We stop by Wat Phnom towards the north of town, which is hot and humid but not too crowded. A scruffy group of five kids, ranging in age from 2 to 6 years old, have dibs on the place and they come up to us, hands out. We're still not sure how to navigate the requests for money here - there isn't enough money for everyone, but how do you give to just one of the hands and not to everyone else standing in front of you? Every one who asks needs it just as badly as the others. In my bag we have fruit bought at the market earlier today and we hand out 5 bananas, one per child, and everyone seems happy with that.
They stay outside when we take off our shoes to walk around inside the main temple - it's shady and cluttered with statues of Buddha and offerings of fruit. From inside we can hear and see the kids outside wrestling with each other near the door - I don't know what they're saying but they're behaving like siblings fighting for the right to do a particular something they think is important. Eventually, they get bored and by the time we leave they've wandered off to find other tourists. They've organized all the shoes by the door into two neat rows.
We leave the wat and follow the walking tour's suggested route, but in fast-forward.
"There's the train station." We look across 4 lanes of city traffic at the sunnier side of the street, where the station is.
"Neat. Want to stop?"
"Too hot." We keep walking.
Hot is the theme of the day. It's our response to everything: 'How's it going?' 'It's hot' 'Want a drink?' 'Yeah, it's hot'. It's also the deciding factor in whether or not we stop at something along our route. Sun bad, shade good.
This line of thinking is what makes our stop at the Center Market a bit longer than it might have been otherwise. Neither of us is too into shopping at the moment - we still have too-vivid memories of donating and/or packing up and storing all the stuff that we already own back in October. We wander a bit, stop for a quick lunch and then wander some more. The Center Market is in a old art-deco style building with a high domed roof:
The building is high packed full of stalls, and there's lots of activity. A woman walks by with a tray of roasted peanuts balanced on her head. Another woman in a seller's stall stirs the coals in the hollow metal iron that she uses to press clothes. A toddler sleeps in an empty stall, wrapped in a green hammock to keep away the flies that wander from bolts of cloth to mangoes to water glasses and back again. The south wall is lined with seamstresses whose feet pump iron pedals to work the machine needles.
A few men walk around the aisles with trays of books suspended from their necks like old-time cigarette girls. They're selling postcards and bootlegged books - the men who do this particular job in Phnom Penh are all amputees and they gesture to you with their wrists and walk around on double knee-height prostheses. We meet these men at the entrances of all the tourist sites around the city and the placards around their necks explain that this is their way to earn money without begging.
The stalls inside are orderly and laid out in right angles, but the stalls that circle the exterior of the building spread out in messy concentric circles. We don't spend too much time wandering there since it's warmer though shady thanks to the tarps and corrugated sheets of metal that make up the roof. Also, we're hoping to make it to either the National Museum or Royal Palace today so we head out into the sun.
All of the tourist sites that require tickets close at 5:00, and when we arrive at the museum not only is it too close to closing time to be worth our while, but the front gate doesn't have enough change to break our smallest bill. We resign ourselves to the fact that, for the second day in a row, we haven't made it to the National Museum/Royal Palace, so we'll try again tomorrow.
The view of the Royal Palace from outside the gate:
The pale yellow outer walls of the Royal Palace area gathering place for kids selling cold drinks and books to tourists and people asking for change.
Most of the buildings we see are a similar shade of yellow. It shows up on restored buildings...
...and on rundown buildings waiting their turn:
Outside the gate, we have a Tourist Moment followed by a Cambodia Moment.
Tourist Moments are easy to spot - the first few steps outside our hostel are always made of these. The tuk-tuk drivers (or tuk-touts, as we like to call them) are ready the second you emerge. "Hello friend where you go? Tuk tuk today?" Friendly but persistent and they're almost everywhere. The first tuk-tout of the day is treated to a "no thanks, we're walking, but thank you" from Pierre (so polite). This devolves into no-eye-contact/head shake/friendly wave within the first 100 metres or 10 offers, whichever comes first. Tourist Moments involve an exchange for money - if you're about to spend money, their smile stays. Otherwise it fades, you're invisible and they're on the hunt for the next person. We don't yet know the Cambodian phrase for hello because no one says it. Our day is filled with hello hello hello.
We run the usual gauntlet of tuk-touts on Samdech Sothearos Blvd, and turn onto a pedestrian-only side street along the north wall of the Grand Palace. Rows of tall old trees line both sides of the street.
The trees have been pruned repeatedly over the years so that the leaves are only in bushes at the top, about 20 feet up. We notice a small crowd of people gathered in a half circle a few metres back from the base of one of the trees - they're talking and laughing and squatting down around small piles of branches, gathering something in bags. We hear a chainsaw up above and the crowd lets out a sound like they're watching fireworks. Pierre and I look over just in time to one of the branches fall to the ground. Apparently it's tree-pruning day outside the Palace, and the branches are full of tamarind pods.
As soon as the branch hits the ground, a young man in a wide khaki hat grabs the branch and runs with it, dragging it down the street away from the crowd. The adults laugh as a group of small kids shout and trundle after it like tin cans behind a car. The adults laugh together, then laugh with us. No one says hello hello - they just laugh and continue to gather the long brown tamarind pods from the fallen branches. The branch down the street stops eventually stops moving and the kids set to work stripping pods for their plastic bags.
Tamarind is used a lot for cooking in south-east Asia, but we've never tried a green one. At first we assume that perhaps the people are bringing them home to pickle them or something but then we pass a group of teenage boys that are nibbling away on the pods and ask one of them: "Good?" He thinks a moment, translating to himself, then smiles, nods and takes another bite. We're curious but don't ask for one since it's so obviously a treat. A few moments later the boy rides by with his friends on their old upright one-speed bikes, metal baskets full of tamarind pods. The boy turns around and says "goodbye" and then they weave their way into traffic. Goodbye is so much more personal than hello.
We head back to the room and drink a few litres of water before bed.
photo credits: P, P, P, D, P, P, D, P
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