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Hi, I am Peter Heyes, and this online diary is about my travels that have taken me from Europe, to North America, Africa, and now Asia. If you want, you can sign up for email updates on the right. The latest posts are on the home page. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Sunday, 14 October 2018

Oh for a quiet weekend


I enjoyed my morning exercise, walking up and down the apartment corridor for about 1 1/2 hours. Time flies because I listen to the BBC World Service. I have to say I was saddened by the news that there's cheating in the athletic games for physically handicapped people. They told the story of how coaches encourage athletes to believe they are more handicapped than they thought they were so they can be placed in different categories. One Australian young lady moved from having a slight problem affecting her thinking capabilities, to having cerebral palsy, to being blind, to competing in swimming and cycling. Even when evidence was presented to the Australian governing body they refused to accept she was faking it.

I don't think I slept much last night as I was constantly fighting with Oudom for the quilt. He's always on my side of the bed, no matter which side I decide to sleep on. It's always a challenge keeping him occupied so I was grateful for Norma's gift of thousands of pieces of Lego which she'd purchased over the years from garage sales in Calgary. I enjoy his company, and I learn a lot from him, but he has to be kept busy otherwise he gets into mischief. I'd brought lengths of narrow plastic as he wanted to make bracelets for people so that kept him busy for a while.

He eats hardly any vegetables, and at the moment I've no meat in the house, so we went home so he could get some instant noodles. Ratha had left me a bag of organic oranges from a family farm in Battambang. They are the local kind of orange that never go yellow but remain a dark green. It's difficult to peel the skin off by hand and so it's done by peeling like an apple. They are always delicious. I also joined the family for lunch as granny had prepared a special dish made of minced pork, some fermented stuff and coconut milk. I was instructed how to eat it, adding it to mouthfuls of raw cabbage and cucumber plus a veg that looks like a friendly cactus.

I'm fascinated by the tree outside the apartment. Some branches still have flowers on them which means the tree has been flowering since April. Normally, fruits come from the flower but this one is strange in that the fruit comes from the stem that held the cluster of flowers. They are long, tubular "beans" that are sometimes almost a metre in length. At the moment they are a light green but eventually they'll turn brown. No one in Cambodia bothers eating them but last year a Vietnamese friend picked up a pod from the ground, opened it up and started to eat what was inside. Nothing happened to him!

Last nigh I had to watch a children's movie called "Holes". It's a very convoluted and complicated story so Oudom decided I needed help understanding it. I'm glad he did because at times I was totally clueless.

It's quite a challenge knowing what to talk about with him as his pet phrase is, "I know", and he does. He's constantly searching on Google for interesting things and they are all filed away in his head. He knows all the flags of the world, for one thing. At the moment, in school, he's learning all about the glaciation of Wales, the formation of tarns, parts of glaciers etc.

I have decided to move to the other side of the bed tonight to see if I have a better sleep.