durian, rambutan, and coconut ice cream

Everywhere you go in the city, there are fruit vendors selling the most delicious smelling and sweet tasting tropical fruits... durian, jackfruit, mangosteen, longan, lychee, rambutan, green coconuts, tangerines, and things I've no idea what they are. I really should be eating lots of this succulent fruit, but I'm not. Instead, I'm eating warm pan au chocolat in the morning with iced coffee and sweetened, condensed milk. Nearly all restaurants in our little tourist neighborhood serve crepes, which are completely irresistible to me. So, while I expected to lose some weight by eating lots of fresh fruit and fish, I'm afraid I might be gaining it (good thing I don't have a scale!). My only saving graces are playing with the immensely energetic kids at Little Sprouts and lugging giant jugs of drinking water from the shop to our hotel.

This week at Little Sprouts, we spent lots of time coloring and water coloring. I'm quite certain that the kids don't get to use watercolors very often. We also played an intense game of keep-away for over an hour, loads and loads of hopscotch, and soccer, of course. We've had to make a couple of trips to the labyrinthine markets in search of supplies. It took us nearly an hour to find chalk (it wasn't a word in our dictionary and nobody seemed to comprehend our mimes). Today, we spent two hours looking for some sort of string and beads with which to make necklaces. We went to the massive cave that is the O Russei market. I felt that with one wrong left turn, I might end up at the gates of hell. It was four floors of everything you could imagine ever needing -- paint, stationery, clothing, fabric, silk flowers, beans, auto parts, tires, hardware, fancy dresses, draperies, Buddhist temple supplies, candy, house wares, items made from rush and other plant fibers, and the ubiquitous food stalls. And, I'm quite certain that I've left out at least ten other categories of goods. Each stall is no bigger than 5x5 and the place is at least the size of a city block. Lighting appeared to be optional and up to each stall owner, lending the place a mysterious sort of darkness. It's not air-conditioned either and is, as you might imagine, quite stifling. Secretly, I can't wait to go back and explore some more.

Speaking of exploring, today I decided to walk to the post office. On the map in my Lonely Planet, it seemed to be about two miles from our hotel. It was a fairly pleasant, if long walk. It most certainly allowed me to get to know the neighborhood a little bit better. I found a street near the Central Market that was populated entirely by restaurants selling some sort of kebabs. I also saw a family of monkeys (macaques, I think...) with the two most adorable, tiny babies playing on the power lines. The post office is in a lovely old colonial building, in a nice pocket of other lovely old colonial buildings near Wat Phnom (which is the hill after which the city is named). On the way back, I decided that it was a bit far of a walk all the way to the hotel. As a barang (foreigner), you can't take more than two steps without shouts of "Moto!" and "Tuktuk!" Often, these are coupled with "Hello, lady!" It seemed too close to pay for a tuktuk, which probably would have cost me $3, and I'm terrified of motos, which are much cheaper. I should say here, that it's not really the motos that scare me, but the idea of riding one in Phnom Penh traffic, where all rules are optional, traffic lights are simply requests, and one-way has no meaning whatsoever. Instead, I opted to take a cyclo, which is a bicycle-driven rickshaw. It is not the sort of rickshaw that is pulled by a bicycle, though. It's the sort that has you, the passenger, sitting in front, which means right in the middle of traffic, as I discovered. The journey was cheap and at a slow enough pace that I could enjoy the sights, except of course, when the sight was the grill of a Lexus SUV. There were definitely some hair-raising, heart-pounding, eye-popping moments, such as when we went against the flow of traffic. Eventually, I was able to sit back relax. I definitely think a cyclo trip is something that I'll do again -- it just takes some getting used to... kind of like everything in Cambodia.