Tastes Like Chicken

  
Cambodia. I had like 2.3 days there so the trip was way quick but man. Saw some stuff.
I rolled into Phnom Penh after the 10 hr boat ride I talked about last time and decided the girls I met on the boat were good people. Apparently the feeling was mutual and we decided to kick it together so I had friends for 2 days. Nothin wrong with that.
Unbeknownst to us, the Water Festival aka the biggest fest of the year was going on while we were there and the city was a complete zoo. Or more of a zoo than it always is. Word on the street is the population of  The Penh straight doubles during that time so needless to say my wide-open-spaces Canadian-ness was shocked to its core. Good thing Cambodians were shocked to their core too… I thought Vietnam was bad, but staring of that impressive caliber doesn’t happen everyday. Apparently a ton of people from the country come to the city for the festival so maybe they don’t see a lot of foreigners. I don’t have all the answers but one thing I do know I scared a lot of children and small old people. Maybe one day soon I’ll get sick of talking about the staring… not yet though.
So me and the Canadian & German check into our guesthouse and decide to roam the streets. You know, mingle with the locals and such, cause everybody is out chillin’ by the river. A few steps from our door this nice lady is selling fried whole frogs and deciding to try one, we inadvertently set the tone for the evening. Yes, I have lived in France on two separate occasions. No, I never cared to try the grenouille legs while I was there. Cambodia, however, brings out something different in me and I plucked off hoppy’s thigh and threw it down my gullet. Seriously, texture and taste was like chicken but still. One was enough.


Hardened by my frog experience, man I was on to bigger things. Braving the crowds for another ten minutes and we stumble on the bug lady servin up fresh and crispy grasshoppers. Yeeeeah boi. We made this bitter American girl passing by take pictures for us and our faces pretty well capture the thoughts inside my head. The taste was actually pretty charred BBQ steak-y except every .4 seconds you remember you’re eating a bug and it all goes bad. The worst was that there were loose bits of wing and abdomen and gnarly whatnot stuck in my teeth for a good while afterwards. I kid not.
Last, snake. I don’t have much to say about that cause it was also fried, but to oblivion so consequently it was wholly impossible to bite off the stick it came on. Like, imagine biting into fried tire. That was the texture we’re working with here. I was ok with that though cause it meant less snake to digest and my stomach was already wondering what the eff was goin on.
Anyway. The next day the buddies and I decided to do different stuff so I went to Tuol Sleng aka S-21 which was the torture museum used by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the ‘70s.

I can’t say a lot about that because it was super intense and hard to take. Most anything I could write will in no way do the place or the victims killed there any kind of justice and will just sound trite. But needless to say, I took my time and tried to take it in. Try being the operative word because I think maybe it’s just me, but my mind mostly just can’t grasp how horrible people are capable of being to each other and what it really means to be tortured, killed and thrown into a mass grave for no reason besides existing at the wrong place in the wrong time. I sort of felt like I’d get 2 second breakthroughs and be able to start to wrap my head around what really went down there and then it was gone again… and I could only sort of try to understand in a totally disconnected, lame intellectual way. That makes little to no sense but maybe somebody that’s been there or to a concentration camp or something similar gets what I tried to mean. Visiting Auschwitz was a similar experience for me. Heavy.
 
After spending a lot of the afternoon there, I decided to just chill and walk around the city. I was supposed to go to the Killing Fields which is one of the mass graves they found in Cambodia but an expat I met at breakfast said since the city is so crazy right now, it could be really hard to get back in if I left to go the 20 or so km. Also, I was kind of thinking that might not be so good for me in terms of ever being able to feel happy again so I decided against it for that day. Wish I would’ve gone but maybe next time.
Hung out for the rest of the day but most stuff including the Royal Palace, Silver Pagoda and other sights were closed so I decided to go to the gym and workout. I am probably 1 of 2 people all time that has come to Cambodia to work out…. but since I restart training w/ natty team like 2 weeks after I get home in Dec., I figured I should make at least a token weekly effort to maintain…

This turned out to be one of the worst ideas I’ve had in a while.

The streets were PACKED like I have never seen before and after getting like 3/4 there on a moto, I have to get off and walk. Unfortunately this quickly comes to a complete - and I mean complete - halt like, 15 m after I start walking. Literally there are people from one side of the street pressed up against buildings all the way to the other side so there is nowhere to go but wait and shuffle 2 steps every 4 mins. I’m serious when I say it took a full hour to go less than 300 m to the gym door.
I’m standing there in the midst of a crowd of black heads, being tall, and all of a sudden this little teenage girl grabs hold of my arm and says “I told my friend you are big so it’s OK”. I was like, well alright then. Can’t argue with that.
She talks to me for another 10 mins or so before it comes out that she’s disabled and has prosthetic legs so I can only imagine that manhandling crowds like that can’t be easy. And now it all makes sense why she’s holding on to me (remember, wall to wall people so I couldn’t see her legs…). Anyway, her English is really good so I asked her if she wants to see what’s going on since I have a good, I dunno foot, on the thousands of people in the immediate surroundings. She was dying giggling to her friend but I took that as a yes and proceeded to cause even more of a ruckus than I already naturally do. Let us picture the scene: Phnom Penh by night. I don’t even know how many people. Me holding a tiny Cambodian over my head, gladiator-style.
Luckily, about 10 seconds after I picked her up the crowds moved enough for me to go the last 15 m to the gym so I set her down and jammed. Piggy back complete, my work there was done kids.
I proceeded to lift in what was actually the single most luxe & beautiful gym of my life. Ate, and by 11 the crowds had finally thinned enough to get home. Next day was Siem Reap & Angkor Temples but my lappy battery is about to die so that’s another story for another day.
P.S In an unrelated note, my sister Sarah’s contribution is to say there’s a monk on the bunk next to us on the night train to Bangkok. Bunk mates? .…monk mates! (Wow. HER WORDS, not mine. Dad: she’s doing you proud with the horrible jokes).