch the crowd, festive searchlights, and more fireworks from the roof of our hotel.