Merry Christmas! Happy Happy!

I'm sure that my much younger self would disagree, but in the last few years, the holidays have stopped being so much about the holidays themselves (the presents, candy, turkey etc...) and a lot more about the people that I get to spend the holiday with. I mean honestly, I'll take any excuse to gather the people that I love to one place.
Especially if it includes a nice glass of wine and some tasty food. And I am writing this from basically the other side of the world. Funny right?

I knew I wouldn't be missing the Santa or presents aspect spending Christmas in another country, but I had never spent a Christmas away from Spokane. Turns out the holiday sort of snuck up on me! Sure, I saw lights and santa hats. My phone kept telling me it was December. Somehow I just couldn't actually get this to stick in my brain. Seeing shots of a wintery-Detroit street made me miss the cold a tiny bit, but the feeling was fleeting. My reality of 85 F and sunny is so incredibly nice.

Christmas Tree?

A girl from my yoga retreat and I teamed up to explore a little town near the coast. (More on that later.) I went up to Phnom Penh with her to meet a friend of hers who is living in Phnom Pen. My Christmas Eve consisted of a great glass of red wine and a ridiculous amount of pizza. Christmas morning consisted of a bus-ride where I got to watch Rush Hour 3, Big Momma 2 (I think thats what its called), and part of Rambo 2. After arriving in the city we wandered over to the post office. On our way, we ran into this group of tuktuk drivers and three very drunk Kiwis. One was dressed in a monkey suit. They offered us beers, took about a million selfies with us and kept trying to sneak kisses on the cheek. Short after we joined, they ran out of beer and decided to move the party to a place that had. When we arrived, we were super excited to see that they had a pretty decent list of English songs. Except they couldn't actually play any of them. We we made do with Cambodian versions of 'I Will Survive" and "My Heart Will Go On."

After a couple hours of Cambodian karaoke (A lot of Cambodian songs are not very upbeat. In fact, they seemed to be a lot of either romantic or brokenhearted ballads or so the videos would have me believe.) we headed out to get dinner and settled on Mexican food, so my Christmas night concluded with a quesadilla and the newest Night at the Museum equal at a mall. It appears malls all over the world are exactly the same.

The introduced themselves as Bruce Lee and Tupac.

It was a Christmas that broke about every tradition I've ever had but couldn't have asked to spend it in a better way. Thankfully, the internet has been strong enough (off and on) for me to get to chat with some people back home, so really I got everything I wanted for Christmas.

I asked one Cambodian if he had ever seen snow. He replied 'Yes! At the market!" He was referring to shaved ice that you eat with sugary syrup.

The pun from this post comes from the lovely Cramer family inspired by Dr. T. For those of you that don't have the pleasure of knowing them. His name is Chris, and he was not with them for Christmas. Brilliant.