Pardon my tardy posting. I am a slow writer, prone to reducing observations to either top-ten lists or semi-structured mental barf pastiche.  It is early afternoon in San Diego. It is 3:00 AM in Cambodia.  I am ready to hurl.

The naked lady put her basketball shorts and black polo shirt back on.  They must have felt clean and cool in the morning air. Her hair was short, her clothes baggy. She was a little bow-legged. When she was bathing, everyone else gave her plenty of space. Nobody approached or even pointed as far as I could tell.  Once her clothes were back on, the invisible perimeter around her dissipated.  As she walked across the promenade to gaze at the river, her carriage was relaxed, confident and maybe even masculine.  Hold on- was this a guy?  I am four floors up and looking across a wide street on a gray morning. I am no longer sure what gender I am looking at.  This happens more in Cambodia than at home.

I also try to determine what I am looking at in the National Museum.  Here are semi-naked women and men ranging in age from mere centuries to over a millennium. They are sculpted stone and molded metal.  Excuse my bigotry, but they all look the same. It takes a moment to pick out men from women, never mind discerning Shiva from Vishnu from Buddha (count the arms: two for Buddha, more for gods).   And if they are the templates for the Khmer physical ideal, where did it come from?  It doesn’t resemble any of the Khmer monks shopkeepers or tuk tuk drivers I passed on the walk to the museum. 

Speaking of tuk tuk drivers, they are abundant.  This is slow season for tourism, so perhaps the glut is exaggerated.  Still, they could be this country’s leading export.  It is impossible to leave a shop of any kind without being asked if I need a tuk tuk or moto. We have travelled everywhere by tuk tuk.  I am sure that on some tuk tuk trip, another tuk tuk tuk tuk driver will keep pace next to us and to pull up next to us and ask if we need a tuk tuk.

Most of the vehicles on the road are motorcycles.  The engine size ranes from 50 cc to 120 cc.  On these intrepid bikes we have seen a family of five, a driver with bags of limes stacked so high on the passenger seat that we could not see the driver, building materials, slabs of ice, many crates of unidentified contents, and our all time favorite so far: chickens.  At first I thought they were freshly killed and on their way to market.  They were fully feathered, and not moving much.Then I noticed their heads were still attached.  They were casually looking around.  There must have been twenty or thirty live chickens enjoying their own funeral procession. 

Back to Phnom Penh’s most public bather.  I went down to the promenade to meet with Mollie and Stephanie, who were taking a sunrise stroll.  A crowd started to form around a man who had her by the forearm.  He was talking into a radio.  He did not have a badge or uniform. She was apparently explaining that she lived on a boat, and that she probably meant no harm.  After a few minutes, she left by herself.  If it was police that had accosted her, they turned out to have other things to do with their time. 

Sorry for the slow photo output.  We just figured out how to upload more than one at a time. 

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