World Cup Week

***NOTE: The reference to my beloved father in paragraph 2 was intended as a self-deprecating rhetorical move; that is, as a joke about how lame I am to be spending nights in an american-esque dive bar with american-esque people with terrible beer and (of late) disappointing games while in CAMBODIA. This behavior is wholly acceptable in the United States, especially if the dive bar and american-esque people are not contributing factors in the situation.****

Now that I’ve begun to adapt to Phnom Penh, every little event has become less novel and I feel that daily updates might be slightly forced in terms of content. I think this is evidenced by the fact that I am writing this over a week after “the next week” headline applied. So I will change to chunk entries.

The days of this week blurred together for one primary reason: the World Cup. That is, I worked during the day, went out to dinner, and then to a bar in the backpacker’s area to watch the games. On my third night at Hunter’s Bar—the place is like a Berkeley dive bar transported into the heart of Phnom Penh—I looked at my glass of beer, then at the large screen in front of me, and realized my life had come to resemble my father’s during March Madness or the NBA playoffs to a disturbing degree. Except that I’m not in a basement in Oregon, and the beer sucks. (Really, it does, and this from someone who doesn’t even know beer much. But it’s cheap.)

Then, on Wednesday, the amazing happened. The U.S. soccer team gave all the expats something to cheer. The final-minutes victory prompted a group of not-particularly-overly-patriotic Americans to begin chanting “U.S.A” at midnight in the capital of Cambodia.