Vijay and Shefali's TAtW

We got out of dodge on the craziest contraption – a sleeper bus. I know we sleep on buses at home, but this is different. All the seats are beds with angled backs to simulate reclining. And I’m sure it sounded like a great idea to anyone who never actually tried to sleep in one. But it just doesn’t work. In my case, since this is Asia, I’m about a foot too tall for this to make any sense, and I often ended up partly spilling into the seat behind me, which was usually met with amusement. Being big and kind of an oaf seems to endear me to a lot of the people we run into. And I mean literally run into, as they are often outside of my peripheral vision by the time I’m trampling them like Godzilla. So these night buses are apparently the standard of getting around when traveling at night, which to me is more like some kind of psychological warfare designed to deprive people of sleep. Either way, it works and you end up somewhere new. Phnom Penh had its moments – we were feeling a little better at this point and got more into Cambodian food. It’s actually very similar to Thai and Vietnamese but with less chili. Also there’s a chance they’re using instant noodles. There are other things too. There are carts with skewered snakes, grasshoppers, scorpions, other critters. We’ve seen them all over – in Phuket, Bangkok, Siem Reap and here, even in Vietnam. You know what we haven’t seen? LOCAL PEOPLE EATING THEM. Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that nobody here actually eats the bugs, but some genius realized that tourists will do all kinds of ridiculous shit, especially if they’re led to believe that the locals do it. This is further evidence of Asians being smarter than the rest of us. So now wherever we go some big dumb weirdo has to prove how much of a man he is and eat some fried bugs while his poor S.O. has to document the whole production. We toured around, no motorbike this time unfortunately, but we did go to the killing fields. If you ever want to understand that you’ve never had any real problems in life, read about Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. And yeah, I suppose you could say the same about the holocaust, or Stalin’s Great Purge or Mao-era PRC or whatever, but that’s not really the point. It’s not a competition. Jerks.

Vijay

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/97388931@N08/sets/72157640680304325/

Video of our latest culinary awakening: