stupid shorts

struth.....

when i went to visit joey up in cardiff last year we went out for a meal to owen and fiona's house with hellen and joel cook, some guys who had visited cambodia for a few weeks and spent some time with the smiths. joel is comming back out on the 18th of march for three months. like i say i only met him once but its going to be nice to have another guy around, particularly for my last few months and im sure it will be good for the church as well! plus, lucy is comming at the end of the month, so everyone is excited about her comming as well.

ive spent the last couple of days weighing up whether or not to try and visit australia whilst im here and then maybe new zealand in the same trip. one the one hand i think that this may be my only oppertunity to visit those countries for a while yet i know ive committed myself to serve and be here for the last few months. i dont know whether this is one of those lessons about committment that people need to learn when they're young, especially when it is going to hurt. i really want to go but i get the feeling that i will have to stay and pay the cost. for me giving up the idea of that trip is a big price to pay. not my will but yours lord.

heres something culturally religious that you may or not find interesting. i only really thought about it this week. we, the male contingent in the church, have lunch at glynn barrows work every other tuesday, its basically just an oppertunity for us to meet up and spend some time together and talk about guy stuff! i noticed that at icc (glynns work) they cover up the buildings spirit alter. this is basically a fancy bird house, painted yellowy gold and with lots of little red incence sticks making this not unpleasant fragrence that reminds me of my first few weeks in the country when all the smells are new and a little odd. i ony really noticed it because most of the christioan places remove them from the premises, this isnt a dig at icc just an interesting note about why khmer people feel the need to have this incence burning all the time. around september time there is the festival of the dead souls where families burn incence and wail incredibly loudly to calm their ancestors souls, there is a lot of that stuff going on year long with all sorts of different events on the calander. particularly weddings but more so funerals there is a massive supersitious movement that seems to be mingled in with the regular buddhist beliefs and is taught to even the youngest kids about the importance of doing certain things and not doing others. one silly example is that if your driving along the road and you lose a shoe or a hat very rarely will they stop and go back for it, it is assumed that a spirit knocked it off you and that you cannot get it back or it will bring trouble upon you. there are other cultural things which seem so odd to me like picming your teeth in public is considered very rude yet they quite happily scrape out the contents of their naval canities (pick their noses) although this is, obviously, not a religious custom it is none the less foreign to what is considered culturally exceptable in the uk or western nations. i cant speak for the french but for most civilised nations this is true. i find all this stuff interesting and have broken the rules on many occasions, this is normally how ive discovered what is good and what is bad because i did something majorly wrong. i quietly whisper to myself 'you muppet' and carry on as if it never happened.

if gordon brown was khmer then i met his son this week. a guy called mr.webol. he goes to uni with Sothy and is apparently the son of one of the cabnet members, ive been told you have to address his father as 'his exelency'. nice enough guy but i dont think he was really interested in meeting me. he took one look at my moto and laughed, sothy embarrisngly stated that it is very old. i was utterly humbled, this guy with a fancy new bike and a crowd of friends came and briefly met this scummy foreigner who had incroched on his turf with a crappy bike and a stupid pair of shorts. i lived to tell the story.

i am slowly losing my mind.
ben.