HAPPY BIRTHDAY RICK!!! 🎉🎂🍾❤️🥳
Today was also a travel day. At breakfast we met the rest of our group. There are eight of us on the pre-trip to Cambodia. Everyone seems very nice. We were picked up by a different OAT representative and taken to the airport. All very easy!
The flight was uneventful and we were met in Phnom Penh by our new guide Alex. While we drove into the city Alex told us a little about himself and his family. His parents were married by soldiers during the Khmer Rouge period. They didn’t know each other but the soldier asked if they wanted to get married. You always say yes to soldiers in that day, so they got married. Most folks lost at least one family member during the reign of the Khamer Rouge. Alex’s family lost four, three uncles and an aunt. His parents currently owns a bike shop that doubles as an apartment for him. Here’s a picture of Alex.
We arrived at our first stop, Wat Phnom, a Buddhist temple that was originally built in 1372 by Lady Penh, a wealthy woman who helped establish the capital. It’s Buddhist temple with a lot of ancestor worship mixed in. The temple itself was very chaotic. There were people offering fake money to be burned for their ancestors. People also offered meat to their ancestors by placing it in the mouth of a stone tiger statue.
Here’s a video of the music at the temple.
There was a large lawn clock that ran on water at the same site.
After touring the temple Alex bought a local delicacy, a cooked duck embryo, and offer to let us try it. The street vendor had a pot of hot water with about half a dozen eggs in it. Alex cracked the top of the shell and used a tiny spoon (which the vendor cleaned by swishing it in the hot water) to scoop out chunks of duck embryo. Only one person in our group tried it. No it wasn’t me 🤪. She said it tasted like chicken livers.
Here are some of the other offerings available at the temple.
From there we went on to the hotel and checked in. That evening we went to the Foreign Correspondent Club for dinner. We took a remork-moto, a cart on the back of a motorcycle, to the restaurant.
We had a very nice dinner along the edge of the Mekong River. We toasted Rick’s birthday.
