Naked old men

It seems like the country is full of 'em
And so, like a biweekly bulletin
A recounting crass
Of an old man's ass
I hope there will be no more of 'em

KEP, CAMBODIA

June 23, 2008

Yesterday was a bit of a slow day; I decided to delegate, and sent Peon 2 out into the field to do surveying for me. Thus, I spent my day around the Guesthouse doing data entry and some initial analysis, and setting up the database to be foolproof, so that when my peons get to data entry, they can't screw anything up or make wrong calculations. How hard will it be for them to just enter data, and then pull formulas down into empty cells? No problem, right? I hope. If there are problems though, rest assured that all of you will be the first (or at least second, I do have a roommate) to hear of it.

Went back to the local Khmer place for lunch. Oh here's a bit of a digression before I get into the naked man story: we ran into Doc R, Doc V, Bunthoeun, and Kunthy at the Khmer place. Not what we were expecting; TH and I were hoping for a quiet lunch, just the two of us and some random Khmer locals. Not so. Doc R insisted on trying to bully TH into doing some work that is adjacently related to TH's project, but is certainly out of scope, saying the same thing over and over again. So that was a bit of a bummer. The food was good though -- and sort of Chinese. There was a bitter melon (foo-ga) soup; the melon was stuffed with ground pork. There was also a salted vegetable (ham choy) dish with chicken. Good, but not as good as the previous day's. I'll let you know how today goes.

My evening was spent in front of the TV at El Dorado's (the caveman restaurant) where TH and H and I watched Bridget Jones 2; a documentary on the history of Angkor Wat; and (Daddy would be proud) Submerged, a Steven Seagal movie. Luckily, it started to pour outside so we cut the Seagal short and ran back to our guesthouse.

So...(drumroll please)...the naked man story. This happened a couple of days ago, and I can't believe I didn't tell it then. So remember how we were kicked out of our rooms for a convention? Well, people ended up having to share rooms, and lucky A got matched with Doc V. A came back to the room one evening to wash up before dinner and when he walked into the room, there was Doc V, standing facing the door, in a bit of a pose, stark naked as the day he was born 73 years ago. A was shocked into speechlessness.

"What," says Doc V, "You never seen a naked man before?" A, in all his smoothness, mumbles something about wanting to eat something and grabs a bag of chips from his luggage, and rips it open and starts cramming them into his mouth, to show that that's all he wanted from the room. Then he rushes out.

Later, full of a bag of chips and no longer hungry for dinner, he returns to the room. Doc V is now lying naked on the bed, face up. He looks over at A and says, "Don't mind me, I'm just letting it air out."

Oh, my goodness.

When A recounted the story to us later, there was a lot of swearing on his part (I feel as though he still hadn't gotten over the shock). To add insult to injury, he was disappointed that a bag of chips had been wasted (snacks are hard to come by, here) in this whole thing.

Again, oh, my goodness.