This is for anyone who will probably never visit Kampong Cham - nor would I recommend it, unless you like bridges e.g. the much revered Spayan Kizuna. The entertainment capital of Kampuchea aka Cambodia IS Kampong Cham or as VSO volunteers see it (probably through very thick ‘rose tinted’ spectacles) the only entertainment capital in Cambodia.
Anyway, such is the vast array of leisure opportunities here that we have resorted to naming the streets according to useful common points of reference. We thought some might be useful to the 'group' when someone has tracked down something which might make our meagre VSO budget stretch a little further.
Some of these are moderately sensible such as Clinic Street, which is where several medical ‘institutions’ are found. Sights include disturbing signs depicting gruesome large molars and instruments of torture to remove them and people / patients, including children, standing on pavements while still attached to intravenous drips. Apparently this course of action is quite common and a regular feature throughout the country but a little more strange is seeing a patient holding a drip in the air whilst sitting side saddle on the passenger seat of a moto (motor bike).
Other names include; Hotel California Street (after the Eagles’ album track to reflect the soulless, sterile accommodation in which we find ourselves currently billeted - only eight nights left as I write this epistle. Lonely Planet guide, please take note). Anyway other gems of reference include Internet Street, Market street-left, Market Street-right, Back of Hotel Street (sometimes called Bakery Street - bet you can’t guess why? and sometimes ‘That b----- mangy dog nearly got me again’ Street), Phnom Penh Street and Grilled Goods Street, Ice Factory Road, Mending Lorries (without a safety net) Street. More noteworthy names include: Battle Of Britain Junction or ‘’Achtung Spitfire’ Junction (as this six road confluence is an interesting event each morning when we go to language class and traffic simply continues irrespective of entrance / exit thus the need for eyes required in places nature had not really thought to equip! Jan Sick Street (yes …following the same sort of logic - the street where my beloved threw-up immediately after eating breakfast (definitely don’t take Doxycycline on an empty stomach!) but did have the manners / courtesy to extricate herself from the restaurant (and I use latter word very loosely) and thus vomit in the gutter / road (as there is no real demarcation between gutter, pathway and road). Helpful old ladies did provide her with bowls of water to swill it away and dabbed her temples with something resembling Olbus oil to make her feel better.
That brings the next topic into the frame quite nicely - namely, the local eateries and cuisine. However, before we start, it is really important to mention the hardships the people have endured during the Pol-Pot / Khmer Rouge regime in which starvation was evident and anything which could be considered ‘food’ was exploited for every nutritional scrap and thus, as already commented in an earlier edition of the blog, they really do eat nose to tail and everything in between. As far as we can ascertain vegetarianism is an alien concept and considering their recent history who can blame them?
The market has supplies of meat and fish with the former often covered with all manner of insects and copious flies and the fish still wriggling and striving for oxygenated water. There are recognisable ‘cuts’ of meat and all parts anatomical including intestine, untreated tripe (which explains its green hue), chickens which have never seen a full meal in their lives and a variety of unrecognisable items which fully echo the waste-not principles that we (back in the UK) seem to have forgotten about as a mark of our more prosperous stature. As for restaurants, these conjure up an image redolent of a degree of cuisine ranging from the apocryphal fast food establishments through to what purports to be ‘fine dining’. Here the similarity stops. The food shops are not what we would recognise as restaurants but establishments which fall into two main categories. The pot ‘places’ where there are several large aluminium pots (hence the name) where you have a look in each container and decide what you would like, inform the (lady, usually) proprietor, sit at a covered (or not) ‘table’ to be served your choice and, what seems to us, a mountain of tasteless boiled rice. The pots contain a variety of ‘things’ which have been prepared earlier that day (or maybe some day / days before) which reflect what the market has to offer. As in most cultures the protein is the most expensive i.e. meat / fish and thus is found as a low ratio (and it has to be said of poor quality) compared to the ‘skip’ of plain, boiled (and did I say monotonous) rice. Having said that some of our VSO colleagues say they like and enjoy the food - each to their own I suppose!
Other eateries, which is probably a more appropriate description, do have a menu but the choice is not really that much better and of variable quality from day to day even in the same establishment. Meat is often served on the bone or more aptly the meat has been cleaved haphazardly and simply added to the dish; thus you can find bone shrapnel lurking for the unsuspected! We are now bordering vegetarians as we are fed up of extracting very dubious unrecognisable gristly items from the depths of our ‘mixed soup’. A mention has to be made of the ‘poshest’ restaurant in Kampong Cham where the girls are on commission to sell as much ‘Tiger’ beer as possible. Our order for China tea with our meal was treated with disdain and they couldn’t get rid of us fast enough (and the food was poor) - another comment for Lonely Planet.
You are certainly spoilt for choice however with such delights from Grilled Goods Street (you know down Internet Street, Right at Market Street and then first left) as air dried cockles and charcoal barbecued fish and frogs are freely available from early morning until 8 at night. You can even get BBQ’d small birds spatchcocked with head, legs and if you are lucky their egg sack with egg still evident - what a bonus. What worries us is how long your particular selection has actually been lurking there, possibly the day / or even days before. One other speciality on the egg theme is the delicacy of boiled eggs containing 2 week foetus - very popular with guys peddling round with trays of these, complete with loudspeaker to announce their coming.
We are currently enjoying a delicious water melon and the mangoes have started to arrive, so things are looking up …..We return back to Phnom Penh next Friday for a couple of meetings and lots of ‘essentials’ shopping before finally going to placement 0700hrs on Monday 03rd November.
Anyway, such is the vast array of leisure opportunities here that we have resorted to naming the streets according to useful common points of reference. We thought some might be useful to the 'group' when someone has tracked down something which might make our meagre VSO budget stretch a little further.
Some of these are moderately sensible such as Clinic Street, which is where several medical ‘institutions’ are found. Sights include disturbing signs depicting gruesome large molars and instruments of torture to remove them and people / patients, including children, standing on pavements while still attached to intravenous drips. Apparently this course of action is quite common and a regular feature throughout the country but a little more strange is seeing a patient holding a drip in the air whilst sitting side saddle on the passenger seat of a moto (motor bike).
Other names include; Hotel California Street (after the Eagles’ album track to reflect the soulless, sterile accommodation in which we find ourselves currently billeted - only eight nights left as I write this epistle. Lonely Planet guide, please take note). Anyway other gems of reference include Internet Street, Market street-left, Market Street-right, Back of Hotel Street (sometimes called Bakery Street - bet you can’t guess why? and sometimes ‘That b----- mangy dog nearly got me again’ Street), Phnom Penh Street and Grilled Goods Street, Ice Factory Road, Mending Lorries (without a safety net) Street. More noteworthy names include: Battle Of Britain Junction or ‘’Achtung Spitfire’ Junction (as this six road confluence is an interesting event each morning when we go to language class and traffic simply continues irrespective of entrance / exit thus the need for eyes required in places nature had not really thought to equip! Jan Sick Street (yes …following the same sort of logic - the street where my beloved threw-up immediately after eating breakfast (definitely don’t take Doxycycline on an empty stomach!) but did have the manners / courtesy to extricate herself from the restaurant (and I use latter word very loosely) and thus vomit in the gutter / road (as there is no real demarcation between gutter, pathway and road). Helpful old ladies did provide her with bowls of water to swill it away and dabbed her temples with something resembling Olbus oil to make her feel better.
That brings the next topic into the frame quite nicely - namely, the local eateries and cuisine. However, before we start, it is really important to mention the hardships the people have endured during the Pol-Pot / Khmer Rouge regime in which starvation was evident and anything which could be considered ‘food’ was exploited for every nutritional scrap and thus, as already commented in an earlier edition of the blog, they really do eat nose to tail and everything in between. As far as we can ascertain vegetarianism is an alien concept and considering their recent history who can blame them?
The market has supplies of meat and fish with the former often covered with all manner of insects and copious flies and the fish still wriggling and striving for oxygenated water. There are recognisable ‘cuts’ of meat and all parts anatomical including intestine, untreated tripe (which explains its green hue), chickens which have never seen a full meal in their lives and a variety of unrecognisable items which fully echo the waste-not principles that we (back in the UK) seem to have forgotten about as a mark of our more prosperous stature. As for restaurants, these conjure up an image redolent of a degree of cuisine ranging from the apocryphal fast food establishments through to what purports to be ‘fine dining’. Here the similarity stops. The food shops are not what we would recognise as restaurants but establishments which fall into two main categories. The pot ‘places’ where there are several large aluminium pots (hence the name) where you have a look in each container and decide what you would like, inform the (lady, usually) proprietor, sit at a covered (or not) ‘table’ to be served your choice and, what seems to us, a mountain of tasteless boiled rice. The pots contain a variety of ‘things’ which have been prepared earlier that day (or maybe some day / days before) which reflect what the market has to offer. As in most cultures the protein is the most expensive i.e. meat / fish and thus is found as a low ratio (and it has to be said of poor quality) compared to the ‘skip’ of plain, boiled (and did I say monotonous) rice. Having said that some of our VSO colleagues say they like and enjoy the food - each to their own I suppose!
Other eateries, which is probably a more appropriate description, do have a menu but the choice is not really that much better and of variable quality from day to day even in the same establishment. Meat is often served on the bone or more aptly the meat has been cleaved haphazardly and simply added to the dish; thus you can find bone shrapnel lurking for the unsuspected! We are now bordering vegetarians as we are fed up of extracting very dubious unrecognisable gristly items from the depths of our ‘mixed soup’. A mention has to be made of the ‘poshest’ restaurant in Kampong Cham where the girls are on commission to sell as much ‘Tiger’ beer as possible. Our order for China tea with our meal was treated with disdain and they couldn’t get rid of us fast enough (and the food was poor) - another comment for Lonely Planet.
You are certainly spoilt for choice however with such delights from Grilled Goods Street (you know down Internet Street, Right at Market Street and then first left) as air dried cockles and charcoal barbecued fish and frogs are freely available from early morning until 8 at night. You can even get BBQ’d small birds spatchcocked with head, legs and if you are lucky their egg sack with egg still evident - what a bonus. What worries us is how long your particular selection has actually been lurking there, possibly the day / or even days before. One other speciality on the egg theme is the delicacy of boiled eggs containing 2 week foetus - very popular with guys peddling round with trays of these, complete with loudspeaker to announce their coming.
We are currently enjoying a delicious water melon and the mangoes have started to arrive, so things are looking up …..We return back to Phnom Penh next Friday for a couple of meetings and lots of ‘essentials’ shopping before finally going to placement 0700hrs on Monday 03rd November.
1 comment:
Hello! This is my first attempt at leaving a comment so hope it works! Sounds like you're having fun even if the food is not quite up to the haute cuisine you're used to. I love the pic of you guys with the elephant! Bet you're looking forward to starting your placement. Can't wait to hear the next instalment...! xx
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