Quoi Angkor!

What? There is a play with words here but I am not sure which is the best language for it.

So after recovering from our food indigestion in Thailand, we gorged some more on flicks (Iron Man rocked, Speed Racer was cute and campy) and on temples with giant painted Monkeys (not like the live Indian ones, who stole my mangoes) and markets where we saw more hipster T-shirts than on a June Sunday in Williamsburg. A special mention goes to the fresh passion fruit juice and the fresh litchis, with the 2 pounds of Mangosteens a close third.

We then flew to Phnom Penh because the flight was on sale and not much more than a bus ticket and it saved us a day of bus hell and a day of sore muscles. At the airport we were greeted by Ken’s friend John. John is an expat here and he knows it all. He speaks Khmer, has been living here for 8 years and publishing Khmer comics, studying Cambodia and developing his own comics and heading a dot com. As a result he has more URLS than a team of Norwegian wrestlers so I spare you the business one. John is an awesome guide and Khmer food lover and friend but he has a bet here, and even though I was prepared right from the start to eat soup for breakfast Khmer style, he’s decided I wasn’t going to eat any khmer food, unless I cooked it.

So far he’s taken us to a jaw dropping French restaurant with pastry’s galore, a correspondent club with horseradish burgers, a Moroccan tapas place, a Pizza bar, a hipster fusion restaurant with beds for chairs/tables and yes, you heard it, an African buffet with full on circus performance. So I escaped for a morning and took a Khmer Cooking class in Battambang with 4 other tourists.

For a mere 8 dollars, I followed a guy to a market where he bought some live snake fish I saw slaughtered with a hatchet, some coconut pulp, fresh galangal, lemongrass, mushrooms, tomatoes, weird greens and some beef and pork (I shivered at the flies hovering nearby but they seemed to stay reasonably far away enough, thanks to a mysterious plastic bag filled with a yellow liquid). Then each one of us ground our spices, cut our veggies and meats and cooked the stuff on a wok. The fish Amok was amazing, The beef luc lak a little scary and the green soup pretty tasty. But the war goes on. Despite all his efforts, John has not managed to make us eat any Mexican food yet, but he has a mad gleam in his eye, I know tonight he’s gonna make the case for the best Khmer Burrito known to man.

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