Team Sweden Takes Cambodia at bryce is abroad

I’ve been in another 3 countries since my last post, so I’m sorry for being so late with this update. I just arrived back from Myanmar (Burma) today after spending the past week there.. I was so confused and I suppose it was the first time I really felt uncomfortable in the past couple months, but after a couple days it was okay. I’ll talk more about that a couple posts from now. Below: Japanese guy smiling.

When I left you I had just finished up in Vietnam and had made my way to Cambodia with the Swedish guys. We took the bus from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, which went quite well with the border crossing being quick and the bus ride tolerable. On the bus we met a young Austrian girl, who we followed to the hostel she’d booked at. We got our beds and the Swedes and I went to withdraw money and find dinner. In Cambodia everything is in USD, with small transactions/change being given in the secondary currency Riel, so it was extremely strange to actually know how much money we were spending, as opposed to having to do on-the-spot conversions all the time.

After a walk down to the lakeside, we realized it was going to be expensive so Erik and I bought a chicken (a dead one I promise), and had that instead. Obviously we were still hungry and got some incredible beef skewer nearby the hostel. How did I know it was beef when the lady didn’t speak a word of English? She started flapping her hands above her ears and saying ‘Moo! Moo!’ Oh, Cambodia. We met up with the Austrian girl and her older German friend and they joined Erik and I for some beer down by the lake. $1 large Angkor draft beers are made extra special by their price, but the German guy said we should have gone to another place where they were just 50 cents each.

Afterwards he decided he wanted to take us to a ‘hostess bar’. There’s a street with probably around 30 of them all bundled together, and you just choose one and go in. As you walk into the seemingly quite bar, you’re approached by around 40 beautiful Cambodian girls wearing practically nothing. This is a sophisticated strip club my friends. You pay around double for drinks, and its expected that you buy the ladies a few drinks too. In exchange you have about 8 girls surrounding your table flirting with you the entire night. I looked at it as a good opportunity to get out all my sarcasm because even though they don’t understand they still laugh. At one point the girls started putting the beer stubbies under Erik’s and my t-shirt, trying to make it look like we had boobs, and then started squeezing them. Oh, Cambodia. They were very insistent we take them home with us (the girls, not the stubbies), but $10 is a little out of my budget and we were staying in dormitories. And I think Jewish law prohibits prostitution so I was just trying to do the right thing. I have morals.

The next day team Sweden and I went to Phnom Penh’s haunting S21 Museum and the Killing Fields. Won’t pretend like it was a fun day, but it did feel a lot like my visit to the concentration camps in Poland a few years ago. It’s pretty surreal to see the exact same thing, knowing that it took place 30 years after the Holocaust and once again, no one raised a finger. As Pol Pot decided it was time for ‘Year Zero’ in Cambodia and began to wipe out every single intellectual and put the others to 15 hours a day of cruel unpaid labor, the world stood by for the millionth time in history, and as a result millions of people died for literally no reason. I decided I’d be the exception and not take my camera to the killing fields so I could take photos of people’s bones and skulls, but I do have a couple photos I took on my phone of the area, just to show how such awful events can take place in such a beautiful piece of countryside. It really was the holocaust all over again.

Phnom Penh is boring otherwise, so we left that day to go down south to Sihanoukville, where we could relax for a few days on the beach. It’s a nice place but I did feel it was very crowded and nothing too special. The beaches were small but the water was so still and beautiful. At night we went down to the beach to a bar called JJ’s Playground, and a few days later went out on a day booze cruise ran by the car for the full moon, which was very fun but I’m lazy so I was tired after a couple hours. What I did love about Sihanoukville quite a bit though was the staff at the place we stayed, Sokkom Guesthouse. They had the cheapest food we could find so we hate pretty much every meal there the entire time. The main receptionist and waiter, who we called SHIRT (as he always wore a shirt), grew to love us as we’d sit down and scream ‘Shirt! Shirt! Get us some burgers!!!’ Back in Ho Chi Minh at dinner one night they gave us free garlic bread, so we had a running joke from then on that wherever we went we’d ask for free garlic bread. On our last day Shirt finally gave us the free garlic bread after I negotiated with his boss. It was a small but significant victory for Team Sweden.

We left Sihanoukville after 4 days as we were hungover, tired, and in a rush to get to Bangkok on the 14th so I could meet up with Matt and JJ (friends from home), who were flying in late that afternoon. On the way we stopped over in Siem Reap to see the incredible Angkor Wat and neighboring temples, intricately constructed of stone thousands of years ago. How it all still stands in such incredible condition and with its true details is a mystery to me. The night bus over to Siem Reap though was terrible, as I became incredibly sick and could barely move. When we finally got to our place, Jasmine Family Hostel (highly recommended) at 6am in the morning, I got some drugs from the pharmacy (visiting a South East Asian pharmacy is an experience in itself) and went to bed for the entire day. I felt better that night so we went to have dinner at the guesthouse restaurant where we met SHIRT #2, otherwise known as Mr. Kunn, who we had a lot of fun with also. We played some ABBA like always and then went back to our room, where we met a young Dutch girl staying there.

The next morning we had a 4.30am wake-up so we could get to Angkor Wat in time for the sunrise. We paid the $20 entry fee (there goes a day’s budget) and joined the huge crowd (see the photos link above for some photos of the massive crowd at 5.30am) to watch the beautiful sunrise. As the temple reflected in the water it was really something special. Afterwards we walked around Angkor Wat for an hour, trying to comprehend its size and awesomeness. As we left we were hassled by the many vendors, who have each given themselves a memorable name. I’ll tell you a couple of these names; Lady Gaga, Harry Potter, James Bond, Spider Girl. Seriously. Lady Gaga was really nice so I put a bottle of water off him and some t-shirts for the girls at the Bangkok hostel from his friend.

We had our driver take us back for breakfast and then went back to see the other temples. We got along well with him too:

At one of them we became friends with a police officer, Nan, who funnily enough became our tour guide for the next two hours, taking us around all the temples and taking photos of us. He told us how the police at the temple only make $75 a month working full time, which is just retarded. A dishwasher makes that in just half a day’s work in Australia. You may say he was just saying that for money but he’s a police offer and can’t really beg, we asked him to join us, and when we tried to give a few dollars as a thank-you afterwards he really didn’t want to take it. Some more temples were seen and then we went back for lunch and to relax at the hostel.

The Dutch girl from the previous day came back from teaching and I forced her to take us on the town for dinner and drinks. We visited a pop-corn/beer place, Temple Bar and finally the famous Angkor Wat? Bar, so we could get our free t-shirts with a bucket. I bumped into another Dutch friend back from Halong Bay and some Argentina guys I’d met in Na Trang, which was all really good. We all had a late night, including Erik having his phone stolen by a prostitute, drinking with Tuk Tuk drivers on the street and having mango with chili sauce.