Maybe Later

During our second visit to Phnom Penh we played the tourist a little bit and went to visit the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. Situated in the heart of the tourist center the area is crowded with foreigners and khmeres trying to sell overpriced goods to them. Usually, when you ask the price, you will get the tourist price. If you divide it by 3, you immediately know the real price. In the Royal palace area, things are different. If in a remote market you can buy 12 bottles of water with 1$, here you can only buy one bottle a dollar. So, after a while it becomes an automatism to refuse politely whatever they are trying to sell you. Usually they insist. But then there was this cute lil kid who was selling water, I think, she came to us and offered, we automatically refused, then she said in the cutest automated reply: "maybe later" and moved on. We liked her "maybe later" so much that we started using it as an automated response. We noticed that it worked very well as they ceased any insistence. So, "maybe later" became the most used two words in our entire trip. 

"maybe later" quickly became the power play of the next trip, to Sihanouk Ville. But let me tell you what was on the offer. On the beach, you could taste freshly cooked sea food, like lobsters, small sepias, seashells and many weird looking sea creepers.
In the night market however, it was a whole different story. Food ranged from typical Khmer to a menu comprising of snakes, frogs, some very small birds, fried spiders, crickets, cockroaches (yes, you heard me well!), nasty looking big bugs, worms and some very ugly big maggots! We were staring somewhere between amusement and amazement for quite a while. We knew that Cambodia is famous for eating insects, a result of the great famine of the Khmeres Rouges regime, but seeing it was still shocking.




While trying to gather courage to order some of these local delicacies,
a woman holding a very small kid in her arms very naturally picked one fried insect and gave it to the kid, who started eating it like a candy.





Well, I had to prepare morally for this step, so we came again next day and ordered a full range of spiders, snakes, frogs, bugs, takeaway, of course, and we had a little feast with all these goodies.
The most difficult to eat were the insects, but not because of the taste or smell, which was quite ok (tasted just like chicken!), but because of the psychological barriers.




 Eventually we got over it and tasted everything :).




However, next trip when someone will try to sell us other fried insects, I'm sure I'm gonna wholeheartedly say "Maybe later!"

Sihanouk Ville, Cambodia, 17.11.2010