From Phnom Penh, Cambodia

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Greetings From Cambodia and Lovin' It!

Here is my first entry in this travel blog. I love Asia and Cambodia in particular. The people are lovely and the sights, sounds, smells are a fantastic blend. I arrived yesterday and am staying in a simple ($5) per night guesthouse along the river. Clean and simple with a double bed, ceiling fan toilet/shower attached. Well, an asian toilet/shower which means that you step down into a tiled area and with a hose you do your business into the asian squat toilet and then hose everything off. It is cold water which feels refreshing!
Today I got up early and headed for the Russian Market to buy school supplies, pencil cases, etc for my classes starting Monday. Before I left the guest house I ordered what sounded like a great breakfast and it was, just served a little differently... The menu board said. Omlette avec fromage and pain. Yum! What came was a sort of scrambled egg inserted into a delicious baguette with a triangle of a cheese slice with tomato, lettuce and cucumber. More like scrambled egg in a roll, but what the heck!
I travelled to the market in a tuk-tuk which is a motorcycle towing an open aired,canopied carriage. It reallyis the size for two toenjoy the space, but Cambodian style thereare usually 4,6, 8 and more ctammed in. I love to travel like this in Asia, in the open air. You can enjoy or sometimes be confronted with fumes, raw humanity, crazy traffic, kids, dogs, chickens and whatever else gets thrown your way. I like to just sit back like a memsahib and take it all in...
This afternoon I had the driver take me to the far in of town along the river to Wat Phnom, an old Buddhist temple with surrounding gardens. Phnom Penh is named after this Wat or temple. History says that a woman named Phnom (it'squite an involved story) anyway Phnom is her family name and Penh means hill and she had this temple built on a hill beside the river back in the 1300''s. It is surrounded by gardens and it was lovely and cool in there today. I climbed to the top of the temple and couldl ook at thegardens below. I watched a woman sitting on a park bench resting while a monkey meticulously picked nits from her hair. I don't know if she had nits, but both she and the monkey were really relaxed as the monkey combed through her hair just like on a wildlife channel when monkeys do that to each other. They were so peaceful and relaxed about it and she just had her head tipped back, both enjoying it. I was mesmerised and kept waiting for the monkey to grab and bite her head, but no! She just rested while a bunch of little kids played with a stretchy jump rope that they had made from elastic bands. Further along, a man was quietly washing an elephant with a garden hose and clearly they were enjoying themselves, too. It was cool and shady in the garden and everyone was relaxing, shaded from the mid-day sun. Worshipers came up the steps in a steady stream to say their prayers, light insense, leave lotus flowers and offerings of money

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