Sights

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
8:15 PM ICT
Seat 12C, Bangkok Airways Flight 693
Somewhere over Phnom Penh

As the plane leaves the ground, and I leave the country I have called home (and called ‘very weird’) for nearly four weeks of my young life, I find myself becoming pensive, wistful, and perhaps a little excessively loquacious. And as I consider this electronic log I have been keeping, I cannot quite shake the feeling I have in some way failed to capture on these virtual pages the true essence of this country… the day-to-day of Cambodia. And so, to remedy this, I present a list of things I saw today while wandering Phnom Penh; and through this I hope to capture something about the country and the culture. My walk was unspectacular, uneventful, these things I list are everyday occurrences in this city, nothing spectacular.

Today, I saw:

• Five identical cell phone card shops, all the same chain (a monopoly in Cambodia), in a row.
• Two monks with shaved heads, wearing the traditional bright saffron robes, buying cellphone cards at one of these stores.
• Cute small children, wearing rags and begging.
• Several old men and women, horrifically burned and missing limbs thanks to landmines, also begging.
• An effeminate Cambodian street-side barber apparently checking me out. (There’s actually a lot of barbers on the sidewalks of Phnom Penh, and, coincidentally, a lot of human hair on the sidewalks of Phnom Penh.)
• A fat sweaty white tourist, who, while having a small Cambodian child polish his sandals for a couple thousand riel (about 50 cents), was yelling at the wait staff at the restaurant he (and, unfortunately, I) was eating; and all the while pretty much ignoring the sad, pretty, heavily made-up, and very young Cambodian woman who was sitting across from him.
• An item on the breakfast menu at the same restaurant called a ‘western omlet’, which was an omlette with either bacon OR sausage OR cheese.
• A market stall selling cut-up fruit to snack on, with one employee searching through the display of papayas to pull out all the ones with particularly large mouldy spots.
• A market stall selling touristy stuff (carvings, silks, handbags), right next to another market stall, set up almost identically, but selling car parts.
• A whole street where every single shop had a giant display full of durian fruit – outside the store.
• A cop, hassling an old lady who owned a fruit stall, almost certainly for a bribe.
• Many people pushing carts full of slowly-cooking sea snails on an open fire.
• Another open fire, this one blazing nicely on someone’s front lawn.
• A huge, bright, shiny building (one of the most expensive in the city) labeled ‘Ministry of Taxes’ (expensiveness of government ministry buildings is directly proportional to the level of corrupt power of said ministry).
• Many men, in order to cool off, pulling up their shirts and exposing their bellies (that’s just what the men do here, especially if they’re sweaty, fat, or old… few are hairy here).
• One man, approximately 45 and 10kg overweight, pulling up his shirt to cool off, and unintentionally revealing a back full of deep and ancient scars, clearly a result of the Khmer Rouge.
• A small statue of a Hindu asura (demon) that looked to be an actual 700 year old statue, sitting on public property, at the edge of a pool of garbage-filled stagnant water.
• A public park (mentioned in a previous post), with kids playing and food vendors selling barbecued miscellanea, that has, at the centre, Wat Phnom, a large temple that was built in the year 1373.
• A giant, shiny, 12-story glass office building being built, using scaffolding made of thin, and incredibly crooked, lengths of wood.
• A counter over top all the traffic lights at major intersections that counts down the number of seconds left until the light changes; which really only makes has the effect that, around 10 seconds left, everyone collectively gets impatient and starts moving out into traffic.
• A tuk tuk driver I owed $5 (a huge amount), agreeing that, because I was temporarily out of cash, I could leave without paying, and pay him later when I had change (which I did).
• A desk at the airport where, in what seems to be an incredibly institutionalized form of bribery, foreigners must pay $25 in order to leave the country.
• A security person at the airport, who, instead of being an unsmiling jackass, actually chatted with me for a good minute or so about whether or not I liked my time in Cambodia, and when, if ever, I was coming back. I smiled, and told him truthfully that I hope to come back as soon as possible.