By Your Intrepid Substitute Blogger If you’ve read Fish Wednesday the last couple weeks, you know I don’t like fish. But I have to admit that this Wednesday, there was little chance of me sweating over the idea of eating fish or cooking fish: I was deep in preparations for our much-delayed Soup Swap. We …
For lunch on our first day in Bangkok, we had Thai food. It’s all very familiar, but hotter than the Thai food we get in Seattle. Delicious plates of phad thai, a big soup bowl of green curry, and a shrimp salad, swimming in lime juice, lemon grass, oh so delicious, oh so nice. Travel …
I was pretty sure my head was going to explode when I saw the gates to the Angkor complex, but when there were elephants inside, Actual Elephants… well. I walked up to them – there were five – and put out my hand and one of them started snuffling around with her trunk. “Bananas?” asked …
Guidebooks are full of advice about how to behave at Cambodia’s religious sites. You’re not supposed to wear a hat, you are supposed to dress modestly, not show your feet to the Buddha, oh, and a bunch of other things that are relatively easy to manage. I did forget to remove my cap in the …
Our guide was three years old when the Khmer Rouge fell. He lost a brother and a sister, and his parents lost everything because they were urban intellectuals. He looked at me. “You wear glasses,” he said, “that means you are an intellectual. You are not going to the fields, you are going to die.” …
I’d imagined Saigon in post-colonial elegance, but instead, it’s a post-industrial metropolis, a swirl of scooters driven by candy colored helmeted 19 year olds, nearly 9 million of them. I was absolutely wrong, Saigon was not the city I was looking for. The good news is that Phnom Penh absolutely is. The fine grace of …