Friday, February 24, 2012

bea and the city

when you arrive, the mood of Phnom Penh overwhelms your soul. All the crazy traffic (similar to any other asialand), the sounds, the pollution clouds coming out of the tubes of the thousand old bikes and new huge Lexus cars, massive wiring systems hanging of a slim poor night light... Looking around when walking the city you can find some beautiful details such as Buddhist temples, the royal palace with its colored walls and roofs, hammocks in the streets, and all the hidden smiles of the people that release themselves when the eye contact is warm enough so as to let it go... Street vendors are everywhere. You can get noodles, fried chicken and duck (baby ducks too...which is pretty disgusting for our culture...), rice and soups in any street corner and when the sun comes down the vendors bring the most succulent bites for an after work snack: all types of crickets, cockroaches, tarantulas, and snakes deep fried in old oil, that sincerely i haven't had the courage to try yet... (waiting for any of you curious travelers!). When you spend some time in the city, you realize that Cambodians actually profit a lot from the parks of the city. Before and after work, when the sun in not so strong that you can melt under it, crowds of people go for walks and exercise in the public space. I like that feeling of sharing these spaces for healthy purposes, the community values that might come out of that. When I bike home every after noon, i see groups of people doing aerobics open air too. It is pretty funny to see a bunch of Cambodian exercising to some kind of techno music in the middle of the park. Indeed, there are always monks wandering in the streets, with their orange togas and their bold heads, sometimes bare foot, some times with flip flops, and most of the times they stop by your house, standing still, waiting for your 'disinterested' contribution ;) . Even from time to time you get to see an elephant in the middle of the traffic, who looks at you with magic while walking home...it's definitely a city of contrasts, a city with a darkened past, the 'charming city' as they call it here, and the pearl of Asia to be...let's see

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