In da club

This is the hideous nightclub that has opened up right next to our office. They like to play awful music usually from 3pm on weekdays, but I've heard it as early as 11am. If there was any point going round to point out that the noise is quite disturbing, we would have done so by now.

Various other thoughts running through the mind about being a European in Cambodia, especially after a colleague told us today about her tuk tuk being in an accident with a car at the weekend. Luckily she's fine.

Neither tuk tuk nor car stopped at an intersection, they collided, and the tuk tuk came off worse and flipped. I doubt neither driver would have been aware of the best way to execute an emergency stop. The sense of brainless recklessness and lack of anticipation in both drivers is staggering and something you have to contend with every day on the roads here. Drivers often pay examiners instead of taking a test, and kids of the rich probably just get given licences or know if they're ever stopped their parents just put a word in somewhere. Actually, the police probably never stop cars that look like they're driven by people with influence.

The car drove off without checking what the damage was. When they had scraped their faces from the bitumen, the tuk tuk driver, who wasn't hurt, asked for $300 from the passengers, for repairs to a buckled wheel. A desperate plea from someone with no other option or more worryingly an underlying association with white skin and financial handouts - maybe a combination of both. Difficult to understand when you seek logical answers.

A wise expat who'd lived here for years advised that the passengers donate $15 for repairs to make the vehicle roadworthy again. A sensible solution as repairs can be done here very cheaply, and tuk tuk drivers may have some resources of their own. They are not the poorest members of society. Therefore $300 was much too high a price to demand of the crash victims.

By European behavioural norms there is so much that needs to be addressed in the story, not least the lack of personal responsibility for causing a crash, but I have to remind myself every day that there is still so much to learn about Cambodian culture, with nuances that I can never hope to understand. Importing western notions of what is and isn't correct is not the way to behave.