I came back to England this week. Sorry I didn't call anyone.
First thing I did, in fact (and shame) was going into one of my old haunts and buying a few pints of draught Carlsberg bought from a pleasant but harassed-looking Birmingham-born woman amid the increasing chatter of young, semi-drunk (and in this respect, ambitious) English lads and lasses, then played pool with a visting Scottish fella and a few English girls who were his mates. I stepped outside and three short-ish chaps each offered me a tuk-tuk; someting wasn't quite right here...

There is a place here which actually is, in the same way that a British embassy in Sydney or Delhi or Buenes Aires is, on true native English soil. It isn't Cambodian any more than the cliffs of sodding Dover are - there's not a thing that's different from my old rock or metal club haunts in Southampton; the staff, customers, the drinks, the sadly ubiquitous chav elemnt, even the graffiti in the toilets are all English through and through.
It may be in the middle of Siem Reap in a developing Asian nation, but when you go as far as to pay for your round in this joint with Western money, after the first couple of pitchers it makes you start to wonder.

The music is the same, too, which helps trick you as every sense but taste (and you need to be drunk as only an English person can be to start tasting a bar) is informed immediately and intimately that you are in our green and pleasant land once more. It is mostly rock or metal or decent dance/electronic stuff - just like the best (well, easiest and sleazist :D :> ) clubs back home, and every inch of wall - inside AND out - has been covered in not one but two layers of graffiti. The bottom is proper coloured art of the `demons, dancing girls and fire` school, and over it all are 10-year's-worth of booze-fuelled scrawls from customers, all of them seemingly as English as fish, chips and a bottle of warm lager :D

It is called `Angkor What?` only 6km from its pseudo namesake, and is just great, if this sort of place is your sort of thing :)

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I feel I have done a bad. In recent days, since getting to the South East Asian peninsular, I've really not been on form and it'll take another few days to get it back - must get all the booze out of the system.
So this is why I've been even more boring than usual lately ;) Goddamn I love this part of the world, but it rarher loves tourists itself, and that means it is very hard to avoid drinking and very easy - immorally easy, really - to get plastered, or at least have a drink or two of an evening.

Walking the streets in every major tourist destination (Bangkok, Vang Vieng, Vientiane, Siem Reap, Khon Khan etc.) you not only see adverts for everything from BeerLao to Johnny Walker Black - billboards, bar signs with prices, bar parasols, building suite hoardings, giant neon signs, a million T-shirts and other merchandise - but in most places the staff of bars and restaurants actively seek out foreigners (the fascinating farang) and hassle them to come in, offer drink deals, even take your arm and try to guide you into their particular place; all in pursuit of their share of the almighty dollar.

And dollar it is, right here, because Cambodia's own currency - the Riel - is all but obselete now. Every sign and menu and price label, from bars to cellphone shops to chemists to market stalls, is in US Dollars.
Funny thing considering that the Riel, at 4000 to the dollar, is by no means the weakest currency about. The laos Kip weighs in at almost seventeen and a half thousand-per-buck, but still everything is fiscally autonomous within that country.
True, you can use Thai Baht (a weighter money by far at only 30B to the USD) in place of Kip in most places, and of course dollars, but nothing is priced that way, and few shops ask for your total in Baht except in the border towns, which is par for the course all around the world, I would assume.

So it is all I can do to even FIND a fucking cup of tea sometimes, let alone fight myself for control of my mind and my wallet.
With what is a little outpost of England here in Siem Reap it's doubly hard to not slip into my favourite old patterns in what seems to be one of my favourite old places.
But there you go. If life was so easy we'd all want to have our heads frozen and try again ;)

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PS: I'd just like to say how much I hate the Photobucket/slow internet thing: I sucks donkey balls, frankly. I am trying (trying oh-so tortuously hard) to get the photos up to date but I just can't make things work half the time, PB freezes or takes an age to load each page, making it all but impossible. I know I do go on about this, so I'm sorry.
I need my own site... Greeee-eeegg...?