Cambodia 3

Meg here-
Greetings from Cambodia. Internet connections here are still iffy, so am taking advantage of the opportunity to say Hello. We've been here a week and already have done so much, it's starting to blur together. Phnom Penh is a huge noisy smelly loud city and I loved all of it! It was alive with color. We saw the museum and the palace and took tuk tuks around the city. The people are so nice, and everybody speaks English. 


We went to Siem Reap by boat. Should have taken 5 hours. Boat broke down en route and we pulled into a tiny floating village while the village blacksmith re-machined boat parts...people had crocodiles in floating pens behind their huts, and they keep their pigs in floating corrals as well. It was amazing. 


We are now in Battambong for several days, then back to Phnom Penh and home. We have a tuk tuk driver named Bunh who sits outside our hotel and waits for us to tell him where we want to go...it is all so surreal. I imagine India in the days of the Raj being similar for the lucky few. We are paying him well ( 20 dollars a day...a fortune by Cambodian standards) and he seems delighted with the arrangement. 


We are too, as this is his home town, and he spent the day yesterday ferrying us to places we definitely would not have otherwise seen...a local blacksmith making garden tools, a bamboo sticky rice roadside operation, two women making rice paper wrappers, a woman who dries bananas, a fish cheese making factory (don't even ask.) 


One thing I've learned is the Cambodians will eat  anything. In the markets they have huge baskets of crickets and cockroaches for sale. They have restaurants that specialize in dog meat. They deep fry tarantulas to eat too! Sorry about that. I thought about leaving it out, but, in truth they were collectively starving under an onerous civil war and then the Khmer Rouge regime brutalized the country and literally starved them to death. 


Today we signed up for a cooking class...NO BUGS!!! It should be great fun. I'm glad I was able to get online! How is it going in Rhode Island? I miss you guys a lot. Am hoping Muzz is doing OK. Let me know how things are at that end. Pips and I will be heading home next week, and I'm starting to look forward to getting into a routine again...to say nothing of having a hot shower.