Cambodia

So I'm currently in Phnom Penh! The first night, we just sat in a cafe outside which ended up being a front row seat to the chaos of Cambodia. In two hours, we saw people playing a foot-toss game, a drunk man pass out in the street and almost get hit by cars, a strong wind caused tamarind fruit from a tree overhead to fall which caused great excitement from people picking them up, and a major storm rolled in and we watched the torrential rain. Goodness.

Cambodia seems to have infrastructure in some places and lacking in others and it just seems to be a jigsaw puzzle of poverty and slight prosperity, with things like university next to shanty town. There are a lot beggars with lost limbs due to land mines, which can be quite shocking to see sometimes. We pretty much get around in tuk-tuks, which weave in an out of the ordered chaos of traffic. It looks terrifying, but the mass of cars, tuk-tuks, and motorcycles just weave in and out of each other effortlessly. Motorcycles often have a whole family on them, including two parents, two children, and a baby.

The only accident we've seen was when a van crashed into the lobby of our hotel. Yep. Not completely, but the van must have pulled in too quickly or fast and shattered the glass wall and bent the iron gate that was protecting it.

Other observations are that there are a lot of dirty perverts around here. The plane seemed to have quite a bit of possible sex tourists, and after reading a book on sex slavery in Cambodia, it all just makes me sick. I was sitting next to a man who looked a bit dodgy and it just made me disgusted to think that he possibly could be going to a brothel that night. Obviously, I could have misjudged, but it's quite common here--there are constant brochures announcing "sex with children is illegal".

The second type of pervert here is the 65-year-old western men I see walking around here with 18-year-old Cambodian old girlfriends. I had to go to the american embassy and I saw that same type of couple except the woman had his baby, and he was trying to help her get her visa to the states (neither spoke a word of each other's language, interested to know how that relationship worked).

It was really strange being in the embassy and seeing people's attempts to get visa. You could hear the conversations at the windows and the interviews given to them, so I saw them show pictures to children to verify that the people in the states were their parents (which was probably a lie since he couldn't identify him), and then a man seemed to have gotten a lot of girls to the US under different circumstances and they were questioning him about his motives. It was strange.

My last thought is that it was another weird moment when I was in a market today and saw some really cheap H&M, Gap, and Hollister clothes, and saw that they were "Made in Cambodia"". I remember being in the H&M in the US before coming here and buying things and noticing their tags, and now I'm in Cambodia. It always seemed so foreign and now I'm here, still buying an H&M shirt, but for two dollars. Strange. The one positive thing that I've heard is that Cambodia was part of a special subsidies program and had one of the best work conditions compared to other asian countries. Unfortunately, they just took away the subsidy this year, and now Cambodia is starting to struggle to keep up their standards with keeping prices low, so that is a current struggle.