where cider meets condensed milk: Phnom Penh

where cider meets condensed milk

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Phnom Penh

On the riverfront in Phnom Penh just before an afternoon storm threatened to carry away our token Aussie. There is trash galore in the river, but people bathe there and wash their clothes. Phnom Penh is dirty and crowded, but feels like a real city where real people live. The markets were pretty cool, because the sellers weren't as aggressive as in Thailand or as outrageously foreigner-price-gouging as in China. My favorite thing was that everyone would wake up early and be out and about on the streets and sidewalks and alleys by 5am. There was a 10-person card game going on in the alley under our hotel window that went from sunrise to sunset every day we were there. We went to a phenomenal restaurant called Friends several times, which is run by and for former street kids, and populated exclusively by fellow bleeding-heart tourists. (It was very similar to KOTO in Hanoi- there seem to be operations like this everywhere.)

We took a boat up the Mekong river one morning to an island famous for its silk weaving. The girls and women selling there followed us from when we got off the boat until we were picked up on the other side a few hours later, but we all ended up with lots and lots of scarves and cloth for about $1 cheaper per piece than we would pay in the markets.

The Royal Palace-- very ornate and awe-inspiring and Buddha-filled and pretty much like every palatial building I saw in Thailand.

I'm With Stupa: A Dane wanders into my photo.

With Emma at the National Museum. Inside, there are all sorts of Buddha statues in different poses and made of different rocks, in rooms placed around a garden courtyard. Our guide was very nice, but spent 15 minutes in every single room babbling on about the value of pre-Ankorian versus post-Ankorian Buddha carvings, which none of us particularly cared about or could differentiate, and everyone smarter than myself ditched him until it was just me trying to politely divert the tour away from pre-post-concurrent-Ankorian overload.

Out on the town in PP-- clearly, I am beating Joss at Connect Four. Was it wrong to take his money if I never revealed my status as captain of the national Con-4 team? Hope he never sees me play on ESPN 8, "The Ocho", or else the jig is up.

How beautiful is this? Coconad! I'm resigned to being a sober roamer indefinitely, so must get my buzz from Coke and any other tempting (?) options...

posted by Raychaa @ 10:06 PM

1 comments:

At 1:24 PM, Anonymous said…

Friends was my ALL TIME favorite restaurant! Wish I could have gone more than once like you! Love the pics!