The Eighth Continent . Com

A Night in Choh Village (Cambodia)

1) Don't eat ANYTHING from a street vendor.
2) Don't ever drink the water or eat the ice.
3) Always wash your hands before eating (especially in a country where toilet paper is not used)!
4) Do anything you can to avoid a run-in with the police.
5) Do not litter.
6) Maintain a strictly professional relationship with your boss.

So I had just finished my fourth hour of teaching for the day, during which time I tried (unsuccessfully) to "wing" a lecture on the application of chemical fertilisers to Prey Khmer (Cambodian) soil for the application of rice-growing. Incidentally, my examples went awry, but I long ago learned the valuable lesson that you can always make a lecture in Cambodia successful by using a couple of Khmer words and grossly mispronouncing a few names while taking attendance.

So, as I relished in my last minute victory (owed entirely to the fact that I could call myself, "Crazy, crazy teacher" in Khmer), I ran into my boss shortly post-lecture. He, of course, whisked me towards the village on the back of his moped, shouting things like, "Don't worry, you will be home in time to work!" and repeat the following phrase…incidentally, I will not repeat the phrase as children might be listening!

We made a number of stops along the way, each one accompanied by guttural incantations and the handing over of a few thousand riel (usually still less than a dollar). And in the long run, we ended up at the police chief's house…a man that is apparently quite feared…even by the 120 policemen that work for him.

He greeted us as his house while wearing a tattered wife-beater, revealing most of his chest and one of the only beer bellies in the entire province.

A few of us sat down at the table, stray dogs and water buffalo wandering about, and began to drink beers. As the chief poured each beer into our glasses, the can was thrown haphazardly into a pile in the corner of the concrete living room.

The food soon arrived, staggered over the course of a few minutes. The first to arrive were the "pregnant eggs"…soon to hatch, fertilized eggs. No, they don't taste at all like chicken, but I have a feeling that they would if you gave them a few more weeks! Instead, they are a partially developed embryo with gangly feet and feathers in their early stages…I recommend salt, pepper, lime, and about a dozen beers as a sauce.

Soon to follow was a plastic bag full of tiny clams, wreaking of decaying seafood and oozing a dark red, viscous fluid. However, when dipped in the same sauce as the eggs, the second and third dozen really started to grow on me. The only caveat was that you could not think of how long it must have taken for ocean clams to have made their way to this one horse town in rural Cambodia.

The warm beers received the popular rural treatment of sharing a glass with chunks of ice, broken with a miscellaneous household implement operated by the same person that carried the ice, bare handed, from the vendor down the street. However, on a more hygienic note, I did notice the ice courier wiping their hands off on the same grubby pants they had been wearing since the turn of the millennium.

As we sat there, downing feathery friends, day-old seafood baked in the tropical sun, and learning ever-valuable Khmer cuss words, the police chief decided to honor me with a glass of his personal rice wine…a saki-esque moonshine with the joint qualities of ammonium nitrate and paint thinner.

Alas, next week I go on a field trip with the agriculture students…we are going to Battambang, the land mine capital of the country.