The A-Team Takes on the Chopstick Attacker

Thanks to everyone for their well-wishes - I am feeling much better. I'm not quite 100% yet, as evidenced by the box of Kinder chocolates that I've been carrying around with me for almost a week and haven't had the appetite to finish yet. But I definitely have a lot more energy, chocolate consumption or no.

It also helps that I am in love with Cambodia! I've had some amazing adventures here, almost all of them with my new best friends, Abe and Adam. They're the nice Jewish boys from Boston that I met on the bus in Vietnam and we met back up at their hostel ("guesthouse" in Cambodia) in Phnom Penh.

Adam is a hard negotiator - his first offer for any good or service is always a dollar. He can do strange voices and interpretations of different English accents, and he is great at entertaining hoards of pre-teen Cambodian girls trying to sell him souvenirs. He went to Vasser and is about to start med school up in the Bronx at Albert Einstein. When I first met Adam on the bus, I overheard him talking to his girlfriend back home saying, "No, Vietnam is NOT near Croatia!" He got teased for that the rest of the trip.

Abe spent the last six months in the Yukon where he milked squirrels and fell out of a 12-foot tree all in the name of research. He is a cellist and acted as our tour guide, giving interpretations of ancient carvings from a guide book that he bought - without negotiating - from a man with no hands. He went to Cornell and is looking for his next job/experience/adventure to last for the next couple years before getting a PhD in neuro behavioral biology (or something like that). They're both funny and thoughtful and adventuresome and generous, and I'm waxing nostalgic because they just flew back to the States and I already miss them.

One of my first adventures with the A-Team was confronting a crazy man who tried to attack me at a restaurant. We were calmly eating our rice on the outside patio of a restaurant when I heard some yelling and ranting behind me. Suddenly, something hit me in the back. It was a chop-stick thrown from the large European-looking man behind me. I smiled and laughed because it seemed like some kind of a joke, but then he started cursing at me and calling me a variety of offensive words for women with his unidentifiable English accent. I tried to ignore him but then he got out of his seat and rushed towards me. I jumped out of my seat and ran around to the other side of the table, A and A stand up, and some woman in the restaurant (we think she might have actually been with him) tries to physically restrain him. But he makes his way up Adam and threatens him - "You trying to touch me?!" - and a crowd starts to form outside the restaurant. He continues to yell and the woman continues to struggle with him and finally gets him to calm down sit back in his seat. I sat on the far side of the table outside of his line of sight, and we quickly finish our lunch and headed out without incident. It was a really scary moment, but I found out later that Adam actually has a triple black belt in Karate, so I was in good hands.