Happenings in the Jungle

They are now calling her 'Mikki Tuk Tuk".

All we have to do is walk past any of our driver friends, they say hello and she hops right in.

She understands "Onhkoy (sit)", "Jho (up)" and sorta understands "Komproos (don't bark)". The last one depends on how excited she is.

"Ot com day" means 'she doesn't bite'. When I used to say "Ot com" my pronunciation was always corrected. I could never get it right. But the grammatically correct way to say it is "ot com day". Once I started to say it properly, I've never been corrected.

We're all picking up a little Khmer here and there and we're starting to understand more of what is being said. I may not get all the words but I get the gist of many conversations.

We spent New Years Eve at a trivia contest held every Thursday nite at the Funky Monkey Bar in downtown Siem Reap. Last Thursday our team won. This week we came in 2nd, and there were only 3 of us on the team. We missed a couple of questions we should have gotten right:

1) What is the new search engine introduced by Microsoft this year?

2) Who starred in the old TV show "The Prisoner"?

(answers below)

After the trivia contest we went to the Warehouse, sat on the roof with 200 of our closest friends and watched the fireworks and roman candle wars. Now we used to have bottle rocket wars when we lived in the States. Here they have been upgraded to roman candle wars. Having a roman candle shot at you will get your attention REAL FAST. The cops were there. They thought it was hysterical.

There 3-4,000 people on Pub Street. We just hope the numbers stay up.

In December we had 3,000 visitors at the Museum. Up from the past and very encouraging. On Tuesday we're taking all of the kids to the Angkor Butterfly Museum to get them ready to build an 8 or 9 foot puppet for the Great Big Puppet Parade in Siem Reap. Kids from all over the province of Siem Reap build great big puppets and bring them to Siem Reap to parade around the streets. The Museum did it 2 years ago and Amatak screamed so loud during the parade he couldn't talk for 2 days. (We're hoping for similar effects this year)

We finished our most recent mine field on Tuesday the 29th of December. We finished in a flourish, finding a dense concentration of Bouncing Betty mines on the old road. We blew up several on Monday. It's always a great feeling to see these awful things disappear in a could of smoke.

Both the Museum and CSHD were re-certified by the Cambodian government. We fully expected it to happen, but its always a pleasure to have the paper in hand.

Tuesday we're having a party for the deminers. In part it is to celebrate the completion of the last mine field and in part its to send them off to the next one.

Suesadei Tfnam Thmai (Happy new Year) from the Jungle

Babu, Bibi and Mikki Tuk Tuk

answers: Bing (we said bling) and Patrick McGoowan