firstly, we checked into a realy nice hotel, new york hotel, and met up with yong bin then. to my amazement, i realised that i have a room all to myself, only to be spoilt by samuel wang, who wanted to sleep with me. haha. den went for lunch at a really nice restaurant. next, we went to visit the royal palace and silver pagoda. not very interesting lahz and it took up the whole afternoon. at about evening, we went on a boat cruise on mekong river, now that rocks! the breeze was perfect, the view was perfect, the atmosphere was perfect, the people were perfect, (well at least most of them), and even the small drizzle made the cruise damn enjoyable. took lots of pictures with lots of weird poses. guess it was one of the highlighs of the trip for many of us. pictures below....
ok, after that was dinner at another seafood restauant and we went back to the hotel. this was the start of a super weird story. upon reaching the hotel, i realised i lost my wallet. now that's a super unfortunate thing to do in a foreign country. so i went to inform miss lim and she in turn informed mr punle, our guide. they checked the restaurant and realised it was not there and so we had to wait for the next day to check if it was on the bus. and trust me, i didn't have a good sleep that night.
so well the next day in the morning, after a buffet breakfast at the hotel, the bus arrived and me, mr hoe and mr punle went up to check the bus for my wallet. we checked every seat and even took the cushions out to check and we couldn't find it. that really spoilt my day. so i had no choice but to carry on with the trip and we went to the genocide museum next. it was a sick and gory place and the stories behind them were scary too. but it's a super long story of killing and more killing so i shall not mention it in my blog. yup, for those interested can go check up "khmer rouge" and not "moulin rouge"... ok... not funny...haha.
ok after that was lunch at a super posh restaurant and after i had my fill i decided to ask the teachers if they had kept my wallet, a thought that was on my mind the whole day. so i found mr shi and asked him why the teachers were not anxious at all in finding my wallet. why were they taking it as a joke and laughing about it. den after a while we took the talk outside as we didn't want too many people knowing what we were talking about. this was when the weirdest thing happened. i have no memories whatsoever of what happened at this point of time. no recollections, nothing!!! and the next thing i could recall was walking up the bus in sweat and falling asleep after that, uncontrolablly. and when i woke up, everyone was already shopping at the russian market and i could onyl see myself and mr shi in the bus. ok according to many people's stories this was what happened during the period where i could not remember a thing...
1. i was rolling on the floor.
2. i was screaming.
3. i grabbed my head
4. i shouted "why are u all laughing at me?"
5. i layed on the floor not wanting to move
and guess what, i totally could not remember what was happening at that time. so marcus's diagnosis of me was that either i was possessed by some super natural thing or i was overly saddened by the lost of my wallet that i couldn't remember a thing. they chose the believe the latter but i thought the former might make some sense too.
ok, because about 2 days before, while we were out to see the sunset, me and yongbin noticed a tree which resembled a woman very much and we started telling people about it. and i even went to imitate its actions. and guess what? the next day, yong bin fractured his wrist and that fateful event had to happen to me on the last day. and this could explain why i actually shouted,"why are u all laughing at me?". so people, dun play with these kinda thingy in future...wooooh, scary.
ok anyway, on the way to the airport, something magical happened! having lost all hopes of finding my wallet, i sat quietly at my seat, not talking much. at this moment, a rainbow appeared at the sky and everyone started taking photos of it. it was damn beautiful and someone once told me a rainbow means hope. and people were making fun saying maybe i'll find my wallet. and just at this point of time, shermaine screamed,"alan, is this your wallet?" !!!!!!!!!!!!!OMG, i got a shock lahz, but it was a happy and relieved shock...hahah ironic. and since then i started to believe that magical endings do happen once in a while. and it did happen to me on that day. but the weird thing was, we did check that seat in the morning only to find nothing there, how did it appear all of a sudden? and upon reaching the airport, i wanted to ask mr shi what happend at that period of time.
so i said" sir, i got something to ask you"
mr shi: no lahz, why would the teachers hide your wallet there?
this was the funny part, i wasn't even going to ask him if they kept the wallet there... but anyway, not gonna think about it anymore.
this roughly brings us to the end of the cambodia trip, and what better way to end of than having pictures to do the talking.
our mural for hope village
me and chun li
me and roth
the children beggars at the ferry stop
zhengmin and celine
pictures of various buildings in the royal palace
us at the royal palace
the rumoured couple
us on the mekong river boat cruise
IRC exco
us at the not-so-posh seafood restaurant
the genocide museum, tower of human skulls
me, zuhao, eric and zhengmin
us outside angkor pub