this is worth like, a bajillion words...

Okay, so... pictures. These are kind of organized in little groups, like mini-stories, through picture.


"No sleep til Phnom Penh" this is the progression of my room at my parents house, during packing





















"How delicious. Make you taste back!" the beginning of my Khmer food adventures

<<My first Khmer meal! Finger lickin' good....

Just kidding, I had this (below) with some pho for breakfast... those fried bread things are awesome, it's like a donut but without the sugar so you can eat it with soup, or dip it in sugar (or coffee) if you want something sweet









<<The infamously stinky durian is in the styrofoam container. I'm not gonna lie, it really does smell like garbage. It tastes really great, though!

(below) The first "exciting" Khmer thing I ate (if you don't count the durian) was these ants... you can't really tell, but there's small ones, GIANT ones, and their larvae, all mixed with beef and some cilantro, etc. It was actually pretty good, kinda sweet.










<< A super yum (green) pumpkin and egg custard dessert!







<<<I've heard so much about mangosteen, but I'd never seen a real one or eaten it... til now! Pretty tasty...


In the ex-pat grocery store that has butter, hot cheetos, and ribena, we found this:

I guess the marketing tactic is that they don't want there to be any confusion about what you're getting.

Unlike the package we found (below). Nothing about the label tells me what that food is, not even in an animal-vegetable-mineral sort of way. Maybe the script in the other language has a clue in it?












"Them" bugs are a part of life, here. In a place where everything thrives, every thing thrives.


I interrupted Phia doing some work in the office with a dilemma...
There was a GIANT bug in my shoe! It might not look that big in this picture, but if you know how big my feet are, you can imagine how huge that bug is (think Edgar from Men In Black).




Phia kind of laughs, but admits that she's also scared. But then she says, "wait, where's your other sandal?"
Did she not understand? There was a GIANT bug in our room! Look back at the bug picture. Clearly my other sandal was in the same place where it was when I took the picture, next to the shoe with the bug in it. Who's going that close to that thing, just for a sandal?





Phia's aunt agrees to get rid of the bug for us, since clearly I am ready to just move out of the apartment and find somewhere new to live.

But wait... she says something in Khmer and comes towards me WITH THE BUG IN HER HAND!

I refuse to go anywhere near her and am trying to pry the metal lattice off the window so I can jump out. We're on the 8th floor, my fall can't be worse than whatever she is attempting to do. Phia says her aunt is laughing because it's a cricket. Apparently, crickets are good luck. They want me to play with the cricket. I continue to work on the window...


<< My little cricket friend (yeah, that's what they look like here)





Just kidding! (about the last part, the rest was true). That thing is some crazy fruit that's kind of like lychee. It's called a rambutan.