Raining at the Beach

  Sihanoukville, Cambodia
April 26, 2009

It was storming when we woke up at 5:30, we could have slept until 6:30 because our pick up for the tour is not until 8:00, but Bill forgot to change the alarm. We had a good night sleep because the bed is not too hard here. 

I had bacon (gave to Bill) and eggs with tea and juice. Bill had banana pancakes. Bill is not feeling well today. Both of us are feeling badly about Ally. I dreamed about her last night.

At 8:00 a driver stopped to tell us that our tour has been canceled due to the rain. We walked over to the internet and read about having to choose Ally's cremation options. I emailed Sheila, but decided to call anyway. We just caught them returning from dinner with Karen and Corey. Sheila put me on speaker phone and we had a great visit! Afterward I called Mom and got caught up on the news since we had not talked at Easter. We stayed at the internet cafe for 2 hours because it was still raining.

We took a tuk tuk to the market for $2. This town has a huge outdoor/indoor market. It is very spacious and has everything. I was going to order some prawns, but the lady was taking a really long time on another order, so we did not wait. There were beggars at this market, that is a first.

We walked to the post office, but it was closed, so we headed back toward our Guest House and stopped at Holy Cow for lunch. The story of the name of the restaurant is that a woman in Bat Tran was ill and she claims that a cow liked her and cured her. It is believed that this cow is the incarnation of Preah Koh (who was born of a human mother). The cow became Nationally famous and is said to have cured illnesses and blindness. Bill had a cow sandwich with beef, onion, cheese and a salad with Anchor Beer. I had a mini cottage - like a beef Shepard's pie with water. We shared a beef and bean spud with a salad. It was really good. We have broken the streak of mediocre meals!

Holy Cow also had some gift items and we purchased Kamot pepper, salt and pepper shakers, 4 water colour postcards and a note pad cover (the money supports street children of Sihanouk ville) for $16.50.

We continued back toward our Guest House and saw Joanne and Guy drive by from our cooking class in Phnom Penh. we stopped at Kompongsom City Casino. We had to leave our bags at the front, go through a metal detector and had to check our had to check our weapons. We then had to wait for the dealer to shuffle the cards, it is a very long process. While she was doing this we noted that the cards in the deck were not all the same and Bill commented that there is no way to tell if they have removed some face cards. Bill ended up playing 6 hands (mostly numbered cards, not face cards) and lost $20. I think he jinxed himself.

We collected our money back from our canceled tour and went to a different internet cafe. This one did not make DVDs, so Bill moved on to another spot down the street and I stayed put. I caught up on 2 blogs and Bill made another copy of all of our photos (he has discovered 4 days later that now all of the memory cards have been corrupted and we don't know how to fix it...) Ironically, the guy there told him that a virus had been put on our one card from the place in Phnom Penh.
We met up and went back to the room for a snack and some reading. We tried some Saki that we had bought from the mini mart. It was not bad, but not great. The rain has stopped, but it is still overcast.

We went to our hotel bar to watch the F1 race in Bahrain. We had nachos with chili, fajitas, draft beer, soda and water for $21. Just after the start of the race I went to the internet cafe. There was a fan on over my head to keep me cool, but it was a pain with trying to read my notes.

Bill went back to the room after the race and I joined him shortly afterward. We were both asleep by 10.