Visiting the temples at Ankor Wat could be a little bit frustrating because of the profundity of food/souvenir/book/"you want cold drink?"/toy vendors, including a lot of children (particularly bothersome when you realize it's the middle of the day during the week and they probably would be better off spending that time in school). I would try to be as polite as possible with these folks
- I'm now quite adept at saying "no thank you" in Khmer - while making it clear that I really wasn't interested in being hassled. Towards the end of my third day in Angkor Wat, though, my resistance was wearing a bit thin.
Eating lunch in a little stand outside of one of the temples, a young girl came up to me and struck up a conversation ("Where are you from? The capital of America is Washington DC!"). After a few minutes, she pushed a simple little basket-weave bracelet toward me on the table and said "This is a present for you!". Despite her sweetness, alarm bells immediately went off in my head and I assumed she was then going to use this "present" as a way of trying to get money out of me. I protested a bit, but she was insistent. She walked away and I left it sitting on the table throughout my meal, waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never did. She walked off and I didn't see her again. She really did just want to give me a present. It made me sad that it was so difficult for me to accept this little gift without being immediately suspicious.
Thanks for the bracelet, young lady!
This afternoon after the death-centric first part of the day, I went to the biggest market in Phnom Penh to explore and distract myself a bit. I stopped at a food booth to partake in whatever the heck it was the lady was cooking (some sort of delicious fried potato pancake sorta thingy). A Khmer gentleman sat down next to me and decided I needed a conversation. His English was very halting (but, as I pointed out to him, far better than my Khmer!), but he didn't let that get in the way of trying to get to know me. After no more than about 5 minutes of conversation, he gave me his card and instructed me to call him if I needed anything or wanted someone to show me around Phnom Penh. Why? Because, as he told me, he loves his culture and wants to share it. And then he paid for my food! I gave him my email address with explicit instructions to be in touch if he ever comes to America.
Last night enjoying dusk and a glass of Tiger beer in some swanky rooftop bar on the riverside (hooray for happy hour $1 pints of beer!), a few Aussie ex-pats decided to (in their words) abduct me. I've been quite enjoying my time exploring around on my own, but did not object to being abducted to see what Friday nights are like for ex-pats. They took me with them, introduced me to some local buddies, then to dinner and a party at a friend's apartment. Most of the folks there were around my age and working for various NGOs. Interestingly, there was a pretty significant cluster of people there who are working at the Khmer Rouge trials that just started in 2006 (only took 30 years to start bringing those responsible for the genocide to trial...). Again, total strangers - though Aussie, not Khmer, this time - taking some random guy in and treating him as an old friend.
*As an aside, I've discovered that though it's always been my impression that Americans monopolize the stereotype of being the loud and rowdy foreigners, Australians reeeeeeally take the cake around these parts!
A couple of evenings ago I befriended a couple of Kiwi tourists and we went to dinner together. They were definitely into adventurous eating so first we found somewhere to eat frog as our first course, then wandered around and arbitrarily picked another street-side restaurant for the rest of dinner. It was getting on the later side (most restaurants here start closing up around 9), so the three of us were just about the only people in the restaurant. No one there spoke English, and the extent of our Khmer were the basic pleasantries, so with sign language we asked them to just bring us food - whatever they wanted! It wound up being delicious: grilled beef and sliced vegetables with a couple different dipping-sauces. The owner of the restaurant wound up just pulling up a chair at our table and through sign language, a few words, and a phrase book we had a lovely conversation about food and how to eat what we were eating. He was completely invested in spending his time doting on us and making sure we enjoyed our meal. Braving the language barrier just to be a friendly guy.
All right, enough of the sappiness. Phnom Penh has been fun - it's a pretty hectic city but much less developed than Bangkok, for example - but it's time to move on. Tomorrow at 6am (ugh) I hop on a bus for the Northeast of Cambodia: Ratanakiri province for some hiking and volcanic crater lake bathing!
And now for some (mostly) irrelevant pictures:
Monkeys! In the middle of the capital of Cambodia. Eating noodles. Naturally.
Monks collecting contributions.
The hostel I'm currently at on the lakeside in Phnom Penh. Mine is the room to the left of the one straight back. Pretty rad!
One shelf in a about 2-story high memorial at the killing fields of Choeung Ek, filled with bones found in just a few of the couple hundred mass graves at this one site.
Goofy grin in front of the Vietnam-Cambodia Friendship Monument. A testament to the Vietnamese's role in ending the Pol Pot regime's genocide in 1979.
Sunset from the balcony at the hostel
I've realized I have a bit of an obsession with taking pictures of monks. Especially when they're doing things that "normal" people do - like getting their picture taken at the Royal Palace.
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