Crabs, Snakes, and Sunsets

I just got back from our extended weekend trip in Kep this evening. Kep is a small town in the Kampot province where the French built seaside villas during the mid 20th century. When the Khmer Rouge came along in the 1970s they destroyed the bourgeois villa town and today it's slowly recovering as a popular vacation destination once more. Everyone in the house came on the trip including Steve Chen and Ed's friend, Yen, and even Bill. We left on Friday around lunchtime and after an arduous 5 hour bus ride on a bus with broken AC, the bus stopped and a man got on saying this was the stop for Kep.

We hauled our luggage onto the dusty sidewalk and looked for the guy from our guesthouse, Vanna Bungalows, who was supposed to be picking us up. He was nowhere in sight and a couple of tuk tuk drivers tried to coax us into their waiting coaches. I called Vanna Bungalows and spoke with the guy only to find out that we had gotten off at the wrong bus stop and fell for a scam to get tourists off the bus and charge them more for a 5km ride to the guesthouse area. Luckily, the guy from Vanna Bungalows arranged for his own tuk tuk guy to come pick us up and hot, sweaty, and dusty we finally made it to our lodgings.


On the Way to the Islands

The bungalows were nice private rooms in private buildings each with their own bathrooms, beds, and AC or a fan. The next morning we woke up for an early breakfast and departure for Koh Pos, a small island off the shore for some snorkeling. Down by the pier we walked out to a little green boat belonging to a fisherman and his nets. Our tuk tuk driver, Ly, also came with us as a guide toting a plastic bag with masks and snorkels. The boat pushed off and puttered towards the many surrounding islands. Apparently some of them belong to Vietnam and the area is right on the border line. We passed Mango Island, Chili Island, Rabbit Island, and others before arriving in a shallow bay off Koh Pos (not quite clear what the translation is for "Pos", but "Koh" means "island" in Khmei). Jumping off the boat and into the shallow water, we waded to the shore evading starfishes and sea urchins before arriving at a very very small village. Ly walked us around pointing out baskets full of small crabs that were too small to sell, but enough for the villagers to eat and he led us to the neighboring village through the forest. There we saw more little huts and what looked like the school, even though there wasn't really a school there. Ly spoke with some of the people and they dragged out a large crab trap with a 3 meter long python inside. He didn't look too happy but the village children were fascinated with their captured snake. One woman even squeezed a little bit of bread into its cage, which it promptly ignored and instead eyed the baby in her other arm.


Snake in a Cage

After the snake spectacle we walked around and Ed and I played a bit of volleyball with the locals. There are volleyball nets EVERYWHERE here built out of fishing net or loose weave or whatever they can find. Walking around on the island we didn't find any nice beaches to snorkel on so we waded back out to the boat and departed for our next destination, Rabbit Island.

According to Lonely Planet, Rabbit Island is so named because the locals think it looks like a rabbit, but I couldn't find the rabbit from any angle. The boat parked in another shallow bay, this time near some seaweed farms and we hopped out following Ly to a beach a short walk away. The beach is supposed to be one of Cambodia's best, but it was hardly anything worthy of note. The only good thing about it was that it was pretty sparsely populated because it's quite remote. There were also chairs and hammocks provided and mats from the locals who ran a little bungalow guesthouse and restaurant. It was very relaxing to just chill on the beach, read, and suntan with the occasional dip in the warm water every once in a while. We tried to go snorkeling, but the masks we borrowed from our guide were so old and scratched that you really couldn't see anything at all through them. We all ate lunch on the island and had our first experience with Kep's prime seafood. Nancy and I ordered a fried rice with fish and a squid with black pepper and it was very tasty considering that they prepared it right on the beach. The water started to get choppy around 3 so we trekked back to the boat through a little bit of forest and cow pies and left back to Kep.


Beach at Rabbit Island

Finally making it back to Vanna Bungalows, everyone freshened up with a shower and changed clothes for dinner down at the crab shacks. The crab shacks are a series of shacks on the water full of seafood restaurants. With all the choices we settled on the shack with the longest lanai over the water. I can't remember what the name of the place we went to was, but we ordered fried crab, "gary crab", fried prawns, and "crab in the hot oil". Watching the sunset from the lanai I could see a woman wade out into the tide and retrieve a crab cage from the water. I'm couldn't see because of the glare, but I'm pretty sure she grabbed the crabs that we were going to eat straight from the ocean. The sunset in Kep was one of the most beautiful sunset's I've ever seen (and that's saying something coming from Hawaii). The colors and clouds were totally surreal looking more like a photoshopped portrait background than an actual place. That dinner was the best crab that I've ever had and one of the messiest dinners ever because of all the sauce and work involved in cracking the crab. One of the dishes was prepared with legendary green Kampot peppers. Kampot is known around the world for its potent black pepper plantations and rightly so as it is the best pepper I've ever had and I'm not sure if I can go back to normal pepper. There's a lime-sugar-salt-pepper sauce that is served with pretty much every seafood dish here and it makes everything taste infinitely better. I'll have to make some when I start cooking.


The Sunset View at Dinner

Culinary Capers

So today was the grad students' last day with us. Kurt left early in the morning and Terri, Kevin, and Juenan left after lunch. We had a farewell lunch for them at Romdeng (all thanks to Bill!) and didn't hold back on ordering every delicious dish they had. One of the highlights was the fried tarantulas. I had a leg and then sampled the head, fangs and all. It tasted fine, more texture than taste with the same texture as soft-shell crab, which is pretty much what it is. I also had a set meal for $6.50, a lot of food for such a great deal, including soup, a main dish, and a dessert (banana crepes with coconut gelato!).


Tarantulas, yummmm!

After lunch we all went back home for a final farewell to the grad students. Once they and Toon (?), our driver, left the compound everyone headed back inside and we spent the next hour and a half or so rearranging the office. The current arrangement is much less cluttered and more organized. In the afternoon Nancy and I went to Beautiful Shoes to get some custom shoes made. They only cost $30 for custom-made leather shoes in any design and color/pattern you want. All you have to do is take a picture of the shoes to them and they'll be ready in a week or so.


The VM Project Team minus Kurt, Yaro, and Yasemin

Sokly took Nancy, Steve, Ed, and I to the National Stadium where we took a brief tour of the complex in the fading twilight. Rows of Cambodians lined the top area of around the stadium track doing various forms of aerobic exercises. It was amazing to see the stadium and the huge concrete cantilevers that Vann Molyvann employed in the prodigiously throughout the complex. After watching the National Swimming Team practice in the Olympic pool, we watched the national basketball team scrimmage in the almost abandoned stadium and walked around to some fruit stands on the street. We stopped at one because Sokly said it had the best fruit and bought dragonfruit, longan, and oranges. The longan are from Takaman (?) where Leakhena's (finally learned how to spell her name) house is and they are some of the best longan I've had, despite their extremely large seeds. If it weren't for the size of the seed, the longan might be comparable to a lychee.


Fruit stall streetside

For dinner, Sokly and Darren (Sokly's best friend) took us to a Chinese place for some local Chinese food. I already wrote about the large population of Chinese here, so this was some pretty authentic stuff. I ordered "Black Chicken Soup" while the others had bitter-melon soup and duck soup. I figured the black chicken soup would be basic broth with pieces of chicken and veggies in it, or perhaps like congee porridge with chicken in it. When the food arrived to my great surprise I found a bowl of black soup with an ENTIRE CHICKEN in it. All they did was strip its feathers and plop it into a bowl of soup seasoned with various strange ingredients such as ginseng, longan, some fungus, roots, black lumpy things, livers, and pig intestines among other unidentifiable things. Luckily Ed ordered the same thing as I did, so we shared the experience of "Black Chicken Soup" together. Also, the chicken was ACTUALLY BLACK. Darren explained that the chicken is a particular type that is black, even the meat was black in some places.


Black Chicken Soup

As of now, we're planning the trip to Kep this weekend and I'm really excited!

The model's done!

Here's a picture of the finished model

The director of the FCC (French Cultural Center) came today to check out our operation before locking in a deal for an exhibition in their main gallery. I'm not quite sure when the show is going to be, but I'm pretty sure I won't be here for it. Tonight is Bill's talk at Meta House, one of the local art galleries here, so we're all going to that. It's also the grad students' last night as they depart tomorrow to get ready to start school again.

Working through the Weekend

The Facade of IFL Building E including the area that we're making a detail model of

So this weekend wasn't too exciting because we had to work on Saturday and Sunday to make up for the long weekend we took when we went to Siem Reap last week. I was working on the south elevations of the VM house but am waiting for the plans to finish them. We've also started work on a small detailed section model of the IFL (Institute for Foreign Languages) Building E. We're making it out of basswood and it's pretty challenging to cut everything by hand (oh laser cutter how I miss thee!) and I had to remake a piece like 4 times. It's good for my craft skills and nice to be able to concentrate on producing a well-crafted model without feeling a lot of pressure to finish like I did back in studio at school.


Another shot of IFL Building E with the pond to collect runoff rainwater and to help keep the area cooler

On Saturday Nancy and I went with Sokly to two of his friends' birthday parties. While waiting for him to get ready at his house, his mom showed us the photo album from Sokly's sister's wedding. It was really thick and kind of funny to look at all the pictures of the bride and groom in at least 5 different outfits. The groom never smiled in any of the pictures, but the bride always did. There were also pictures of some kind of ritual involving passing fruit between the two families. Another popular memento seemed to be portraits of the bride and groom in prom-like poses in front of various backgrounds including in front of a Little Mermaid-esque underwater castle, in an ideal home complete with a portrait of another of their wedding pictures on the shelf with a portrait of the bride in the background of that portrait, and in many of the shots the happy couple was standing on a 101 Dalmatians rug. The wedding was right when the grad students arrived earlier in July so they had the chance to experience that cultural extravaganza complete with Cambodian party dancing.

I also met Sokly's little nephew who is adorable and about 2 years old, I think. He was studying Chinese for his Chinese school, which is apparently very popular for the large population of Chinese living in Phnom Penh. We even drove through the area of town where the Chinese live (a kind of China Town) complete with a Chinese temple. I'm not sure, but it seems like there is some tension between the ethnic Chinese and Khmer but it isn't really something that is talked about much. The Chinese were apparently harshly oppressed under the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese rule. According to Wikipedia, Chinese New Year was only celebrated again for the first time in 1991 since before the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

Last night after work in the office, Lekina and her brother took Nancy and I to a "Suki Soup" place. Suki Soup is basically the Cambodian version of Hot Pot and derives apparently from the Japanese "sukiyaki". The place we went to was called City Suki Soup and it was really really delicious. Unlike traditional sukiyaki, a common suki soup ingredient are various types of meatballs with fish, shellfish, chicken, and combination. They even had a special type called "millionaire balls" with mushroom, shrimp, and either chicken or fish. They also cook the beef slices by placing them in a ladle with holes in it and letting it boil in the water. I guess it's to stop the meat from getting lost and over cooked in the hot pot. Hopefully we'll get to go there again because it was a really nice place and the whole meal was only $22 to feed 4 people a huge and filling meal!

Nancy's Birthday and Yaro's BBQ

Nancy's Birthday Rice Cake

So yesterday was Yaroslevna's (?) last day before she went back to Russia. She's one of the two Russian students working on the project along with four grad students, four Cambodians, Nancy, and myself. Lekina (?) is the other Russian working with us and she had a BBQ at her house as a farewell party for Yaroslevna that also doubled as Nancy's birthday party. Lekina's family barbequed beef, fish, chicken wings, served a some veggies, and ended the evening with palm fruit rice cakes. After dinner we engaged in various games of badminton, frisbee, and basketball all at the same time.
Lekina's family also has a plantation where they grow lots of bananas. Her family gave us two big bushels of bananas to take back to our house so we have lots and lots of bananas to snack on. The bananas here are more like apple bananas: small, short, and sweet. According to Sokly (one of the Cambodians who works with us) there are four different types of bananas in Cambodia.


Sokly, Palm Fruit Rice Cakes, and Cambodia's Favorite Beer

Our next stop for the evening after freshening up at home was the launch party for Cambodia's first fashion magazine, "F". It was held at Club White, a new establishment across from the Intercontinental Hotel. The streetside was crowded with loads of cars (mainly Lexuses or Toyotas) while inside it was probably the loudest club I've ever been to. After the mandatory pat down and passing the weapons check, the club was so loud that the bartenders couldn't hear what I or Nancy were ordering and resorted to handing us a pen and paper to write down our orders. The music at the club was fine and everyone had a great time dancing despite the unbearable heat and insufficient air conditioning. Everyone from the VM Project who went left around midnight because many people were tired and had a long work day.

Life in the House

Vann Molyvann's house from across Mao Tse Tung (?) Blvd

I've been so busy catching up on the Angkor excursion that I haven't had time to write about the past few days. We've been really busy at work surveying Vann Molyvann's house for the past four days because he and his family are leaving PP for Siem Reap this weekend. Today was our last day to survey the house and I mainly worked on the south elevation, north east elevation and site plan. Vann Molyvann (the architect whose works we're working to preserve) built his house with a hyperbolic roof inspired by vernacular Brazilian roofs. It's built on a square grid with the second and third levels pivoted 45 degrees so as to take advantage of the view outside from all four facades. His style of brickwork and exposed corners with horizontal lines reminds me of Frank Llyod Wright with a bit of Corbusier thrown in with the brise soleil that surround all four sides. Vann Molyvann still lives there with his wife, Trudy, and an army of Khmer helpers (a driver, cook, door man, and maybe more). We sat down and listened to Bill read an article about the house and VM's life. It's really amazing how he managed to escape from Cambodia with his whole family at the beginning of the Khmer Rouge.


The southern facade of VM's house

Life in the house at Street 228 has been fairly quiet. We got two new housemates after Yasemin left on Saturday: Kyle Brooks, a photographer from the states, and Stephen Chen, a Princeton-graduated film maker. Stephen is now my room mate and he has a lot of serious looking camera equipment. For the past two weeks we've also had a cook in the house named Rett. She comes on an irregular schedule that I haven't quite figured out yet and cooks meals that are consistently good, but tonight's was particularly exceptional. It consisted of sauteed green veggies, fried fish, some kind of chicken curry, and watermelon for dessert. All for the low price of $4/person/meal! As a side note, the fish I've had here has been pretty fresh and delicious because it mainly comes from the Tonle Sap lake or from the Mekong river. I'm not sure exactly what it looks like, but it tastes pretty good.



Rett at the stove!


Our delicious meal

Weekend Recap 3: The Big Loop

A common sign around Angkor

Day three in Siem Reap started off much the same as the others with an early start and french bread, scrambled egg, and banana breakfast. Noi was our driver again and we set off first and foremost for Preah Khan with a short stop at Baksei Chamkrong, a seemingly unfinished brick temple outside the main gates of Angkor Thom. With its austere and undecorated facade, it looked almost like one of the Mayan temples from Tikal. The climb up the steep staircase was perhaps the steepest one so far.



Baksei Chamkrong in the early morning

Preah Khan, the largest ruin of the day was uncrowded as it was still fairly early in the morning. The low sprawling temple complex is unique among the Angkor ruins for one of the only two-story buildings still surviving. There were also some large trees ripping apart the ruins with the most distinctive feature of Preah Khan (meaning Sacred Sword) was its wide causeways leading to each of the smaller buildings. Another prominent element is the extremely long central axis along the East and West entrances passing straight through the central sanctuary.



Two-story building at Preah Khan

Up next was Preah Neak Pean, a prime example of Khmer engineering, and according to LP the inspiration for the pool at the next big Las Vegas resort, Encore Angkor *barf*. In plan it's a central square pool surrounded by four identical square pools oriented along the cardinal directions. The central square pool has a round island temple in the center and would have been surrounded by the water kept in the reservoir pools. The staircase along the central pool has an opening that leads down a pipe exiting from the mouth of a statue in a recessed opening in each of the four surrounding pools. Anyways, I thought the waterworks was an interesting feature that was readily transparent in this example of Khmer architecture.



Drainage from the main pond into the secondary ponds

Following a little sketch at Preah Neak Pean and a fuchsia dragonfruit snack, Nancy and I made brief stops at Ta Som, the Eastern Mebon, and Pre Rup. Pre Rup is similar to Ta Keo with its high staircase and central symbolic tower of Mount Meru, home of the Hindu gods. The staircase was quite a hike before reaching some well preserved plasterwork and a nice view.


Almost to the top of the Pre Rup stairs

Up next was Banteay Kdei, interesting because of its state of prolonged decay and location across from Sra Srang, a sacred ablutions pool.

Banteay Kdei and its crumbling walls.
Prasat Kravan, a temple built not by a king, but by a noble person was one of Nancy's favorites. The brick construction is also a little unusual and well-preserved. Our last stop on the Big Loop was Phnom Bakheng, a popular spot for sunset viewing because it's up on a hill after a little hike up from the road. You can also go up the hill via elephant, but Nancy and I chose to walk and enjoy the woods. We left before the sunset because it was really overcast and you couldn't even see the sun through the clouds. There was a great view of the Western Baray or man-made reservoir over 7 km long.


The view from the top of Phnom Bakheng

Returning to Bun Kao Guesthouse and a shower later, Nancy and I ate dinner at a little restaurant where I ate a scrumptious pumpkin casserole and Nancy, in a fit of longing for Western food, had pancakes. That night we explored the area around Pub Street, but didn't have a drink and wandered into a photo gallery with some excellent pieces by a famous photographer who I can't quite remember now.