Advertisement
Published: January 31st 2011
Edit Blog Post
Monday 1-10
The bad thing about Phnom Penh is that it appears none of the tuk tuk drivers know where anything is. If you don’t know where you’re going (and good luck with that if you’re a tourist who just came to town), then the tuk tuk driver doesn’t know either and will badger you when you end up at the wrong place because it was your fault you didn’t get the right address. Nice. With a few hours to spare before we got on the bus to Siem Reap, the girls and I checked out the bright yellow, art deco Central Market. A beautiful building and a great place to check out t-shirts for sale with incomprehensible English phrases on them. Here, let me entertain you with a few:
• Ape should never kill ape
• Life is worth when you see the world of life
• She sheavy so you’d all beer not trust
• I heart drugs
• Eat babe for face, alternative get trick for fun (my favorite)
• Just you heart…I hear, I way to keep (punctuation included)
• Always breathless confusion (Jane’s personal favorite)
• Sweat time for you and me
• Happy boyfriend, café
in love
• Freedom life? (with the question mark)
• Beautiful love what’s in your jeans (Rae’s favorite)
• Sheep happy party time, this is happy bear (on a pair of pajamas and probably the most incomprehensible one)
For lunch we headed back to another Friends restaurant, this time Cambodian. It was DElicious as well with a little wading pool to cool ourselves off in, which was good ‘cause it was frickin’ hot walking around the city. After which, we climbed aboard our 6 hour bus ride through the Cambodian countryside. We passed very picturesque small villages, grazing water buffalo and speedy ice cream (tuk tuk) trucks. The rest stop we took a break at had (for my first experience) fried grasshoppers and fried tarantulas, the latter of which is supposedly a Cambodian (Khmer) specialty. I couldn’t bring myself to eat one. I love food, but I kind have to draw the line at bugs. Rae was going to try a grasshopper, but it had a fly on it. Hygiene people! ;o)
We arrived in Siem Reap in the evening and were blown away! Now HERE is our first tourist town! This place was crawling with foreigners and
Preah Promreath
The gold and red colors are what Angkor Wat supposedly looked like in its time. English-speaking shop owners. Fortunately, our hotel was situated around the corner from “tourist alley” and several markets, so we were in the thick of things. Siem Reap is much more navigable for travelers and caters so well to tourists that we had no problem speaking English and finding our way around all week. It also doesn’t hurt that all commerce is done in US dollars. They only give the local currency, the riel, out as change when they had to break dollars.
Our first stop after dinner? Getting a fish pedicure, of course! It seems to be pretty big here; they fill a large tank with cleaner fish (collected from the local river), build some benches around the top and voilà! Nick and I got the dead skin nibbled off of our feet for 30 minutes by these little creatures. Jane & Rae tried their hand at it, but decided window shopping was better for than getting eaten by fish ;o)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.069s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0485s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
danisom
non-member comment
Actually, I think it totally suits you.