Scooby, Italian men and Hokey Pokey icecream

Right no more movies at the Meta House for a while! Being suckers for punishment we went again on Tuesday night and watched a film more horrific than the one from last week. This one was filmed in the 1970’s straight after the Vietnamese assisted in removing Pol Pot and his cronies from power. It’s pretty harrowing but if you want to see exactly how cruel man can be against his own kind then this is the movie for you! And unusually, in this case, the association for cruelty was not religion or oil, just greed for power and a deluded, demented strategy for their own kind and country. If you talk to teenagers here they’ll say, that the Khmer Rouge time was their parents life and has nothing to do with them. A fairly shortsighted view when you consider the psychological scars that have to have been passed onto the next generation plus if you take into consideration the condition of the country and how it has taken the last 30 something years to crawl its way back from the brink in the main part through the assistance of other countries. How can they believe that it means nothing to them as half the country still struggles for enough to eat and clean water to drink? But a friend wisely pointed out, in Buddhism, there is no yesterday, no tomorrow there is only today. Hhhmm I think there could be a a big debate bubbling away on the surface of that cauldron. I need a good old dose of American cinematographic escapism for a while :o) Well it wasn’t quite what I ordered but Friday night dished up a French movie which is almost always better than American (at the French Cultural Centre) but this one left me a little perplexed. The best bit was the cost (free) and the, oh so lovely air-conditioning. For a line in all that’s new – I walked out of the office today to go and meet a friend for lunch and saw both a goat and a brood of chickens pecking away at the grass. What did you see outside work when you left your office today? I picked up my new Honda Scooby on the weekend. Oh she’s so fine, 50cc of pure power!! Me and Scooby, scooby’ed around for a while, getting the feel of the road and then I stopped at a supermarket to buy a bottle of red. At this juncture I’d just like to comment on the fact that you can buy a bottle of vodka (Smirnoff) for the same price as a bottle of red and what’s more, you can buy both of them at the supermarket! But I digress,...... it all got a bit embarrassing on Scooby at the supermarket as I quickly got told by the lovely Khmer man that I’d parked in the wrong spot and then getting all flustered at having to move her I couldn’t then work out how to release the seat to remove my wallet and bag from her neither regions. Finally a man (don’t you love being a female and having a man turn up at just the right time, bugger woman’s lib, I could’ve been there all day!) arrived on his scooter looking like he was just picking up some treats before heading off to Mardi Gras (I hope he doesn’t read this). He was Italian I think, judging from the accent but what better person to help me with my scooter problem? He showed me that I needed to give my seat a good whack before pushing the key in and sure enough up the seat popped. We’ll that’s lesson number one of riding Scooby out of the way. I thought it safer to go straight home with my bottle of vodka and wine – I’m just kidding! I only got the wine - and save more adventures with Scooby for another day. The power went off again on Friday night, which was ok as it was nearly bedtime anyway. I turned the fan on in my bedroom in the vain hope it would come on again while I was asleep but unfortunately it was still off the next morning. As fate would have it, I’d actually polished off my ($6aus for a scoop and a bit) New Zealand Hokey Pokey ice-cream the night before, so all was not lost. Sunday was a tough day, I found myself a hotel pool to lie beside and practice my Khmer while sipping juice shakes and eating chicken sandwiches. I topped that off with half price cocktails at FCC for Sunday aftenooners. A nice relaxing weekend indeed.