Phnom Penh

It is a city rebuilt in a hurry with no money after Pol Pot was defeated. Shabby, dirty, poor. It is a city with just a few multi-storey glass-fronted department stores selling lovely colourful clothes for children. Commercial, clean, shiny. It is a city with women in markets with no real face left after a napalm blast, with beggars missing limbs, with teachers who earn $50 per month. And here we are. Four of us went out for lunch it was under $40 dollars including cocktails, delicious food, lovely place. We thought it was cheap. The driver who took us there could never afford to eat there.

Most of this is just true of the third world. But here are some things about Cambodia that may not be true in lots of other places. We did things to make ourselves understand where we are. We ate a tarantula, big black and hairy and in keeping with my blog: DEEP FRIED. It was crunchy and okay. We ate red tree ants. The were little and semi-dissolved in a sauce.

Then we fed some fish. Now pay attention! After we finished eating animals, we let animals eat us. We paid $3 to put our feet in tanks of Angkor fish. In the first tank, the fish were about the size of two large workman's fingers. In the second tank, they were just little fish in a not so big fish pond. What these fish do is nibble at your feet. They only eat the deep skin, it tickles and your feet come out all soft. Disgusting, hilarious, weird.

The evening was happy hour cocktails at the Foreign Correspondants' Club. This is featured in the film The Killing Fields and is the site where war reporters sat and drank and made up stories about the war rather than going out and seeing any of it. You can't really blame them, I suppose, but it was a pretty woeful thing to do.