I Can Do Anything

Riding a bicycle in Phnom Penh does wonders for the self-esteem.  If I can ride a bike here, I can do anything I want ever in my whole life.  

I left the apartment around four and twenty minutes later I arrived at RM's office.  The bike ride was uneventful, which is just what you want a bike ride in Cambodia to be.  The worst thing was how hot it is here.  Guys.  It's hot.  Add a bike helmet and a breathing mask and you are boiling in about two seconds.  The other hard thing is finding and reading the street signs.  Mama Mia and I had a challenging time doing that in Venice, but this is 10 x worse.  Maybe there are signs but they are all written in Khmer, so that's no help at all.  Luckily, there are many streets (most) that are numbers and they are usually the numbers I recognize, and they are consecutive, so that helps a lot.  

At the office a very exciting thing happened.  A certain interviewing Toucan we all know got to interview no less than 6 Cambodians about information and community planning.  It was thrilling.  These will be on YouTube soon, but Sammy's long suffering editor is quite behind on uploading interviews, so hopefully, it will be before Christmas, but I wouldn't doubt if it took until after then.  

After the office shenanigans, we biked over to a local bar for a mapping meetup where we heard two presentations about different ways to design interpretations of maps to help better understand land usage and flooding.  This is one of the projects that the NGO that RM works at is working on.  There is a lot of research involved...perfect for a library student.  One of the speakers was German and the other was Cambodian.  The whole evening was in English.

Dinner was next and we headed over to Savana 2, a local Cambodian barbecue place.  I tried lots of new foods including heart and stomach.  Goat was also eaten and a nice sauce was quickly whipped up by mixing up regular black pepper with lime juice.  It was yummy.  

Tomorrow I will be biking around Phnom Penh on my own.  I plan on seeing the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda, Wat Phnom, and shopping in one of the two main markets here (Central and Russian).  I might have to forego Wat Phnom because it's pretty far...we'll see.  

We are starting to think about Thanksgiving plans.  There is talk of taking a bus and staying my last few days on the coast.  That would be very beautiful.  I hope the budget and time allows!