Notes from Phnom Penh

I haven't been able to blog as often as I normally do. I'm not sure if it's because I often find myself scrunched over my laptop on my bed trying to keep the mediocre wifi signals, or because I'm sharing space/company with El Hombre which occupies time that I might otherwise spend writing, or because I simply haven't had the desire to write much. In any case, I didn't write extensively about Spain or Greece. But in a nutshell: Spain was brillante (por supuesto) and Greece was breathtaking but I am totally over Greek food and Greek rudeness. In fact, I think I'm kind of over both Spain and Greece for the next 5 years or so.

We're currently in Phnom Penh and I absolutely love it. I love being in Southeast Asia. In my normal life, I'm a fairly bougie yuppie girl - I like my comforts. I like slate and granite counters, wiped down with Lysol. I like hardwood floors, swiffered regularly. I like showers with the perfect amount of pressure, followed by extra-fluffy towels. I like high thread count sheets and beds as big as boats. I like modern, inventive gastronomy and I generally expect competent service from people in the service industry.

But when I come to Southeast Asia, all of that kind of goes out the window. I'm always willing to put up with here things that I'm not willing to put up with in my normal life - such as dirt, mediocre showers, haggling, street food prepared in highly questionable sanitary conditions. I'm happy to put up with the "negatives" of Southeast Asia - touts & tuk tuk drivers who shamelessly try to rip you off, humidity, dust, flooding, etc. because Southeast Asia always gives me a dose of that thing I miss in my normal life: the rawness of daily life in its most simple, real form.

I feel somewhere in my conscience that it might be morally questionable that as an American yuppie, I only come to SE Asia (or Latin America, which I also love for similar reasons) for short periods of time, and enjoy the simplicity of it all only to be able to return to my normal privileged life whenever I want while the locals don't have that option, but that's a subject for another day.

When I'm in SE Asia, I love the energy that pulsates through daily life. The speeding motorcycles and cars that have no regard for traffic laws (today our tuk tuk driver literally drove us against traffic while hundreds of motorists sped toward us, then would swerve around us at the last second like it wasn't no thing that we were going in the wrong direction in their lane). Seeing entire families (parents, kids, babies, and grandmas) on a single moped. Babies who seem gleefully happy just playing with dirt, or waving at passing people. Unpredictable monsoon showers that appear from nowhere, come down in buckets, then leave as quickly as they came. I feel alive.

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Anyway, what prompted me to blog today was an experience El Hombre and I had at dinner.

We went to Tripadvisor's #1 rated restaurant in the city. One of the reasons I really wanted to patronize this place was because the restaurant employs/teaches/helps local street kids. The food was bland and dumbed down for Western palates which supremely annoyed me to no end (and made me seriously doubt the credibility of non-Asians who review Asian food), but that's another post, another day.

Two American women were sitting at the table next to us. When the waiter came by to take their order, one woman asked him if the feta cheese in the Greek salad was pasteurized. He had no idea what she was talking about. She spoke a little louder and more slowly. "Pass-choo-rized? Here, let me write it down for you. Can you ask someone in the back whether it is pasteurized?"

The kid disappeared into the kitchen and brought out the box that the cheese came in. The cheese was imported from Greece. Her dining partner noted that since it was made in Greece, it was probably pasteurized, otherwise wouldn't it spoil by the time it got to Cambodia? The woman answered that she couldn't be sure, better safe than sorry and instead ordered all the other Westernized dishes on the menu: hummus, french fries, spring rolls.

Oh, the things I wanted to say. Mostly: "SERIOUSLY??"

I figured she must be from Berkeley. It's SOOO Berkeley to ask questions like that. They soon struck up a conversation with us and it turned out she's from Chicago. Based on our conversation, there are about 1000 things why she annoyed me and why I was reminded me that I am often embarrassed to be American while traveling abroad, but I'll just stick to this one point. We're in Cambodia. It's third world. It's a fair, honest question to ask your waiter if the ice is made from purified water, but honestly, is the cheese pasteurized? It's probably not. So if you have doubts, just order something else. Why fluster your waiter who is about 15 years old with a vocabulary word that even most Americans don't really know the definition of, when you're probably not going to order it anyway?

So I know there are lots of people out there who aren't that familiar with traveling in the third world. I would have been more understanding if she'd been some hick who had never been abroad. But she nonchalantly noted how this was her 8th visit to Cambodia and how she's the owner of a fair trade business that employs Cambodian women. Which to me just made her inane question inexcusable because honestly - you probably know that most dairy here is not pasteurized, in which case, don't bother trying to order it if you have an issue with it since it won't kill you to not eat cheese for a week, and two, why the hell do you need to eat Greek salad in Cambodia when you can eat Cambodian food?

Anyway, I know I sound self-righteous, but it was just one of those incidents where you had to be there - it was SO uber-annoying.

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I adore the food here. The local food, not the tourist food. On our first night here, we ended up at the night market. Crowds of locals were huddled on tiny footstools eating a variety of street food prepared in the middle of the market - fresh and fried seafood, rice noodles, soup noodles, sugarcane drinks, papaya salad. We decided to pull up some footstools and join in the fun. I had the most delicious papaya salad, made properly with a mortar and pestle so that the lime and fresh crab juices could thoroughly mix into the green papaya. El Hombre had some fried crab claws and shrimp (fried with entire shell intact), some kind of fermented tofu-fishcake hybrid and stir-fried rice noodles. The food was so flavorful - spicy, sweet, sour, salty, pungent, with extra kick added from various chili sauces. Today I had papaya salad made with so many extra hot chilis that as I ate it in a fully air-conditioned dining room, my face was sweating like crazy - it even dripped from the pores on my chin, which I can't recall experiencing before! El Hombre noted that it looked like I was in pain trying to eat it, but I assured him it was the most delicious pain.