About ten minutes before we were supposed to meet for dinner, Rabia texted to ask if I’d be up for joining a group of people going to Spark later last night. Would I? Uh…yeah, of course - is Buddha Buddhist? Spark is on par with the Rock as being the most happening Khmer dance hall in the city. Both are huge buildings with big name-recognition located on the Southern side of the city. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve only been to the Rock once and had never been to Spark before, but it wasn’t because I hadn’t been wanting to go.
We got in a tuk-tuk from the restaurant, and in contrast to the usual clueless reaction, the driver answered with a quick reply of recognition. “Oh, yes, spah’k. You should go to the Orange Club too.” Anyway, we showed up at the surrounding parking lot and looked up at the radiating red neon lights on the roof. This seemed to be the place where all of the teenage riders of the new Honda and Suzuki motorbikes, with their flashy clothes and speedy driving, go on a Saturday night. We headed into “blue” Spark, not to be confused with the smaller and apparently slightly sketchier Spark Red, which sits behind it.
Both the Rock and Spark are huge dance halls, and we could hear the dance music as soon as we walked in. That was after, of course, passing the signs spelling out that guns, military uniforms, grenades, cameras, military caps, babies, drugs, and flip-flops were not allowed.
It was the night out I had been craving since before I partly satiated that desire at reunions. We went straight to the dance floor and practiced the jelly-like shoulder movements of the young Cambodians dancing around us. Pop Khmer dancing or the dances that young people in Cambodia do or whatever you want to call it is pretty good, I think. It somehow captures the hip shaking of Western hip-hop dancing and meshes it with the deliberate hand and arm movements of classical Khmer music. I happen to think the end result is both unique and successful.
The best thing, I discovered, though, is that there are breaks in the DJ’s playlist in order to make way for bands or performances every once in a while. At first, when the music changed to a slow song and everyone vacated the dance floor to the tables and bars surrounding it, I thought that perhaps slow songs were just too scandalous for the clientele. But then I realized that we had just missed the memo and that they were breaking for a performance. From my perspective, these provided the best excuse to stop dancing for ten minutes to let my sweat decrease to a normal rate. And as a side note, for a supposedly conservative culture, the performances were far from PG.
Following the success of last night, I jumped on Brendan’s suggestion to go to Phnom Penh Water Park today. What could be better on a hot, hot day? Plus, we couldn’t imagine too many tourists coming to Phnom Penh to go to the water park along the road to the airport, which increased its appeal.
The oversized and neat white and blue cement entryway visible from the road certainly oversells the slides inside. We paid our admission, again headed past the no-guns signs, and stepped into a little piece of Americana. The snack bar even sold a Cambodian versions of a hot dog, which I had to get just because it felt appropriate. Expecting to see towering slides curly-cuing down into blue pools, however, I was moderately surprised to see only a few slides of medium height surrounded by what we came to call the Stagnant River Pool.
Nonetheless, we pulled off our flip-flops, kept our shirts on (since everyone else seemed to be), dumped our stuff in the lockers, and hit the slides. They weren’t high, but it was still plenty of fun. In contrast to the regulated parks in the US, the rules seemed to be that, if you didn’t run, you must not really want to slide down. If you didn’t launch more than five people down the slide at once, then you just weren’t being creative. And if you didn’t go immediately after the person in front of you, then you just had no sense of adventure for when you’d run into the other person midway down the slide. Also, feet up at the bottom. As if on purpose, the bottom of the shallow pools at the end had extremely roughly finished concrete floors.
Even though I swim nearly every other day, there was something more entertaining about going down the slides. We held our mouths closed super tight when we hit the pools. The water wasn’t exactly crystal clear. And when the sirens started sounding, we did like everyone else did and ran for the wave pool, which was just starting up again. We went into the empty pool first, and within seconds, it was filled with paratroop jumpers landing in their inner tubes with thuds all around us. We looked around a few minutes after we got in and realized that the pool was virtually full, and everyone was packed in tube to tube.
Yet beyond the nearby tubes and at the edge of the pool, we confirmed our worst fear, which deep down, we already knew to be true. A mother was leading her young son to the edge of the pool to…pee. There may be waves, but this was no ocean. We got out, tried to block the knowledge out of our heads, hoped really hard that we wouldn’t get sick, went on a few more slides, and then headed back into town.