Too late for the fun

When I arrived in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh on Friday, I was exactly one day late for one of the city’s greatest festivities.

The Water Festival 2008 – or Bon Om Tuk, as it’s called in Khmer – concluded on Thursday night with boat races and spectacular fireworks.

According to the Lonely Planet travel guide, “up to two million people flood the capital for fun and frolics” during the festival. Great. And I missed it.

When I walked along the banks of the Tonle Sap river on Friday, all I saw was the clean up after the party.

Workers were dismantling huge light displays that had been mounted on boats. Kind of like Las Vegas on water.

These displays had praised the beauties of Cambodia in millions of colored lights.

Now, laborers were meticulously unscrewing all those colored light bulbs, putting them away for next year.

Water Festival is like carnival in Cambodia

The weekend edition of The Cambodia Daily this morning was full of stories about the festival.

One thing that struck me is that there seem to be many similarities between how people in Cambodia celebrate the Water Festival and how the people of my hometown Cologne celebrate carnival every year.

For one, there are special songs composed for both festivals. And it seems that people in both towns love to sing those songs.

In Cologne, those songs are usually drinking songs. But in Cambodia, some songs seem to have an anti-drinking message. Others are sung to encourage the rowers in the boat races.

The Cambodia Daily writes that this year’s favorite songs included one called Kromom Om Touk. For all of those (like me) who aren’t fluid in Khmer, that roughly translates to “Unmarried Ladies’ Racing Boat”.

The lyrics go

All the racers in my boat are unmarried ladies. We’re skillful at racing. We don’t lose any power. The fastest boat is the unmarried ladies’ racing boat. Our boat is wonderful, and many men come to ask us to be their girlfriends. Nowadays, unmarried ladies are as good as men, race like flying, and are also pretty. Thank you for asking me to be your girlfriend. After I win, I will go with you for a walk.

Now going for a walk is about as risqué as you can get in a song sung in public here…

The rest of the lyrics sound a little dry, but I guess they lose through translation.

Anyway, the song reminded me of one of the most popular carnival songs in Cologne: “Mir sin Kölsche Mädcher”, which also praises the strengths of the local women.

And if you just read the translated lyrics to that German song, you’d probably also wonder about the IQ of the people of Cologne…

Singing in the face of terror

In Cambodia, the horrors of the Khmer Rouge past are never far away. And this is also true in the realm of the Water Festival songs.

During the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, some of the most prominent composers and singers of Water Festival songs lost their lives.

Singing satirical songs apparently didn’t rank high on the Khmer Rouge’s list. And it didn’t take much in those days to get killed…

“But now, there is a new generation, and they make good songs, too,” the Cambodia Daily quotes 26-year-old Kea Khunny.

Deaf Husband, Crippled Wife

Thinking of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, it seems strange at first sight that another of this year’s hit songs is titled “Deaf Husband, Crippled Wife”.

But it turns out that the song doesn’t have anything to do with the torture and terror of the Pol Pot regime.

Instead, it’s a husband and wife complaining about typical misunderstandings in a marriage. And the lyrics show that Cambodia is still a very rural society:

I ask him to tiel up the cow, but he goes and ties up the buffalo. I ask him to fish, but he goes and catches chickens. – I bring her to my parents’ house, and she sticks her bow-leg out and my father trips on it. – I ask him to take me to the Water Festival, but he thinks I want to go to bed”

But then the chorus strikes a conciliatory note, hits the listeners with a moral message – and shows that the song is firmly rooted in our time:

Even though both of us are like this, we are an honest couple. We have a baby every year, and we don’t have to worry about AIDS. This is our destiny, so we accept it.

Of singing flight attendants and such

My friend Sandro is a flight attendant. In his blog, he recently wrote about flying to Bangkok with a pilot who is about to retire.

This flight was going to be one of the last ones for the pilot.

When they arrived in Bangkok, the pilot invited the whole crew out to dinner.

And to thank him, they sang a song for him after their meal: Leaving on a Jet Plane by John Denver.

The next morning, they sang it again for him – I guess as a double thank you and farewell.

According to Sandro, singing this song for crewmembers who are retiring, quitting or leaving the company is a tradition among airline personnel.

I didn’t know that and thougth it was kind of touching.

In addition, the idea of the whole happy cabin crew singing just made me smile.

Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the flight attendants also sang on the plane during their emergency-exit-oxygen-mask-routine? I mean, what would lend itself better to a musical number than this cabin-crew-choreography before every flight?

What a shame that so many airlines have meanwhile reverted to showing videos demonstrating the emergency procedures. Some even with computer-generated passengers and crew. Yeach!

That has no style whatsoever! I paid for the live show!

More music on airplanes

Speaking of song-and-dance routines and music in general on airplanes: a few years ago, I was on a flight to Spain. It was a pretty rough flight and as soon as our plane touched down, the crew played some soothing music over the cabin sound system.

The first song the passengers heard was Time to say good-bye by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli.

When that was over, the next song was Who wants to live forever by Freddy Mercury and Queen.

I always wondered if they’d played those songs in reverse order during the flight in case those turbulences had gotten worse…