In which a difficult morning gets even more difficult

Just when your morning can't get any worse here - you've been forced into taking a 6:30 AM bus to Phnom Penh when you wanted (needed!) to sleep in, which means no yoga and worse, no breakfast at all; dust has been blowing in the bus windows coating your face and bags; the bus keeps violently swerving around slow-moving vehicles and animals; nausea setting in as you've had no breakfast, the bus smell is foul, the swerving incessant; the bus has stopped (finally!) after four hours at a "rest stop" for food which turns out to be a filthy, fly-ridden pit at some dusty outpost where you don't dare eat anything from those scary pots besides the rice - just then, when you are really hungry, dirty, tired, and cranky, you feel an itch and look down, and see that Cambodian children have put a dozen live tarantulas all over your tank top and are shreiking with the hilarity of it.

Okay, so it was funny. Even I laughed, after I got done screaming. Apparently this roadside village is famous for eating tarantulas as a delicacy, and, both live and fried, the poor things are everywhere. I tried to explain that being vegetarian lets me off the hook for tasting spiders but the kids were still very disappointed that "nice lady" got back on the bus without having a taste. "Taste so goooood!" I bet.

Two hours later, after a few days of the relentless tourist-touting of Siem Reap, it was a huge relief to finally arrive in the much more cosmopolitan (relatively speaking) Phnom Penh, take a shower, and have an enormous overpriced but delicious $7 veggie sandwich on a home-baked baguette. At this point I didn't care if that's most people's weekly salary here: I desperately needed the upscale nourishment, and to spend an hour in a stable, spider-free lounge chair.

The city is more lush (e.g. less dusty) than Siem Reap, energetic and bustling (impossible, actually, to imagine the Khmer Rouge evacuating this entire city in 1975, and what the scene must have been like) and has some truly spectacular pagodas and palaces. I spent the afternoon visiting several, including the famous Silver Pagoda, so named for the over 5,000 solid-silver tiles laid over the pagoda floor, each beautifully engraved. This being Cambodia, though, what have they done to their priceless 5,000 solid silver tiles? Oh, you know, just packaging-taped them at every single seam so they lay flat. It'd be like if the French duct-taped the Bayeux tapestry to the cathedral walls. Crimminy.

I then headed (of course) for the FCC for a mojito and an afternoon reading editions of the Phnom Penh Post, which included reports on everything from the Cambodian elections to Tiger Woods apparently having some late night car accident, and the Saints MNF victory. Glad to be up to speed! The FCC here (for those who have seen The Killing Fields, it is featured prominently) is a shabbier but more characterful version of the Siem Reap location; here the black leather loungers are all cracked, and the white walls are faded yellow from years of cigarette smoke; but you still have the atmospheric balcony, spinning fans, and sunset over the Mekong River (it's down here too!).

I closed the evening with a massage from a blind person: an NGO down here trains those blinded by landmines to be masseuses. It was an incredibly intense (good intense!) experience, as I could feel how present she was the whole time, having to feel her way around my body, and her knowledge of pressure and touch was outstanding, as you might expect.

Tomorrow, a visit to the actual Killing Fields, and the genocide museum; then I am off on a short flight to Bangkok around 5 PM to close out the trip. And I think today was the memorial for Martin's mom Susi; I am so sorry I missed it and was thinking of you guys today.