Goin' to the Country

We went to see Kim's baby, and when I told Radek that we were going to the really rural part of the village, he laughed and said, "I thought we already were."  When I drive there by myself, I get some weird looks, but imagine the impact on these country folks as we made our arrival.  Radek kept saying, "They are looking."  Mostly, they just gawked at this odd display.  But, we also got a few cheers from a group of boys who sped past on their moto.

I always take the back route to Kim's house which is easier than the highway, but when we were almost there, a farmer motioned for us to turn left.  What?  When we went a little further, I realized the problem.  The road was cut in half, and a giant pipe was being installed.  We took the detour which skirted a rice paddy and then rose steeply back up onto the dirt road.  I won't go into a lot of detail now since it mostly involves embarrassing myself, but there may have been a slight mishap which caused my moto to wedge itself into a clump of bushes.  It wouldn't start back up, and I got a little worried.  I'm sure it wouldn't have taken an engineer with a PhD to find the problem it, but luckily, I happened to have one on hand, and he fixed it.  We decided it would be best to just push it up the hill this time.  Actually, Radek pushed it, and I pretended to be helping.

Yay!  We made it past the giant hole.  No problem now.  Oh, wait.  Is that a...?  Yes.  It's a tree - an enormous fallen tree - blocking the whole road.  Naturally, there was another detour through the muddy rice paddy, so Radek pushed my moto through the onerous sludge while I again offered tremendous moral support.  

Kim grilled Radek on is job, education, family, Germany, vacation, and various other topics.  He was impressed with her English and her interest in so many (often random) topics.  (He did very well considering that talking to Kim is like the Spanish Inquisition.)  I think he also liked seeing how regular people live in Cambodia. 

I asked Kim how to spell Sey-Hak's name, and she looked at me as if it had never occurred to her and said, "I don't know.  You decide."

Kim's nephew, slept most of the time, and he woke up later, and I noticed he was watching a music video with a woman wearing a leopard print bikini, singing some Khmer song, in the jungle.  Cambodians may not have running water, but they have way better electronic gadgets than me.