expats, my birthday, and heat

None of the events of the past 48 hours would have occured without the help of the expats. While I continue to possess a strange disdain and perhaps even confusion about hanging out with expats, I feel extremely lucky and really happy to have met them still. My ultimate goal is to build sustainable relationships with local Khmer. However, having a non-tourist population to discuss episodes of How I Met Your Mother, the sociocultural implications of Knocked Up and Canada as the 51st state is a nice cushion to have.

A more appropriate title for this entry therefore would have been Tiff Tsang HBSc or: How I learned to stop self-loathing and learn to love the expat bubble.

I bring up the subject of expats because I spent the large part of Friday pondering about my birthday, which you all should know is today. Of course, all of my fears of doing this alone were dashed once I met Prateek and company. Through Prateek, whom i consider of social saviour and big brother typology, I've had the chance to meet really interesting and amazing characters in the NGO population in PP.

What I've learned from meeting them, however, is that I seem to be the only one who actively sought to get myself here. Through work and such, this collection of USAID, PeaceCorps, JSI, PSI, UN, WHO, Save the Children employees, and consultants of other acronyms seems to just have found themselves in Cambodia on the single factor of circumstance, or paycheque. Nonetheless, they are really great to talk to, and to hear Happy Birthday in Khmer from. I've deviated from the subject of why exactly I chose to come to Cambodia, and not Latin America, Central Asia, the Middle East, or that sexy region of sub-Saharan Africa, but that is for another posting.

But, self-involved as I am, back to my birthday. I spent last night at a house party discussing the trials and tribulations of the expat community, post-conflict psychology and the retributive lyrics of the song "date rape" by Sublime. At around 130am, we wound up at this club called Heart of Darkness, more affectionately known as "the Heart". Joseph Conrad's vision of subcontinents really hit the right note here. In a crowd of equal parts tourists, expats and rich Khmer kids, I couldn't help but wonder..."this must be Orientalism, Chinoiserie, and yellow fever, applied..." All to the sound of not so great house music and the occassional Macarena. I kid you not. I especially enjoyed the Anglo grandfather-type (replete with sweater vest), standing in the corner and watching all of this rhythmic thriving of inter-cultural bodies injected with many doses of alcohol. And the icing on the cake were the not so inconspicuous body guards fervently monitoring the activities between their rich Khmer clients...or rather, their children.

My new friends, Drew, Liz and Annie informed me that this was all quite normal...and that there was a hip hop night if I so desired as I'm not the biggest fan of house. We even tried to play charades with the caged, and elevated DJ in order to communicate to him HIP HOP:

2 Words....then hopping around for a bit. He didn't really get it.

A final word about the expat community is that they are really protective of each other. While PP is safer than I expected, acts of violence against foreigners do happen. Rumours of an Australian girl getting sexually assaulted after leaving the Heart, as a result of her moto driver steering her in a direction that wasn't home are abound. I'm really lucky that Prateek, who is embodied as a football player-like South Asian dude, lives above me and has been around to slowly engrain PP living here. Like I said - turning 23 without my new friends would have been a tad lonely and I would probably be on the computer @ 2pm (Cambodia time) without the excuse of a hangover and 5 hrs of sleep. I also have the excuse of the heat.

It's about 38 degrees celsius out there. I suppose I should make another venture out again.