follow the Rabbit-New Year 2010-2011

2011 is the year of rabbit hence my attempt at clever title. The New Year kicked off very quickly for me here no sooner was the new years eve alcohol leaving my system than I was going full throttle at work but more about that later. Has many of you know I am not a big fan of Christmas however I have no issues with New Years eve and this was a good one almost as good as the ESIB Alumni parties :-).

The evening kicked off when a few of us met up to have dinner. Nothing special about that you may think until I realised that our party consisted of me and  five sayra saa att (beautiful), intelligent and entertaining women.

one thorn an five roses

I was of course very happy with this ratio although I was very much the thorn among the roses. Part of the reason of the lack of male reinforcements was mainly that Dave was back in England, all the other male vol from my group were at their placement and Danny was with his family. Despite been vastly out numbered I feel I keep my end up and at the very least tried to be a gentleman in the company of the wonderful women all but one of whom where Dutch (the Dutch are good for parties)

After dinner we headed to Paddy Rice one of the three Irish pubs in Phnom Penh. This is were any semblance of decorum that I had been delicately maintaining went out the window very quickly. The decline was marked first by a couple of buckets or beer, then some champagne and the arrival of male re-enforcements in the form of Paul and Ïngran (well certainly Paul counts as male re-enforcements, Ingran on the other hand is more interested in guylove these days).

waiter there is Dutch girl on my bottle of Champagne 

 Anyway things started to spiral especially when I found a new years eve mask which gave me special powers and allowed me to become someone totally different. I still don't know where the mask came from but it survived and is now hanging on my wall as memory of great night.

It is I the Cookie monster :-)

Anyway the mask clearly had magic powers as evidenced from the following picture.......

look into my eyes....ok it wasn't that magically

Now at some point between the third bottle of Champagne and 1am and 1.30am things got a little bit harder to keep track off. I know some of us went to the Heart of Darkness and that I cycled, I also remember that Linda and I had a dreadful time finding a working ATM due to system crash and that the night or should I say morning ending very very well.

When I eventually awoke the next morning Chris, Jeljte and I heading to watch Khmer kickboxing which was probably the coolest thing I have done on New Years day in ages. It was great the fights were been staged in a large shed where the tv station was based. They started with the lightweights and worked their way up through the weight divisions. 

The only problem of course was that I hadn't brought my camera. Was really something we were the only non-khmer there and between the guy with 10 mobile phones attached to piece of ply board and the crazy music that was played during each fight it was an experience. Each round lasted three minutes and I think there were 9 rounds definitely something I will do again only next time I'll bring my camera.