It’s pretty hard to sum up the weekend that was Thanksgiving and Water Festival in mere words. Conveniently, Thanksgiving falls on the Thursday before Water Festival, which lasts from Friday to Sunday (with an extra day off on Monday for everyone to recover and travel back to the countryside from Phnom Penh). For obvious reasons, being that there were historically few pilgrims here and that there are now few Turkeys running around, I didn’t have Thanksgiving off from school. I did, however, have Friday and Monday off, and the whole city started taking on a celebratory feel for Water Festival just in time for me to feel like Thanksgiving was a real holiday.
The population of Phnom Penh is estimated to be somewhere between 1 and 1.3 million people. During this weekend, however, it swells to between 3.5 and 4 million, as many from the countryside come to join in the celebration. That’s a huge increase. The holiday celebrates the end of the rainy season and the rich harvests that result, and it involves boat races on the river and the city taking on a generally festive atmosphere.
Since I missed Halloween due to dengue and since I’m partial to Halloween and Thanksgiving as far as holidays go, I really wanted to make sure that I got a good, surreal celebration of Thanksgiving while I was in Cambodia. For about a month or so, Mel and I had been planning a big dinner at my house to celebrate the holiday. Additionally, I had the big excitement of having Lev and Elena coming for the holiday and that weekend. I mean, at least half of Istanbul is on the same continent as Cambodia, so why not? And Elena made the trek over from equally non-celebrating Laos. All in all, it started shaping up to be quite the occasion.
Thursday morning, I ran around picking up supplies for dinner since I had been busy coordinating our apartment being repainted until the afternoon before. Since our street is one of the main avenues to the riverfront, Liep pulled me out to the balcony in the morning to see the ceremony proceeding down our block before I left on my errands. The boats that race during the festival are long and narrow, and each carries 60 rowers. It was a pretty cool spectacle to see many of the teams carrying their boats symbolically to the river right outside my window. I had prime viewing space.
I went to school and made it through classes enough to rush back to my house to see Elena and Lev. Since Water Festival and Khmer New Year (in April) are the two biggest holidays, that Thursday afternoon at school had the same feeling that the day before winter break always did, a time when the excitement is palpable. I shared in the excitement, and just tweaked it in my head to apply it to Thanksgiving. Anyway, I headed back to the apartment, and everyone miraculously made it through the maze that is the route to my house. I don’t know whether to be impressed by my direction-giving ability or by Mel, Elena, and Lev’s resourcefulness and confidence. Either way, they made it. I also walked in and discovered that Elena had brought a paper-mache Turkey piñata with her. Not only would it have been impressive enough for her to have found it somewhere, but she also both made it herself and literally carried it from Laos in her lap on the plane.
Well, unfortunately, in the scramble to get ready, none of us had actually managed to get the main food ingredients, so Lev and I headed onto a moto to pick up everything else that we needed. It’s always fun having visitors and throwing them right into things, and we had fun getting the rest of the food. An hour or two later, everything that I had pictured was coming together thanks to Mel and Elena’s leadership in the kitchen. The table and chairs were set up on the terrace. We put out some candles, and we finally all sat down. We took it high class, and I even bought cheese and baguettes. Additionally, a huge thanks goes to Leslie for bringing two cans of cranberry sauce all the way from the US and then hauling them around while she visited other fellows until she finally arrived in Phnom Penh. It made the evening.
Anyway, I had built up this image of what Thanksgiving dinner here would be like, and it was exactly as I had hoped for. We all sat on the terrace looking out onto the city while we ate for hours. And it was nice to be eating at home and not in a restaurant for the first time since I arrived. It was the shorts and t-shirt Thanksgiving that I had hoped for. And best of all, unlike Thanksgiving at home, we finished dinner and then had a whole rest of the weekend’s worth of festivities to look forward to.
The next day, after squeezing in a quick Khmer lesson in the morning, we headed to the riverbank to take in the boat races. Contrary to what everyone had warned, I didn’t find it unbearably or overwhelmingly crowded. Yeah, there were more people than usual, but all the roads East of Norodom and down to the river (which we fall between) were closed, so there was actually less traffic on the streets than usual. The crowds mainly formed right at the edge of the river but really didn’t seem to extend too far back into the rest of the city. We easily got a spot on the concrete ramps that slope down into the river, and, luckily, having someone block our views really isn’t a problem here. We easily towered over the few rows of heads that were in front of us.
What there were a lot of were boats and racers. All of the boats huddle in close to shore as the make their way upstream to start the races. With hundreds of boats and a round robin style of two boats racing at a time, there is never a lack of rowers stroking down the river towards the finish line. And with sixty people to a boat and long, skinny, decorated boats, the sight is pretty impressive. Everyone, of course, had coordinated outfits for their teams, though we often saw people changing shirts after each run to join what must have been the other teams that they were competing with. We didn’t place any bets, but if we were to, we would have hands down put our money on the ones wearing the pink satin shirts. Because they were wearing pink satin shirts of course.
As the afternoon continued, we meandered up the bank to the area near the port, where old, crumbling piers rising along the shore gave us greater height and perspective from which to see the boats. It was here that I had one of those realizations that you occasionally have when abroad. It’s minor, but I realized that I could actually recognize all of the flags of Southeast Asian countries passing in front of me on the sterns of the boats. In addition to the Cambodian boats, which make up the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of boats here and which represent different teams from all over the country, most Southeast Asian countries also send one boat to participate in the international division. These smaller, twenty person boats each fly their nations’ flag, and realizing that you can recognize the country from the flag is a small but rewarding experience.
Unfortunately, at this location, the three of us also started discussing whether we thought any of these rowers could swim. Our doubtful predictions were unfortunately confirmed when I learned on Monday that the Singaporean boat had capsized that Friday evening and had lost all of the men who weren’t immediately picked up by nearby boats.
But at that moment, we didn’t know what was in store, and we continued along the riverfront, looking for crickets. Crickets are a common treat here, and I’m always up for being “cultural.” It also certainly helps to have two adventurous partners in crime who are willing share in the excitement. I mean, what’s the use of eating a cricket if you can’t show someone that you did it? We had been told that the influx of people from the countryside would bring tons of fresh, juicy, countryside-grown bugs to vendors’ trays and also an excitingly large crowd to the city. So far, however, we had been underwhelmed by both, oblivious that we would stumble into both later that evening.
The boats were interesting to watch, but after a few hours, we decided that it was time to move on. After a bit of sightseeing, I had the idea that we should go to Olympic Stadium to join in the aerobics that happen every evening (and morning), both at 5:00. I had been meaning to go with one of the other teachers at school who had told me about it for some time, but here we were right before five looking for something to do and hoping to do something a little active before dinner. Olympic Stadium is so named because…well, I think because they decided they liked the name. It actually is quite impressive, and when we arrived, you could see everyone swaying simultaneously on the concrete that rings the top edge. As we climbed the stairs, we started to hear the music, and there were literally hundreds of Khmer women (and a select few men) all moving to the music in coordination. There are a few different groups, and each group has its own leaders and play lists, but by the time your eyes scan the whole panorama, it looks like everyone for hundreds of yards around the stadium is all doing the exact same thing.
Having not prepared in advance, we joined in with our flip-flops and khaki shorts. It was probably one of the most fun experiences I’ve had since arriving, as we imitated everyone else’s steps and looked out over the sunset. The stadium’s far and away the tallest structure in its neighborhood, so the views of the sunset are amazing. Behind us, over the river, fireworks started launching into the sky for the water festival celebrations. After the initial aerobics wound down, just as it was getting pretty difficult to see in the dark, the music paused, but we were told by one of the other aerobics exercisers that we didn’t have to leave yet because dancing came next. We stayed another twenty minutes, and danced we did. It was much harder to simply follow along than the jumping jacks or crossover steps of aerobics had been, but the person next to me took time to try to teach me each dance. Unfortunately, every time I was just starting to get it, the song changed, and there was a whole new dance. I only felt bad that my teacher was spending so much time on a hopeless case like me, but there was a supreme satisfaction when I occasionally actually got the steps down correctly.
We left elated and hopped onto two motorbikes to head back to shower before going for dinner and hitting the town. We made the right decision to share two motorbikes rather than a tuk-tuk, as the traffic built considerably as we got closer to Independence Monument and the river. Unfortunately, even our maneuverability on the bikes was restricted, though, by the ever-increasing crowds, and we decided to walk to rest of the way rather than sit and inhale fumes. Large crowds: check. We bemoaned that one block up, the traffic was much thinner, away from those gawking at the monument. We still had a good ten more blocks to walk, but soon we discovered that our detour was about to get much more exciting than the rest of our motorbike ride home would have been.
We headed East on Street 240 before planning on heading North again for the rest of the way, but as we walked, we noticed that the festive atmosphere that everyone had been telling me about actually started to seem like it was realizing. People were out in the streets, and areas that sometimes feel abandoned at night had music and food stands. As we continued across St. 240, we passed a group of men sitting on a mat on the sidewalk enjoying themselves and chowing down on food and beer. We didn’t think much of it until, just as we were passing them, I realized that they were asking us in Khmer if we wanted to join them for a beer. We took a moment to do a little group huddle and then quickly decided that dinner could wait an extra fifteen minutes.
Well, they were elated that we were joining them and quickly passed us each a can of Cambodia’s finest: Angkor Beer. We knew things were off to a good start when the second things they handed us were crickets to munch on with our beer. We had been looking unsuccessfully for crickets all day, and to quote a later email from Lev, “You couldn’t believe how happy we were. I’m talking shit your pants out of joy happiness. Turns out that these things are delicious. Crunchy, slightly salty - the perfect beer snack.” Crickets: check.
Our new friends insisted that we share more beer with them, and, soon, we were in the rhythm of it, sitting out there with our ten new friends drinking beers in the street. Literally. We were sitting in the street. Across the road, a DJ played the same song over and over again, enough so that even I noticed it was pretty repetitive. But it was a catchy jingle.
We were offered food, but I wasn’t convinced it wasn’t dog, so I declined. Slowly, we learned their favorite drinking game. It’s called “Cheers.” It goes something like this: they say cheers, and then everyone drinks. Repeat for three to four hours. Anyone can initiate. In fact, there can be multiple cheers going on simultaneously. Just make sure there’s never more than five minutes when the “game” isn’t being played.
Anyway, slowly our dinner plans disintegrated, and we got hooked on our new friends and their newfangled game. After staying for a while, they insisted that we had nothing to worry about and that we were very safe (not as sketchily as it sounds when I’m writing it right now). Additionally, we began to notice that the DJ actually seemed to be playing mostly for us, and they insisted that, if we needed to, we should use the bathrooms across the street in the not yet open boutique where the music was coming from. Eventually, we got the full story, and it turns out that we were celebrating with the Deputy Prime Minister’s bodyguards right in font of the deputy PM’s house. Across the street, the large, upscale store that I had noticed being built many times earlier this year (and which served as the staging area for the DJ) belongs to the deputy PM’s son. All in all, that made the whole event even more exciting.
Eventually, we requested a few songs from the one American mix CD that they had and danced out on the sidewalk. The DPM’s grandson came out with his babysitter to check out the festivities, and Elena danced with him for a bit, at which point we realized that these guards were very much partying but hadn’t forgotten who they were looking out for on a normal basis. I’ve never seen so many people keeping an eye out to make sure nothing happened to the kid. The best was when Elena started tossing him in the air. The kid loved it, but I thought everyone else was going to have a heart attack. From there, we went back to change and then hit the dance floor by the riverfront. All along the river, barges with light displays passed by. In the dark, you couldn’t make out the barges themselves very clearly, so it looked as though these lit images were just floating through the river.
I’ve loved being here for the year and am generally pretty happy most of the time here. People are nice, things are different and exciting, and I have time to do the things I want to do. But Cambodia is also a very serious place. In this way, that evening wonderfully sticks out as one of the times since I’ve been here when I haven’t just been happy but have been having a genuine, wonderfully fun time.
(To be continued…)