Tasty glass burgers 18.04.10

Today has been super fun. We arrived at our very very nice hotel at about one o'clock today. We went straight out for lunch. We are in Kampong Cham at the moment, and it is a really small town. It's nice for us to be here, because it's not very touristy, but it means that there are only two restaurants in the whole place! It is Khmer New Year at the moment as well, so those two restaurants are both closed! Bimes. So for lunch our tour guy organised a meal with a local family. We went to their house and they had made the most amazing food for us. We had sooooo much as well! We had chicken curry, fried noodles in ginger with fish, deep fried pork, vegetable curry and, my personal fave, deep fried aubergine. The family was really nice as well. The dad was a tuk tuk driver and the mum had cooked all the food for us. She was way preggo and had three sons already, poor woman. There were grandparents there as well. Really nice, it was. After lunchey we applied lots of sun cream and then went out for a bike ride. A bike ride. Me on a bike. Heck. I got injured before I'd even left the bloody hotel. I was dismounting from the bike because the stand had broken and I bashed my knee on the bike. Idiot. Not the most promising start. When we actually got going though I was ok. The main problem was that Becky, Nat and I had decided to wear the ridiculuos hats that we bouhgt the other day, and mine kept flying off. Bimes. In the end I just tied it onto the back of my bike. Genius idea. :) We rode our merry bicycles to an island on the Mekong River. To get there we had to cross a bamboo bridge that was like two hundred metres long. It was super rickety. There were several times when I thought that the bridge would actually break. But it didn't. Phew. Riding around the island was brill. The Local people there love tourists, so everywhere we went people said hello to us and waved. It was super, I felt like a celeb, like Cheryl Cole. I said that to Nat but she pointed out that it was probably a bit different for Cheryl. And she has never cycled around Cambodia, but still. We went and tried some fruit from someones house. They invited us, blates, we didn't just turn up. We had a fruit that begins with a p that is very much like a big orange, only it is green. I said it is like an alien orange. It was very tasty but very odd at the same time. An old Cambodian lady came and shook my hand and sat next to me. She had no teeth. She kept shouting instructions at us about how to eat the big green orange, but she didn't speak English. We had a bit of a communication problem. She went off somewhere and came back with a very jazzy fruit for us to try. Jackfruit. It was yummy. It was a bit of a faff to eat, because it has seeds the size of eggs in it, and then there us this whte stuff that you can't eat and then there is a kind of gunk. Well worth it though. It tasted kind of like tropical juice. We said goodbye to our new Khmer friends and then set off on a tour of the island. It is Khmer New Year at the moment, and for some reason they celebrate by throwing water at each other. They also put a smelly powder on your face. So we got a lot of that happening to us. Our celebrity status only seemed to increase the fun in getting us soaked. It was mega loads of fun though. The little kids loved it especially. At one point we were riding down the road and we could see a group of kids up ahead with their big buckets of water, so we readied ourselves for a soaking. I was riding through at he back and managed to get stuck in the mud in the middle of the soaking zone! Bimes for me. All the rest of the group were up ahead so I was all alone. I was not worried though, because the people in Cambodia are super nice. Perhaps if I hadn't got out of the soakig zone I could have stayed here and started a new life, Cambodian style. But that didn't happen, because a small Cambodian boy pushed me and my bike out of the mud. Hooray! I had another encounter with a Cambodian boy when we were on our way back home. This boy was slightly older, I'd say about 15. Anyway, we were riding through a group of boys who were messing us up with the perfumey powder, when all of a sudden he grabs my face, announces " I want to kiss you", and plants one on my cheek. Goodness me, I was in a right tizzle after that. It's not every day that a girl gets a surprise kiss from a Cambodian toy boy, you know. Then we watched the sunset by the bamboo bridge. We didn't have many options for dinner, because the main places are closeed, so our guide took us out for some local food from a street stall. I was happy to eat fried noodles from one of the stalls but a few other people in the group didn't want to because they thought it was unclean. So we went to a burger restaurant instead. I had a chicken burger and chips. I was happily eating my burger when the guide got all freaked out. We asked him what was the matter and he said that he'd found glass in his burger. Seriously, a little piece of glass. Then Griff found glass in his burger too. We didn't want to pay for our burgers because there was glass in them, but the most the guy would offer us was half price. The cheek of it. We didn't stay out late last because we were all really freaked out that we'd eaten glass. I wanted to ring Mummy Hen so that she could reassure me that I wasn't going to die, but I couldn't because I didn't have signal or credit. Bummer. In the end though, I got through it on my own like a big girl. I did not die from eating glass. Phew.