I suppose technically it wasn't the blue moon because it is September now (say what??), but it was a blue moon in the US and either way it was a full moon, making lunatics of us all.
The evening started in this place called the "Sky bar", which is eight floors up and is probably the first time in eight weeks I've been up higher than five stories or so. It was in one of the new buildings on Sihanouk boulevard, sleek and modern and therefore totally incongruous. The elevator and the stairs up to the bar -- which is apparently also a Chinese restaurant -- are all black mirrors.
The bar itself is a maze of reflective surfaces and manages to give off the impression that there are mirrors everywhere, though I think there are actually none. There are old elevator shafts, or maybe they are just designed to look as such, with artfully lit art installations, things that look like slender silver tree trunks. The restaurant section was wrapped around the bar, little rooms like train compartments next to the full glass walls, red furniture and silver columns like windows.
It was disorienting and dizzying and extraordinarily beautiful, and I never got used to the fact that what I thought should be mirrors weren't. We sat at the bar, shiny black tiles, silver, and the aquariums on the other side with a few crabs lazily floating about.
A couple raspberry mojitos later, my friend had to head off and I just jaunted around the corner to street 278, which is this tiny little street lined with very cute little bars. The most famous, and much larger than I expected due to an expansive back and a hidden second floor, is called Equinox. I met up with a couple girl friends, who were there with a larger group. With seven of us at a table and adding chairs, the staff had to ask us to move out of their way or split up. We choose the former, but soon enough we heard the band had started on the second floor and made our way up to check it out.
The band, I later learned, was called Cambodian Space Project. They are a Khmer fusion band -- most of the musicians, at least as far as I could see/hear, were Australian, while the main vocalist was a Khmer woman. She sang in both Khmer and English, and the music was a mix of styles, but they were very good and we had a great time bopping away to the beat.
The venue, I should note, was really interesting, mostly for the huge shadow puppets hung on the wall, like those I saw at Sovanna Phum, with their intricate designs and strange material.
When the band went on a break, I decided to get home -- thanks to being up early every day this week I woke up promptly at 8:30, so I was starting to fade. But that was when the full moon madness began to set in -- at least, I'm going to blame it on the full moon because I can't figure out what else it might have been from and I wasn't the only one it happened to.
I didn't have nearly enough to drink to account for it, either. I couldn't sleep, and lay in a sort of haze of odd dreams, until I at last went into a proper sleep sometime around four in the morning, and woke up feeling very blah. A good amount of water didn't do much to help, and I sort of lazed through the day, until I started to feel better around four -- after watching a couple episodes of Community with a friend, which I give full healing credit to.
It was very odd, but fortunately the expression is once in a blue moon for a reason, and thankfully the lunacy only hit when I got home, and the rest of the night was lovely. Phnom Penh is becoming much more comfortable, in that I no longer feel totally and constantly displaced. I still notice the differences, but less so.
You'd hope -- as utterly strange as it is, by the end of this week I will have been here a full two months.
How THAT happened, I really couldn't tell you.
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