Phnom Penh

We had the funniest ride back to Phnom Penh from the east. Over the course of the 10-hour trip, we must have stopped a million times, and for quite a few of them we were the last ones on the bus. At one stop the assistant to the driver came to get us at the bathrooms! And when we got on the bus the driver was jokingly shaking his finger at us. At the next stop we were standing around munching on fresh cashew nuts when he came up to us and pointed his finger to the bus as if it was time to get back on. I said “really?” and the guy starts laughing and walks away. As we were standing around, a group of boys came up to us, asking for money for food. One of them noticed Kendra’s tattoo and started laughing hysterically. He kept saying “cobra, cobra” – I guess he thought Kendra’s tattoo looked like a cobra. His hysterics got the whole bus laughing at us. On the bus, there was also an endless supply of Asian pop karaoke. They kept playing one awful song which had a couple phrases of horribly-pronounced English. Even though we moaned each time it came on, Claire and I learned the English parts pretty quickly and started singing along. The driver and his assistant started playing it on purpose just to see our reactions, and it got the whole bus laughing at us again! I swear, my family is a freakshow wherever we go!!

Everywhere I went in Cambodia, I found a striking resemblance between several locals and some of my Tibetan friends back home. A man on the bus back to Phnom Penh reminded me so much of Rinchen, in build, the way he laughed and the way he tapped his foot as we drove, waiting anxiously for his next cigarette – the resemblance was so uncanny my sister and I kept giggling. And I think the guy knew that I kept looking at him. Our bus driver even reminded us both of Tawang, my boss at Shambala. There were others too who reminded me of Tawang’s wife, and our friend Tashi. Weird, but a very nice reminder of home! :) (HI to you all!!!)

Most of our time in Phnom Penh was spent shopping at one of the gazillion markets and eating – both of which totally satisfied the conscious activist in me. There are shops everywhere set up by non-profit organizations working for HIV/AIDS patients, landmine victims, orphans, etc. You name a social problem and there is an organization for it in Cambodia. Kind of sad, but the situation provides a million possibilities for a person like me looking for a job or volunteer opportunities. A couple of the restaurants that we went to were set up by an organization called Mith Samlanh (Friends), which has set up housing, health services, counseling, primary education and vocational training for over 1,800 street children every day. They have also set up two restaurants training older street children to be cooks, servers, and hosts, giving them the experience necessary to get permanent jobs in the growing Cambodian service industry. I was really inspired that there were such influential organizations functioning in a country with less than 10 years of relative stability. For more information about Friends, check out their website: www.streetfriends.org.

We also had a very interesting glimpse at the underbelly of Cambodia one evening. Lured by a flyer for “buy one, get one free drinks” at a romantically titled lounge, Bogie and Bacall’s, we found only a seedy hostess bar with black lights and awful fluorescent posters of the actors in their heyday. Nothing at all like we had imagined from the name! This was also the first time we had ever been in a hostess bar, which put the sex tourism we had heard about in Cambodia front and centre! After the owner finally brought us drinkable drinks, we ate sweet popcorn from a vendor and giggled at another crazy scenario we had gotten ourselves into! That evening also made the sex tourism more obvious to me for the rest of the trip. Almost every evening I saw at least one or two white men – usually not so attractive – with younger and quite pretty Khmer girls. Funny that it’s so blatantly obvious what’s going on, even to me!