Wowsers! What a week!
So I made it through week one of work at SSC. My head is swimming with information but it's the kinda stuff I like to ponder - such as cultural differences and the value judgments we make. Interesting stuff. When it stops floating around my head and I make heads and tails of some of it I'll let you know...but I think my job is going to be very enjoyable and challenging.

So moving on to the weekend...for people who have few friends we sure had a busy weekend!

Friday night saw us having dinner with a friend of Ben's aunt and her sister. Two lovely women we had never met before. We took them to one of our favourite restaurants in PP that serves provincial Cambodian food...and as we chatted and got to know each other we discovered just how small the world can be. Anne (from Perth) is friends of Ben's Aunt Pam and her sister Lynne (from Tassie), I discovered through conversation is friends with my Aunt Liz, who also lives in Tassie and her daughter was friends with my cousin Lucy. What are the odds that two random people could be friends with our Aunts, when there are 20 million people in Oz? Trippy!

Saturday was wedding fever! My dear friend Chenda always said she would get married in 2007 and sure enough she did. So Ben and I experienced our first proper Cambodian wedding. It was out in the provinces so we hired a car to drive there. Took about an hour. We went with two other woman from Hagar, as that's how I knew Chenda - through my work at Hagar. She was the finance person there.

Cambodian weddings are interesting. Chenda had 10 different outfits for the day, although we only saw two...but they were beautiful with lots of bling. It's amazing though - Cambodian women cake on the make-up when they get married and they hairspray their hair to an extent that it would stay still even amidst a tornado...they are so made up they are almost unrecognisable. Chenda on any given day is stunning but I hate to say, I think Western notions of beauty differ when it comes to Cambodian weddings.

Like Aussie weddings though...a Cambodian wedding consists of guests having quite the feast and then partying on down to some bad music. Whilst there was no Bon Jovi "You're love is like bad medicine"...or Billy Idol's, "It's a nice day for a white wedding"...we had fun.






The thing I was most taken with was their cans of coke...allow me to introduce what i call Commitment Coke...it's pure, gassy love in a can. A toast to the happy couple!






Saturday night was out on the town with my good friend Michelle (aka Wookelle). Wookie used to live here in the Penh but is now based in Singapore...so it was lovely catching up. I met her and a large group of people for dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in the French district of PP. If that makes sense? A cultural fusion some might say.

Then this morning, Ben and I met Wookie and her friend Claire that she was travelling with at Java for brunch, where again there was another fair crowd of people...popular is our Wookie! So I think Ben and I have eaten and socialised our way through the weekend quite successfully.

Now I must prepare myself to move on to week two of work and come Friday Ben's parents will be in town and we are off to Laos! Yay!