Happy New Year!

Chinese, Laos, Khmer (Cambodia), and many other new years are being celebrated this week. At Angkor national park we saw workers erecting a stage and upon talking with a local fellow I found out that they are expecting 20,000 people at the park celebration of the new year. We seem to have a knack for attempting to travel during holidays. We will be hoping on a bus to the capital Phnom Penh just before noon today.

For the new years celebration the guesthouses on the street we are staying on got together and had a mini-celebration inviting all of their guests down to the street for music, dancing, and games. It started at 6:30 and the locals were well into their alcohol by then. I ended up having to keep a beer can in my hand at all times to ward off our guesthouse owner running to a cooler to grab me another one whenever he saw me without. This tactic worked until the locals started switching out my unopened warm beer can for a cold one. Busted.

The games we played were a giant tug-o-war, a piñata of sorts, and a variation of duck duck goose. The piñata was a weak coconut shell or something close to it that was suspended two to three brothers in the air and struck with a bamboo pole that was roughly a brother long. The first time around the shell was empty and cracked easily. The second time, unbeknownst to the person striking it, the shell was filled with some sort of liquid that splashed nearby revellers and hilariously poured out on the striker. Duck duck goose was played by the same rules you might expect except that instead of patting people's heads the person going round the circle held a tightly rolled bed sheet. The person would place the bed sheet behind the person they chose and sit down in their place. The person to the right of the chosen person with the bed sheet then had to sprint once around the circle as fast as possible because the chosen person officially had free reign to wallop them with the bed sheet until they accomplished this task. Jocularity, jocularity.

Dancing was also a fun event. Cambodian pop music was played and the locals started "fawning". Though I don't know the right spelling of the word, fawning consists of moving to a beat with the body but especially with the hands. Think voguing meets rave and you've got a bit of a picture. The dance is very mild with both men and women taking place. It is good that it is mild because anything more exuberant would cause major sweating.

A few hours into the celebration someone kicked off the tradition of powdering people. All the locals broke out what I thought was baby powder and attacked anything that moved. Soon everyone was blanketed in a thick layer of white powder. Soon after that my eyes started burning and I recognized the pungent scent of tiger balm. It took quite a while to be able to open my eyes and then the second round started. Of note in the powdering were two boys who chased each other for some time up and down the block just to lose their powder to the air rushing through their hands and the girl who ran up to me and shouted "I'm sorry" before wiping powder all over my face.

It was our second new year on our trip and both were thoroughly enjoyable.