March
22, 2013
Today was the last day of the conference and our
last day in Cambodia, so we needed to catch any other filming and finish the
episode. The morning was
uneventful for both Matt and I and for Prakti. They had some final meetings with people they needed to
catch up with and we had an episode to finish.
We decided to grab a quick lunch over at the
restaurant where we had done our laundry the day before. We had some delicious tea, pineapple
fried rice and beefsteak with steamed rice. It ran us whopping $3.38 bill. Big spenders.
We finished up the edit in the afternoon and showed
Minh and Mouhsine who enjoyed it.
They headed off to find some cheap massages and meet some stove people
for dinner, so we decided to have another attempt at the night market. I had researched it more and found that
it only ran on Friday and Saturday nights.
We left the hotel around 8pm very hungry. It’s not a terrible walk from our
hotel, so since we were low on cash and didn’t want to pull more out, we opted
out of the tuk-tuk for the exercise and to save the $8 roundtrip. We came upon the busy night market on
the food end which was fortuitous given how ravenous we were. (Fortuitous for the cooks…)
There were carts lined up in a giant square with
grass mats laid out in the middle where people were sitting on the ground
eating their dinners. The outside
of the giant square was littered with shoes that people had removed to enter
the dining area. Matt and I made
one round through all of the carts to check out our options. There were kabobs of mystery meat
shaped and colored like angry birds, there were full-body cooked pigeons,
noodles, rice, fish and squid. We
decided on a vendor and they gave us a basket to load up. We chose a pigeon, some wantons, and a
deep fried drumstick with pork fried noodles. They dump the contents of our basket on a BBQ and reheated
the contents. Remembering we had a
flight the next morning, we reconsidered for a moment, then decided to go for
it. We got two cokes and opted for
a cup instead of a bag, threw off our shoes and dug in to our loot on one of
the mats.
Had this been the first place we had been on this
trip, I think I would have taken photos and been bright-eyed and excited and
weirded out by eating on the ground and by the pigeon’s scrawny little head
watching me chomp down on its body, but after a couple months of so many
experiences, it’s going to take a lot more than that to phase me.
It was a happy atmosphere with many families and
young people, and after dinner we decided to check out what they had for sale
in the other side of the market.
There was live music going on down the street, and rows and rows of
clothes, purses and scarves. These
were not handicrafts, like I had expected them to be, but they were beautiful
and cheap, so Matt and I got a couple t-shirts and some scarves as souvenirs.
We were thirsty by the end of our shopping and
wanted to get rid of our couple dollars worth of riels, so we found a street
vendor outside the shopping area to buy some sour sop juice and a beer. The little eight year old running the
stand gave us a great deal and it cost us the equivalent of 75-cents for the
two beverages. The man sleeping in
the chair next to the place must have been in charge, but we figured it would
be better not to bother him and just finish our transaction with the child. We gave him our funds and walked away
wondering if he even worked for the guy.
If you haven’t tried sour sop, I’d highly recommend it. Pretty tasty.
We walked back to the hotel knowing that we needed
to get up early to pack and prepare for our long, long, long travel day to get
to South Africa.
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