When many people hear “Cambodia,” they tend to think of rice
paddies, gnarled banyan trees, and ancient temples. Thirty or forty years ago, Cambodia
was a country in political turmoil under the regime of Pol Pot. Today, the
people of Cambodia are still recovering from the scars left by the Khmer Rouge,
but the country is far more beautiful and welcoming to tourists than it has
ever been in the past.
This
term, we have a few students in our classes who call Cambodia their native
home. To celebrate their country and culture, Liesl Stach, one of the
AmeriCorps service members at LLC who spent three weeks in Cambodia in May 2013
as part of a class on travel writing with her college, shares her thoughts and
recollections on the country.
The more populated beaches are all right, but they’re swarming with young children, plucked from school by their parents to sell fruit to tourists in order to help with the income. Sometimes the children will mob tourists, one or two touching the tourist’s arm saying, ‘Such pretty skin! Very white!’ while another child picks the tourist’s pockets. The children of Cambodia are adorable, with dark brown skin and large eyes, and oftentimes so small that it’s not uncommon for a twelve-year-old to be confused for a six-year-old – but they insult you if you do not buy what they’re selling.
FACTS ABOUT CULTURE IN CAMBODIA:
In Khmer culture a person's head is believed to contain the
person's soul—therefore making it taboo to touch or point one's feet at it. It is also considered to
be extremely disrespectful to use the feet to point out a person, or to sit or
sleep with the soles of the feet pointing at a person, as the feet are the
lowest part of the body and are considered to be impure. When greeting people
or to show respect in Cambodia people do the "sampeah"
gesture, identical to the Indian bamaste and Thai wai.
Customary Cambodian teachings are laid out in verse form in long works from the
14th to 18th centuries collectively called Chhbap ("rules"
or "codes").These were traditionally learned by rote. Works such as
the Chhbap Pros ("Boy's Code"), Chhbap Srey ("Girl's
Code") and Chhbap Peak Chas ("Code of Ancient
Words") gave such advice as: a person that does not wake up before sunrise
is lazy; a child must tell parents or elders where they go and what time they
will return home; always close doors gently, otherwise a bad temper will be
assumed; sit in a chair with the legs straight down and not crossed (crossing
the legs is a mark of an impolite person); and always let the other person do
more talking. In Cambodia it is not polite to make eye contact with someone who
is older or someone who is considered a superior. (Source: "A Country Study: Cambodia." Cambodia : Country Studies. N.p.,
n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/khtoc.html>.)
This
term, we have a few students in our classes who call Cambodia their native
home. To celebrate their country and culture, Liesl Stach, one of the
AmeriCorps service members at LLC who spent three weeks in Cambodia in May 2013
as part of a class on travel writing with her college, shares her thoughts and
recollections on the country.
“To get
around the big cities, many people take tuk-tuks – open air carriages attached
to the back of motorbikes. Depending on how far you want to go, it costs only
one or two dollars to get from place to place, but that’s a thousand or two thousand
riel. In Sihanoukville, the ‘vacation’ city of Cambodia, you can take a tuk-tuk
to a pleasant beach to watch the sun set into the Indian Ocean as you sip on a
daiquiri and politely decline the older women who offer to give you massage you
for a few dollars.
The more populated beaches are all right, but they’re swarming with young children, plucked from school by their parents to sell fruit to tourists in order to help with the income. Sometimes the children will mob tourists, one or two touching the tourist’s arm saying, ‘Such pretty skin! Very white!’ while another child picks the tourist’s pockets. The children of Cambodia are adorable, with dark brown skin and large eyes, and oftentimes so small that it’s not uncommon for a twelve-year-old to be confused for a six-year-old – but they insult you if you do not buy what they’re selling.
To appeal to tourists, several pizza joints have sprung up in the bigger cities like Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. But what they sell is ‘happy pizza’ – pizza made with cannabis. It’s not exactly legal to sell it, since marijuana is banned in Cambodia, but shop owners do it anyway. You mostly see partying Australian twenty-somethings on their gap year eating in these places. Street vendors will sell you fried tarantulas, grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches. Surprisingly, they don’t taste like anything strange. The bugs have the texture of potato chips and the salty taste of sunflower seeds. They’re just sort of hairy. Breakfasts at the hotels consist of pho noodles and fruit, but there are also juicy sausages and eggs. The restaurants, however, serve the most delicious food you’ve ever tasted, like lotus root salad with chicken and young lotus seeds and galangal dressing, fish filet with bread and sautéed vegetables, stir-fried beef with lemon grass onions and green bell peppers, fried chocolate-banana spring rolls, and red sticky rice dumplings. And of course, jasmine or fried rice accompanies every dish.
In Phnom Penh, there is a temple called Wat Phnom, which translates to ‘Hillside Temple.’ There are temples like this all over the country, sacred places where people come to pray and leave offerings to Buddha. Feral dogs will lounge in the shade, seeking refuge from the scorching sun and sniffing the shoes that people leave outside the temple. Burning incense hangs in clusters from the awning. Men stand outside with cages full of small birds, ready to sell you one for a couple riel. There is a belief that if you let one of the birds out of the cage and it flies back to you, it will bring you good karma. Outside of Siem Reap is Angkor Wat, a crumbling stone temple in the middle of the jungle. It’s something right out of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. Incense burns here too, and statues of the Buddha can be found around nearly every archaic corner. The stone floor makes it easy to stumble, but if you climb all the way up to the top of the temple, you can survey the surrounding banyan trees and the sky that’s so blue you feel like you’re in a cartoon instead of real life, and in a country that has such a chaotic and troubled history, you’ll feel stupidly amazed by the serenity you feel on top of that temple.”
