banks, like most businesses, close at five. we all know this. so i show up at my neighbourhood branch of bank of america at 4.10 and discover that it closes daily at 4. too warm to go straight home, too early for a meal, so i went into porter books and was only narrowly averted from buying another copy of all the casson books because i was distracted by a build-your-own cardboard skeleton - all 206 bones labelled with their names in latin and english, to be hooked, glued, pinned, tacked and slotted together to make a whole skeleton with flexible joints - how cool! if it didn't cost so much i would buy one for ariel and sarah, but then i know it's really for myself. the children have the genuine article to play with (which i always feel vaguely queasy about - it came out of someone's inside! how about a nice plastic skeleton instead? on the other hand we eat things that are other people's insides. well not other people, because that's cannibalism, but you know, when you eat a chicken it's full of bones too.) what i did do was to buy my guidebooks to melbourne and cambodia. i think i'll spend my time only in the northwest. (the northeast sounds fantastic but i'm not brave enough to travel there alone and i quite suspect i'm not hardy enough for it. and i don't think i want to travel to phnom pehn just yet.) so just siem reap, tonle sap, battambang and possibly some other temples on the border. and this bamboo train is astonishing.