Wandering in Phnom Penh

So, I headed out on Thursday on a quest to find ginseng tea by special request. I'd been told about a great grocery store here with a wide selection of teas and had even driven past it once. Seemed easy enough to find, or so I thought. I started off walking very purposefully, passing numerous tuk-tuk drivers, moto taxi drivers, cyclo drivers, and loitering Cambodian men, confident that I knew where I was going and would get there eventually. Well, I must have passed it at some point, because I never found it. The longer I didn't find the store, the more aware I became of the numerous people watching me walk purposefully down the road, and the more I realized that they were leaving me alone because I looked like I knew exactly where I was going. At this point I had no idea where I was going but thought it best to continue acting like I did. This prevented me from turning back the way I came, and the only thing I knew of in the direction I was headed was the Central Market, several kilometers away. Ignoring the noon-time heat and the dripping sweat trail marking my passage, I valiantly carried on to the market. I never found the tea, but I did find the stall in the market selling fried tarantulas, spiders, cockroaches, grasshoppers, termites and scarabs for a tasty afternoon snack. I wanted to take a picture but found the buckets of fried bugs a little too disturbing to linger over. Maybe I'll go back sometime. No longer appearing lost, I was able to hire a tuk-tuk for the ride back home across town.

The lesson here is that if you look like you know what you're doing, people assume you do and leave you alone, even if you're red in the face and look like you've sprung a leak. Thanks to my vast on-call experience, I've honed my skills to near perfection. I was able to bluff all of the Cambodians. You'll never again trust the on-call doctor!

That evening, Teo and I headed out in the twilight rain shower to the Olympic Stadium. Best we can tell, it has nothing to do with the Olympics but is merely the only stadium of any size in Cambodia. Turns out, every evening the locals gather for Jazzercise on the top of the stadium. Attendance was down because of the rain, but there were still several hundred people milling about. Many of them had paid the 500 riel (12.5 cents) to join the various dancing groups. One group of mostly middle-aged women was doing step-aerobics/line dancing. The teens and 20-somethings were in a boy-band-wanna-be-very-enthusiastically-flailing-about group. The slightly less enthusiastic were Jazzercising. The kids were having Karate lessons. And the recently-engaged were honing their traditional Cambodian Apsara dancing skills for their upcoming weddings. One guy was sitting with a scale. For a small fee he'd let you check your post-exercise weight. We had a lot of fun watching the festivities until the rain picked up and we headed back home, darting through the crazy rain-parka covered moto drivers.

I love being here!