a street 51 christmas

From Christmas in Cambodia

A Street 51 Christmas. Street 51 is one of the bar streets in Phnom Penh, and features the infamous Heart of Darkness night club, Zeppelin, a bunch of girlie bars (the Black Cat, Shanghai), and Howie's, the place where I spend most of my non-working hours. I went there on Christmas night to get a Christmas kebab for Christmas dinner since I Christmas didn't-feel-like-eating until then.

From Christmas in Cambodia

There are 3 24 hour dining kiosks along this strip and they are all delightful once it get pasts 11:00 PM. The chicken shwarma kebab had french fries in it. And garlic sauce. And stuff kept on falling out of it, delicious stuff. There are also what I term "weird Cambodian burgers" on offer. They may not be weird, but the only time I ate one was at 4:00 AM on a particularly interesting Friday, and I don't really remember anything about it other then a single, truncated frame of me eating it with lots of ketchup and thinking, "Well, this is odd spicing."

From Christmas in Cambodia

Something about Santa Claus hats is a cultural universality. It's like Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson. There are probably people in the backwaters of Papua New Guinea who own Santa Claus hats. Here, they're all the rage among the hip young things out for a night of larceny on Street 51. I mean, I own one.

From Christmas in Cambodia

The Heart of Darkness wishes you a Happy Holiday's. This is the club where they had that shooting a while back, but you know about that if you've read anything about Phnom Penh nightlife. Hailing from New Orleans, nightclub shootings are nothing particularly exotic in my eyes, and the Heart is a pretty standard nightclub with thumpy-thumpy music, overpriced cocktails, and lots of people making out with each other. I like going there to dance poorly on occasion, but the creeper-to-me ratio is occasionally rather high and sometimes I run right back outside again. The female security guard is lovely: last time I walked outside to wait for friends, she let me sit on her chair, did my hair into braids, instructed me on how to do a Khmer "wai," and had a discussion with me about boys.

From Christmas in Cambodia

They had an absolute winner of a tree in the mall opposite the Heart. I find myself becoming a bit of a connesuir of Cambodian Christmas trees. Sort of like a wine snob, only a thousand times more esoteric. The Ultimate Hipster, in a way. Maybe I'll produce a guide no one will read.

Oh, wait. Already doing that.

	From Christmas in Cambodia

Happy Merry Christmas, everyone.