Cooking in Cambodia

We still had another full day in Siem Reap, which was really our last free day together as a group. Most of us had been travelling together since Hanoi, three weeks earlier, and the end was near.

I got up around nine o’clock and my roommate told me that the cooking class had been moved up from eleven to ten o’clock. This left me time to either shower or get some breakfast. I went with the breakfast option because coffee sounded like it would cause me more good than the smells emanating from me would cause harm. I think I made the right decision.

All of us who were taking the cooking class, seven in all, gradually found each other in a restaurant across the street from where the cooking class was taking place. The meal was okay and the coffee was sufficient. We wandered across the street to the restaurant in which the class was taking place and we were handed menus. We were instructed to pick an appetizer and a main course in which to cook. Going along with what had been working for me in Cambodia thus far, I went with fresh shrimp spring rolls and fish amok.

Like the other cooking classes that I took in Asia, there was a lot of chopping. I’m starting to get the hang of it, though I can’t cut a tomato into a rose to save my life. We rolled up the spring rolls, made the sauce, and then it was time for the main courses. As I mentioned, mine was the fish amok. Unlike the class in Vietnam, we actually got to cook our meals in this class. The hot plates came out and we went to work.

When I took the cooking class in China, the meal I had was one of the better meals that I had the entire time I was in China. I’m sure that was due in large part to the ingredients and my instructor. I can’t say that this was the case in Cambodia. I’ll put all of the blame on myself, but I can easily say that I had had much better fish amok during my time in Cambodia. The spring rolls were good, though. And the dessert – sticky rice with coconut and mango – kicked some serious butt. I still don’t have the recipes for what I cooked, but they are supposed to be e-mailed to me. At this point, I’m doubting if that will happen.

After class, I returned to my hotel room and this time I think I actually got to take a little nap. Afterwards, I went walking around the small, touristy town for a final look. I went to the local market, but I had bought pretty much all of the Cambodian souvenirs that I wanted at the Russian Market in Phnom Penh, so I didn’t get anything.

At night, we had time for one final meal in Cambodia. Coming to the realization that if I chose Cambodian food for my final meal, I likely was going to get something that I had already tried at this point, I joined some friends at a Mexican restaurant for some chimichangas and margaritas. It wasn’t the best Mexican food I had ever had, but it was the first I had eaten in quite a while, and it was good enough for me.

It turned out to be an early night because some of us were still a little hungover and we had an early-morning bus – our last one for the trip – to Bangkok in the morning. We’ll turn to the commute in the next entry.

Absinthe Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

Well, we returned to Siem Reap after a long day at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom and the other temples and it was still only around four in the afternoon. The next day was fairly open until a cooking class at around ten o’clock, so the plan was to take a little nap and then go out and have a night on the town.

Unfortunately, the nap part didn’t work out. I tried and tried but sleep didn’t come. For the most part I just laid in the semi-dark and/or watched television while my roommate was on the computer. Obviously, this was going to make the night out on the town a little more difficult, but it couldn’t be avoided.

At dinnertime, we met to go to a restaurant/bar called the Temple Club. One of the draws of the place was a local dance show that would be performed while we ate. The other draw is that if you drank a bucket of some mixed drink, you were awarded a t-shirt. As it turned out, the show wasn’t particularly entertaining and the t-shirt was a little bit too small, but the bucket of vodka and red bull was just what the doctor ordered. (Coincidentally, it also was just what I ordered.)

After dinner, and feeling pretty good at this point, we went across the street to another bar. This other bar was called Angkor What? and also gave away t-shirts with buckets of drinks. Unwilling to drink another bucket, I opted to purchase of t-shirt from this establishment for $5, but at least this one fit. Even though I wasn’t prepared to drink another bucket of liquor, I wasn’t quite finished drinking yet. I ordered a beer and then another beer and then it seemed like a good idea to do a shot of absinthe. I had never had the legendary liquor before and now, with friends and already drunk, it seemed like a good time to experiment with the Green Fairy. It didn’t taste all that good, but it wasn’t too bad either. It warmed me up a little bit and made the beer taste better. Now that we were getting good and, let’s say comfortable, my friends wanted to do a shot of Jager. I wasn’t in the mood for Jager, I’ve never been a big fan, so I opted for another shot of absinthe. I distinctly remember this shot of absinthe because I also distinctly remember being in the bathroom about 45-seconds later vomiting it into a urinal. Good times, good times.

Having recognized that I had been beaten, I decided to walk back to the hotel. It was only a few blocks across the river and I figured I was in decent enough shape to get back on my own. I was right. Thanks to all of the Red Bull, though, sleep didn’t come immediately. That might have been good because I got a text from my roommate that he was lost. He followed that up with a message saying that he didn’t know idea where he was – okay, that was pretty close to the first one. I tried to give directions, but since he didn’t know where he was, they weren’t very helpful. I then received a text message saying, and I quote, “I’m near the river and the prostitutes are after me.” I received no other texts from him, but he was back in the room within ten minutes, so I am pretty certain that he escaped the prostitutes unscathed.

After he returned, others also returned to the hotel and I suppose we were a little loud because there were a few half-hearted complaints in the morning, but nothing too big and it was all good fun. The next day was the aforementioned cooking class and I’ll get to that in the next post.

Angkor What?

After a night in Kompong Cham, it was time for yet another long bus ride to another city in Cambodia. I didn’t mind this one, though, because at least we were going to stay at our next destination, Siem Reap, for three days.

After arriving in Siem Reap, we took some time to clean up and went for an orientation walk. I had eaten breakfast in Kompong Cham, but it was getting pretty close to three o’clock and I was getting hungry. I cut out early on the orientation walk and grabbed some grub. Then I went and checked out the local market, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It ended up being an early night because we had to get up early the next morning for the fun stuff, so I’ll just skip forward to that.

At 4:30 am the next morning, we awoke in order to hop on a bus to head to Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is the national symbol of Cambodia, it’s on their flag for Pete’s sake, and was built by a Cambodian king (or rather, his subjects) in the first half of the 12^th century. It is featured heavily in the Lara Croft, Tomb Raider film, or so I’m told – I haven’t seen it – but was a treasured site well before that.

Getting back to getting on a bus at 4:30 am, we headed to Angkor Wat to catch the sunrise coming up over the temples. It was quite impressive, even if my iPhone couldn’t completely capture it thanks to the position of the sun. The mirrored images in the reflecting pools added to the splendor. Or at least one of the reflecting pools. The other was pretty much full of algae, though even that cast a little bit of a reflection.

After the sunrise, we stopped at a little restaurant across from the temples for breakfast and then re-entered the site to actually enter the temples. We toured with a guide for about an hour and then had some free time to explore. The complex is surrounded by a moat and it would have been great to get a bird’s eye view of the complex but for some reason they are no longer doing balloon rides in the area. At the far end of the complex, we ran into some wild monkeys that were getting fed by the tourists. Even though it looks just like it does on television, it is still very impressive in person.

After Angkor Wat, we went to Angkor Thom, an ancient fortified city built at the end of the twelfth century. Specifically, we headed to the Bayon, which has 54 gothic towers, each with four smiling faces of Avalokiteshvara that, according to legend, look amazingly like King Jayavarman VII, the king who built (or rather, whose subjects built) the city. There are other carvings in the complex that depict Cambodian life at the time that the temple was built.

Finally, we headed to Ta Prohm. People were calling this the Tomb Raider temple, but I really don’t know anything about that. To me, the temple was a brilliant example of how nature ultimately triumphs over man. There is plenty of the temple still remaining, but much of it has been crumbled by the surrounding jungle. Interestingly, there are several sections that are now part rock and part wood because trees have grown through several buildings within the complex and it is not always easy to tell where the buildings end and the jungles begin.

I took lots of pictures of all of these places, but there’s not nearly enough room to post them here. If I ever get caught up on posting travel photos on Facebook, though, you can be sure to find them there.