Patches of my tangent quilt

The bed bugs in my current location have turned me into a puckered carcass (be a dear and swallow that hyperbole please). When I first checked into my room I barely noticed. I looked for spaces mosquitoes could shimmy through, but as night fell the room began to crawl. Usually bed bugs are so small you can barely notice them until the rows of rash plot against you in the morning, but this room had been so neglected that all of the bed bugs were fully grown. I tucked my pants into my socks and slept with a scarf on underneath the fan, but the back of my neck and side of my hands were still lumpy sore in the am. Plus, the whole sleeping thing didn’t go down as I had expected. So now I’m on my third cup cup of coffee looking up rooms in another location before heading off on a day trip to Ream National Park. I’m hoping the trip will clear my mind. I’ve been talking myself into dizziness lately. World vertigo.

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I wrote this on the 21st of April.  It is now May 4th and even though it has only been 13 days, so many things have happened.  Ream National Park was lovely.  I enjoyed the clear waters, trekked through jungle and village and had a quiet meal of fruits and chicken rice on the coast.  Bed bugs ain’t got nothin’ on me.  The place I stayed that night was clean and comfortable.   I watched the Matrix on the tele and than a show about Korean pop fashion.  Worlds colliding together in other worlds.  The show starred a foreigner and a national gushing out enthusiasm and rice cakes.  The following day I made my way towards Phnom Penh.  I had a plan.  To take a plane from Cambodia to Kaula Lumpar, Malaysia.  I’m currently in Singapore, but I’ll have to get to that in my next post.  I booked a flight, met up with Kris again and wallowed at the thought of departing from my beloved Cambodia.  The next morning I left for the airport and as I sat in the small waiting room outside my terminal I wrote the following ranty bit about my overall experience there:

Cambodian Freedom

I’m currently in Phom Penh International airport. Samsung’s presence is surprising, as is the luminescent coiled wire ball lamps dangling from the ceiling. I’ve spent a total of 33 days in Cambodia (3 days over my visa). And it’s been absolutely wonderful. I could see myself living here. It’s just enough gritty and just enough gorgeous and the people are just enough nice, but not so much that they seem full of shit. Today, I got my hair cut by a man with a chair on the side of the street. He had a mirror nailed up against a wall in front of a temple, and used a buzz cutter and a comb to do the bulk of it. I drank sugar cane juice, which entailed searching for a motorbike with a metal contraption built to squeeze the juice out of the sugar cane bark. A metal wheel against a metal plate. Topped with lime and ice cut from giant blocks on the side walk. I’ve walked through sand that squeaked, melted under skies that looked like someone poured neon glow sticks into the clouds (*props to Kris), watched boys bury each other in the dirt and pour wine over their bodies in fits of giggles, I’ve had boys walk up and hug me in the street, children beg me (a complete stranger) to throw them up in the air, I’ve been lied to and scammed, and in the end it seems now that I’ve loved every minute of it. But as nice as it is for me to come to Cambodia, as I’ve mentioned before, it comes from a history of sadness. It lives in the shadow of its history.   I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I left my sneakers at my very first hostel in Laos. I had to buy a pair in Pakse, but a day after I bought them they started falling apart. I kept them barely together with super glue for about two weeks until I made it to Siam Reap. My tuk tuk driver that day-he did two really important things for me. He brought me to this women who re-glued and then actually sewed through the rubber bottoms of my shoe into the fabric to keep them together and then he had lunch with me seeing more Wats. While this woman put my shoes back together she told me about her business. Her husband. Her children. Their life. She was optimistic and honest.   She talked about the Khmer New Year. There is something wonderful about Khmer culture and the language in particular. It’s harsh. It’s loud and it’s harsh. But the women, jeebures-they talk just as loud and as harsh as the men. They have just as much spirit. So she was telling me about the Khmer New Year and the time they would take off and how they would enjoy it. And then she said, the problem is, when we don’t work…we don’t make money. For all the bonkers bat shit crap that goes on in the states, that is not a sentence I can honestly put out in the world when speaking about my own country. There are so many cuddle crap programs (that we all pay into for better or for worse)-that make it so if there is a holiday, if I’m sick, if I’m hurt, even-if I can’t find a job-I don’t have to worry about-I won’t ever have to worry about it the way that this women does. After that, my tuk tuk driver took me back to Angkor land. I did my thing and then as I said before we got some lunch together. He talked to me about freedom. You are free. Every bone in my body wanted to say, nah, not anymore.  But I couldn’t say that. Relatively speaking. I’m free. As a white-American-I am free (at least in one way) that this tuk tuk driver could never be.

Love, Hate Update

The big blur.  A blur of days, and faces, and scenic villages, and temples.  I gave Siam Reap another few days.  I fell in love with it every evening and grew to hate it every morning.  So many times over and over. I can’t even remember everything that has happened to be honest.

I watched quite a few people treat my (understandably) grumpy guesthouse owner like crap.  One of them even told him that the Cambodian people deserved the rain of Pol Pot and than threatened to beat him up at a later date!  The other, moaned and pissed because the owner wouldn’t accept a ripped twenty bill (it’s standard practice in Cambodia because of the fraud)-an expat business owner eventually pulled him aside and told him that the owner’s reason was legitimate.  Only then did he pull out a stack of ones, which  devolved into an f-u argument.  BLACH.  Other highlights included learning about the wonderful work that is being done for children’s health in Cambodia.  They have a couple of children’s hospitals that are entirely free based on donations.  Pretty incredible when you consider the history and hardship.  I also spent quite a bit of time giving free English lessons behind the temples.  Got a bundle of bananas out of it 🙂

Then I took another sleeper bus from Siam Reap to Phnom Penh.  Felt sick as a dog:
+awkward seats that weren’t big enough for even the tiniest of legs

+thunderstorm/cars overturned in mud holes/picking up other buses’ stranded passengers

+deciding that I don’t mind squatting bathrooms, just squatting bathrooms in the dark (spiders, snakes, oh my!)

I did meet a lovely volunteer teacher on the bus over.  She was working in the South of Cambodia and gave me a solid earful of recommendations and youthful aspirations.   She even showed me the guesthouse she had been staying at.  I got a room in the dorms and met some interesting folks.  They had a rooftop bar that had a great atmosphere, unfortunately I had the joy of encountering bed bugs for the first time at this location as well.  You win some, you lose some.  I had some super magical moments in PhomPenh.  I met some sweet dancing nerds and we took a traditional dance class.  It was wonderful.  Everything was in body isolations.  I’ve been stretching out my fingers and toes everyday since.   Hands-hands-hands!!  Afterwards, we made our way across town to check out a dance and shadow puppet performance.  The way they used space and light in this performance was absolutely brilliant!  There were no boundaries-men turned into monkeys-and paper turned into ship sails-the night into deep water-flashlights into dance and shadows into gods.  They moved behind the stage and in front of the stage behind and in between the audience with control and grace and raw emotion.  And the music!  Drums that sounded like thunder and a trumpet player who stared into everyone’s eyes with a confidence that felt like lightning.

On the other hand, the begging in PhomPenh was just as bad, if not worse than Siam Reap.  I met up with my friend Kris again and we took turns turning down tuk tuk driver’s and small children as politely as we could.  At one point, at nine o’clock at night, when I was by myself I snapped on some school boys that were fluent in English and looking for donations for children’s education.  “It’s night time!  Can’t you give me a break!  I’m sitting by the river, trying to have a moment of peace!  All day people have been asking me for money-I am not an ATM.  I do not have endless amounts of money to donate–“–“Sorry ma’am, sorry.”  It wasn’t a fair thing to do, these kids just wanted to help their country.  That said, since I’ve left PhomPenh I’ve only had two people ask me for money.  I’ll get to that later though.

The worst of the begging is outside of the killing fields.  Kids from the local villages hang outside of the mass graves all day.  They grab onto the back of your tuk tuk as you drive away to be extra dramatic.  A bunch of people warned me about this, but lucky for me the kid that was begging me broke out into laughter about five minutes in his act because his friends ran over and started teasing him.  He left and came back with tears as I was driving away, but at that point his friends were turning their sad faces on and off and giggling a wreck.  The tuk tuk driver was pretty confused.

For those of you who don’t know about the genocide that occurred in Cambodia, I would recommend looking into it.  It’s incredibly tragic and in the end, there was no justice.  The United Nations gave a seat to the same corrupt government that turned their own country into a giant concentration camp.  The man that led this government at the time, got to die a peaceful death in his own home at a ripe old age and once again the States didn’t clean up the HUGE mess of mines they dropped.  As a result, a sizable portion of the population has had to have something amputated and can’t work in a country where work is hard to come by.

There is so much history I was never taught in school and I don’t know what to do with it all.

Now, I’m in Kampot.  Kampot is just lovely.  People are warm and friendly.  The town is small and divided by the intracoastal.  Despite everything, there is something just absolutely seductive about Cambodia.  I can see why so many expats just stay here.  The last guesthouse I stayed at was outside of town, kind of in the middle of nowhere.  It was run by a French couple.  One night, I stayed up late looking at the blossoming stars and listening to Kris talk to one of the owners about the impending third world war, when they deviated into the subject of how to live your life knowing how full of corruption the world is.  The guesthouse owner made the point that you gotta just take the leap and live your dream.  He went on to say that the beautiful thing about Cambodia is, in Cambodia your dream will only cost you $20,000.  At home, your dream will only ever be a dream.  He took it a step further by saying, you know I may be paying into a corrupt government here too, but at least it’s not MY corrupt government.  I’m getting a little bit rambly, but it was a point (a couple of points even) that will probably stick with me.

Yesterday, Kris and I left the middle of nowhere and found a really nice spot to chill in town.  The shower here actually has pressure, the food is pretty good, and we have patio.  Like I said before, there isn’t as much begging here.  There are a lot of SEEING EYE MESSAGE shops, but people here all seem to try and work for their money.  An idea, that I am beginning to recognize as a uniquely capitalistic one.  If you work hard for your money than you deserve it.  Despite whatever privilege got you to a place where you were able to have said opportunities.  I don’t know if there is less begging here because outside of the city there is less competition or if people just take care of one another better because it’s a small community.  But I’m happy to report I’ve finally been able to relax some.  Let all of the intake settle where it may in my gelatin pot brain.