I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar

These last few weeks have been flying by; we can hardly believe that we will only be visiting two more countries before we reach the States (Malaysia and the Philippines)! That being said, we are packing our days full: waking up before sunrise and not hitting the beds until the wee hours of dawn (okay, that might be a little exaggeration but it does feel like we are on the run all day and all night).

Yesterday we decided to celebrate Thanksgiving. We dressed in our finest holiday attire, drafted a little sign, "ARE YOU AN AMERICAN LOOKING TO CELEBRATE THANKSGIVING...if so, come talk to us!) and hit the Russian market in downtown Phnom Penh. We held the sign for hours, but to our dismay, we discovered that there were not too many (or any) Americans frequenting that market. We then got back into a little tuk tuk and drove to the US Embassy, hoping to catch a few Americans who were looking to celebrate their home-cooked turkey dinner with a few travelers holding a sign on the street corner. Unfortunately, the embassy was closed. Luckily, however, our sign got the attention of two americans in another tuk tuk. They shouted the name of a restaurant on the riverside and we told them we might meet them there later.

We then took a brisk walk through the neighboring park and visited the temple on the top of the hill. As we were walking, we bumped into a man visiting from San Diego (and his young daughter who had just been bit by a vicious, wild city monkey). He ended up giving us a Christian missionary's phone number. So we walked to the nearby hotel and tried to call. No answer. No worries. We decided to sit down and enjoy the happy hour specials.

An hour or so later, we picked up and went down to the riverfront to meet the Americans from the tuk tuk. As we walked through the bustling riverside area, we spotted a bar with no one inside. It turned out to be a Vietnamese karaoke bar that was simply waiting for its regulars to arrive. We figured we could do no harm and quickly put in our requests, hoping to have the karaoke bar to ourselves. The second we hit the stage (with "Stop" by the Spice Girls), however, the Vietnamese karaoke bar went into full swing. They gave us the VIP treatment of free songs and after every performance, various other customers gave us things like napkin roses, grapes, and dried shrimp. Everyone else in the bar was singing very serious Vietnamese love ballads so we thought it was important to spice up the evening with Shania Twain's "Man, I Feel Like A Woman" and TLC's "Waterfalls." We finally finished our night with none other than Helen Reddy's classic, "I Am Woman." The crowd probably couldn't understand any of the lyrics but they still went wild. Who would have known that the American feminist movement would be so popular with the Vietnamese? Maybe they were just feeling the Thanksgiving Day spirit. You know we were.

Happy Thanksgiving!