Weekend in Cambodia

It's 9AM. I'm at work dead tired cause I slept like crap last night. I had my fan up to near full blast and was still sweating. I don't know if it was the heat that kept me up. I feel asleep around 4:00AM and woke up at 6:30AM for work. It's super hot here as well, plus my computer is broken, so I'm sitting here on another computer without my work trying to figure out how to keep busy.

Friday night we went to the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) after work for happy hour. The FCC was supposedly the place where journalists used to hang out but now it's a very touristy place that caters to fashionable (and cheesy) westerners and ex-pats. This is just my personal opinion. Also, the beer and food is twice as much as it is elsewhere in the city -- a cheeseburger costs $8. But the people in my group like it a lot for some reason so I go to be social. Then we hit up this excellent and cheap Indonesian restaurant called Bali's on the riverfront. It was great. I try to be adventurous with food but there's not much description on the menus and somehow I always end up with meat and rice on my plate, maybe a few vegetables, no matter what I order. Anyway it was good.

Saturday we did lunch at a western-style bar and grill on 240. I had fish and chips. Tasted like fish and chips, Asian style. Like, Almond Boneless Fish and Chips. Then Bobby and I saw the Royal Palace. The architecture is cool here -- unlike the Chinese, who use a lot of reds and dragons and such to decorate, there is a distinct SE Asian flair here. Elephants replace dragons. Yellows and blues replace reds. Yet there are still tons of huge gold buddhas everywhere (I mean, everywhere), some with psychedelic lights behind their heads that go a long way in explaining why many buddhists are hippies.


Saturday night we met up with a lot of students in town at One Fish Two Fish on 278; there were about 10 of us there, most of us from Michigan, Harvard or Georgetown. My stir fry was tiny and left me hungry, sad.

Yesterday I woke up and grabbed some donuts from Del Gusto on Sihanouk. The donuts here generally suck -- no glaze at all. Then I worked off the donut with an hour long bike ride through the city. I got the bike from KiD; some people get cell phones from their jobs, I got a bike. So I biked all the way to the other end of Phnom Penh and back. I got destroyed by the heat (it was in the 40's yesterday... like 100+ farenheit) and I also got an amazing farmer's/sunglasses tan. The farmer's tan might be the best I've ever had. Ended up around Wat Phnom (see picture) later in the day; WP is a 600-year old temple (literally means "hill temple") and is the supposed namesake for Phnom Penh. Here, I saw some monkeys, an elephant, more buddhas, then went to Sorya for some gelato, which I ate in about 20 seconds to cool my body down.


Home to chill / listen to a Kensington message. At night we went to Pat, Tiffany and Jordan's apartment for pizza from Happy Herb's. As the name implies, it's pizza with weed as the topping. A few of us (including myself) opted for the un-happy pizza, and it generally sucked. I should've had the weed pizza, perhaps I wouldn't have noticed how bad it tasted.

Came home later, and didn't sleep. This entry has come full circle. Great.

- m