Hashing Cambodian Style!

As many of you know I am an avid participant in any hash run I can manage to come across and find them to be an excellent way to meet people when you’re new to an area. So of course I had to try out the Hash run here in Phnom Penh yesterday. So I hopped on the internet, found the website and showed up at the old train station at 2:45 as requested about 5 minutes after getting there the hash wagon pulled up. These guys have this hash run stuff down to an art. They have an old produce truck with sponsorship banners (beer companies of course lol) on the sides that loads up all the runners every Sunday and drives them out to the run site. Now the drive takes about an hour to get out of town, as does any vehicle larger than set of roller blades, and the whole way out you get the most hilarious looks from the locals as you have a dump truck with about 50 white people drinking beer, driving through town. We got out to the run site, which like most other hashes is in the middle of nowhere, and all pile out for our run and take off along the path.


Our trusty hash steed!

The short run/walkers path heads one way and the long takes off the other. Now Cambodia as a country is almost entirely swamp, take any movie you’ve ever seen about Vietnam and that’s pretty much exactly what it looks like in the country side here. So we’re running for about 2k before our path trails off into a rice patty and we miss the marks showing to go the other way. So about 10 other runners(and of course myself) all take off through the rice patty maze attempting to stay on the berms separating the patties. Once were about 10 minutes and a kilometer off path the slower runners, which included the guy who set up the trail, go running by on the right path and we all start cursing and began making our way back. Then the path joined up with the walker’s path and soon ended at the water park. Now this is not your normal idea of a water park, remember this is the bottom of the Mekong River Delta and there are 5 other third world countries upstream from the water here, god only knows what lives in it. But in true hash fashion we all say screw it, pay the 75 cents to get in, guys drop to their boxers and girls to their undies and start hitting the slides(making certain to hold your mouth and pinch your nose closed when you go into the water of course lol). After everyone was pretty beat up (there were two Ausies who were convinced they could surf down the slides lol) we got together for the Hash circle afterwards. I got labeled as an illegal immigrant (because I had moved into their hash from another) and myself together with the hash virgins all got into the middle for our drinks and punishments. These guys are much more creative then the Hashers in Gabs or Ottawa ever hoped to be. One of their rituals is that the guys who set the run have to sit on a huge block of ice for the entire proceeding, resulting in testicle imprints in the ice when they got up(I don’t look forward to setting a hash here ever!).



Look mom I can slide!

Yes that is a toilet seat around his neck.

Poor little virgins all lined up and ready to drink!

Once all the goofy festivities were done then all 50 or so of us piled back into the truck and headed to town to find a restaurant. And since we're all done running and everyone is drinking pretty steadily now, well everyone’s getting a buzz going and getting much more rambunctious. Then it takes another hour or so to get to this sweet little Burmese restaurant which is completely unprepared for that many people to show up so it took a bit to get our food but the food was worth the wait(I’ve yet to have anything here that wasn’t delicious). By the end of the night I’d even managed to make a few friends with a couple of very interesting women who are lawyers down here from Germany and DC working as interns for the tribunals for the Khmer Rouge leaders, so I have found the type of good natured and dedicated people I like to hangout with. As well as a couple of pretty cool Ausie surf bums(yeah the two from the slide lol). All in all I think this town is going to fit me well and I am looking forward to many more runs with the P2H3 Danger Hashers and the rest of my year here in Cambodia.

Let The Games Begin!

Now this is where things got interesting in the middle of my pool game at our mini reunion I get a call from the embassy here in Cambodia telling me they’re waiting at the airport for me to which I told them that my flight itinerary doesn’t show me leaving until the following morning and that I would be in Cambodia in 2 days time. So the next morning as I am setting there with my mom all ready to go to the airport I check my tickets and orders and nearly crap myself because my itinerary was printed wrong(thank you Africa!) and both my orders and itinerary say I was supposed to leave 2 days earlier and should already be in Cambodia. Now for those of you not familiar with the military missing a flight, with no good reason other than some papers being wrong, is a huge problem and ultimately results in me being listed as UA(an offence punishable under the UCMJ by restriction, loss of rank and/or being sent back to DC and a whole bunch of other bad things I don’t really want to happen). And regardless of your military knowledge you can imagine my dismay at realizing I had missed my flight to Cambodia and now needed to get there as soon as possible. The bad luck pretty much ended there though because when I called the embassy here they gave me 5 days to get here, and then when I went to the airlines thinking I was about to have to drop 3000 dollars of my own money on new tickets it turned out that since I had the luck of coming from Africa where E-tickets don’t exist that I could use my paper tickets to fly standby the whole way there without having to pay anything more(I am always using paper tickets from here on out lol). So the next morning I showed up bright and early at 6:30 am to wait for a flight, I got the first flight to Denver then the next flight to LA without any problems actually making it there 8 hours quicker than I would have otherwise. Which turned out to be a great thing because the other nice thing about standby is that you pick up and recheck your bags at every stop, so when they didn’t come in on my flight to LA, I was able to just wait until the next flight when they came in. That night I caught the overnighter to Hong Kong where I hit my first and only real snag in the trip when it turned out there just aren’t that many flights going to Cambodia and I would have to wait a day, which is where that whole “check your bags at every airport” thing came in handy again. You see it is in my outdoorsy nature to always be ready to go in case I should have the chance to do any hiking or camping therefore I packed my sleeping bag and pad along with all my other camping gear rather than ship it in case I get the chance before my shipments make it here to Cambodia. So I had probably one of the most comfortable nights ever in an airport with my sleeping pad and bag all rolled out next to a little waterfall display they have there in the airport(I kept having to go pee for some reason that night lol). I got some funny looks from a few people but it was comfy as hell and a lot less then the 200 bucks a night for a hotel (Hong Kong’s expensive!). The next morning I lucked out once again and met a Chinese/Canadian guy from Ottawa who lives in Hong Kong but works for Canadian Airways and after chatting a bit he offered to show me around town for about 4 hours until my flight left that afternoon. So we stashed my bags in Canadian Airways office hopped a taxi and saw a bit of Hong Kong and had something other than airport food for once in 3 days lol.I got off the flight to Phnom Penh at 5:45pm and showed up at the embassy at the tail end of our semi annual inspection here. I had been in the house about 10 minutes (just long enough to change out my polo and slacks that I have to show up to the embassy in) and then they called a response drill where essentially we have someone pretend to be an intruder and then we proceed to go through and clear the building room by room much like a civilian SWAT team would. The difference is though we work and sometimes live in these buildings so normally you know them inside out even by the time you do your first drill. But since I had only even been in the country about 10 minutes it was just crazy being thrown into all of this with guys and tactics and scenarios I’m not familiar with at all and it really gave me a whole new level of respect for our civilian counterparts, not knowing what’s around that corner when you’re tracking down and armed assailant in an unfamiliar building. But after the drill everything settled down and with the exception of one or two trips to the store I’ve barely left the compound yet.From what I have seen of it I really think I will enjoy my time here in Cambodia, the locals are nice and personable with much the same outlook on things as the Africans back in Botswana (although I must say they definitely have a more stringent work ethic lol). The city itself is pretty crazy compared with quite little Gabs, or anywhere else for that matter. Our vehicle (a full size suburban) is nearly useless here making a bicycle by far the most efficient means of transportation. The marine I’m working with are ok guys they are definitely much more in love with being a marine than I have ever been but they’re good guys none the less and they all really like to mountain bike so I’m set for recreation. The one thing I’m not so sure about is the expats here. In Botswana the expat community was a great community, it was almost entirely composed of NGO and foreign aid workers because, well… there’s just not really anything else to do in Botswana which led to a community comprised of people with big hearts and open minds. That and there was a large but tight nit Indian community there which I really liked and got along with many of them very well(and now hope to one day spend some time in India because of). Whereas here in Cambodia most of the expats appear to be here solely because they don’t want to actually have to work at anything in life and can take advantage of the social and economic situation here to do just that. And of course you have the low life middle age men (and of course the other marines all fall into this category) who are here because their economic position makes it unbelievably easy to date a girl(usually girls though they hardly ever stick to just one) they wouldn’t stand a chance with if it wasn’t for the fact that she make’s as much in a year as he does a pay check. But all in all I know eventually I will find my kind of people here and settle into a life that I will probably regret leaving once my time here ends in November.

Home for Christmas

As many of you may well know this last December was my first time to be home for Christmas since I joined the Marines 5 years ago. However oddly enough upon my departing Botswana I felt nothing but remorse. You see I’ve never really been much of a social butterfly and it’s always been hard for me to find large groups of people I could actually connect with, now granted I can make friends with pretty much anyone, anywhere, just like anyone else who can keep an open mind and travels extensively. However I never usually connect with a large group and end up normally finding one or two good friends to pass the time with. So it was quite to my surprise when I show up in a little city of 100,000 or so in Africa and find a plethora of people with common personalities and interests to my own. If you have the right friends anywhere on earth can feel like home.
So anyways upon arriving at the airport in Grand Junction I felt a bit relieved to be done traveling and to only have lost one bag in route which I knew to be somewhere between Atlanta and Denver and was looking forward to some snow and cool air (the one thing I never really adjusted to in Africa was the heat lol). My mom picked me up at the airport and at our very first stop for gas (this is after I left the airport on the wrong side of the road lol) I almost immediately felt like an outsider. I quickly came to realize I would spend the next month as a tourist in the same small town (1500 people or so) that I had been born and raised in. But I was back with my family and was going to see them all for the first time in 5 years. My younger brother Gunther still lives and works in the area as a coal miner (you can’t really knock it he makes over 50,000 a year at the age of 21 in an area where most people are lucky to break 25,000) so we met up earlier on in the week. However our video game rehab sessions(he had torn a ligament in his thumb dirt biking and had to play as much Xbox as possible to rehab the thumb and get back off of workman’s comp lol) soon ended when my little sister and baby brother returned home. My sister(TR) is living in Cheyenne, Wyoming with her husband who is an Air Force police officer and trying to make the most of it, and my youngest brother(BJ) is also wasting a bit of his time in the Marines out in 29 Palms, California as an explosives technician.
So the remainder of the time went by pretty uneventfully. My grandmother came down to join us and managed to scare both my brother and mom into not smoking anymore (she resembles the grim reaper in a white flowery hospital gown lol). And we all had a nice Christmas dinner together for the first time in 5 years. We spent the majority of our time out and about due to my mom’s trailer being about 450 square feet with 6 people 3 dogs and a cat. And once the daily festivities were done we all retreated back to our appropriate borrowed residence for the night (TR was staying with her husbands family, Gunther has his own house in the next town and I stayed with my friends family up the road from my moms). After the week of Christmas my family all departed back their normal lives which left me to finally get to spend some time with my best friend and her family who were kind enough to essentially adopt me for the rest of my time at home. I went up and did some snowboarding both with BJ and with Brie her family and then threw in some snowmobiling for good measure, as well as did a nice little road trip to meet up with some friends of Brie’s from college that I had always heard a ton about but never met and who turned out to be two very nice women. We rounded out our time at home(brie’s going back to DC on her way to Turkey) by gathering together as many people as we could find from our class in high school. We ended up finding 9 people (pretty good when you consider my graduating class had about 45 people total) and all meeting up to catch up over a few drinks at a local bar. Which turned out to be a really interesting experiment into how much people change and mature (or in a few cases don’t change or mature lol) after high school. But all in all it was really fun night and it was really nice to catch up with everyone.