Things are different here

You know how when you've been in a country long enough you start picking up those wonderful little charming things that sets the country apart from home or other places. Cambodia has got loads of them, and I wanted to share a couple that I've been experiencing with you:

1 - The first one is similar to how people always talk about the weather in London... When you walk through the Cambodian countryside and meet people, greet them with your "Suck Sue Bye" (How are you?), the next few questions are always centered around: Where are you going? Have you eaten? What did you eat or What are you going to eat? It is basically a country that is largely obsessed with food (as opposed to Londoners obsessing about the weather).

2 - The traffic rules are basically the opposite to home. When you merge onto a road from a side street or similar, you don't even make an attempt to look at what your merging on to. You are only responsible to look ahead of you, e.g. breaking if someone merges onto the street ahead of you or steering away from anyone who changes lanes or turn in front of you without indicating or checking out what's going on behind them. It is quite confusing at first, but as long as everyone is doing it (and people aren't driving too fast), we're all ok. The other bit of this is that if there's simply too much traffic to cross as you're trying to get onto a road, you wouldn't wait until there's an opportunity to cross, you'd simply start going towards the traffic on the "wrong" (although there's no such thing as right and wrong in traffic here) side of the road... again "forcing" people ahead to get out of your way and the traffic behind them to get out of theirs (cause they aren't looking behind just ahead and that's where I am coming against them so they better get out of the way)... until there's space to "safely" cross the road. I hope this is making sense. Actually it probably isn't. But that's ok, its not making much sense to me either. I'm doing ok at it though.