February 3 Phnom Penh

I was picked up in the morning by Heangly who is a 26 year old Chinese Khmer who used to work for Rainwater Cambodia and now works for the WTO, the World Toilet Organization. He came from the village and tells a Abraham Linclon type of story of studying by candlelight to 3 in the morning to get ahead. But he recycled candles from the pagoda. He now has an MBA and is marketing $35 flush toilets for sale to the Villagers on a capitalistic private model with local businessman working the ccommune woman to market and sell these toilets without any subsidy or aid. His entrepreneurship is very cutting edge thinking for Cambodia. I was mesmerized by his story and he likely will become a core character in the film.
After a 6 course lunch with him and his colleagues from France Australia and NYC of rice with beefm fish chicken and lots of chili, I went to the French Culture Center to see an Exhibit of paintings by Chath. I ended up buying a set of portraits of his family, who were in their earlier life Khmer Rouge.
Then I hired a Tuk Tuk to take me to meet a bus to get a video on arenic poisoning and the bus was late so I waited around at a cafe until it arrived. While waiting I dashed over to the Java cafe to meet Dana the owner, who is managing the sale of Chath's paintings and made arrangements to buy the works I wanted. Last stop on my busy day was visiting with Seckon, who is suppose to be Cambodia's most prominent painter with his work being shown in Galleries in London Hong Kong and Bangkok. He showed me pictures of a 225 meter naga( snake) that he made out of recycled plastic. He is a political artist and seems fearless of the Government, which I did not understand. It took me over an hour riding around Phnom Penh to find his as the streets are not numbered sequentially . I was not a happy camper and then got into a fight with the Tuk Tuk driver who wanted to charge me $25....I felt like I was in NYC, except here I was afraid he was going to hit me if I did not pay him. I did pay him and guess it was my own fault for not settling on a price before we started our lost journey.

Had a lousy dinner at the hotel bar and two glasses of chilled red wine..yuk and to bed to fly home to Siem Reap in the morning