Day Trip to Prey Veng!

Today my family and I took a day trip to Prey Veng. It was a nice change of scenery and I was able to buy a few things too- some more soymilk, a couple ripe mangoes (even though mango season hasn’t started yet- I’m not sure where they came from), and some apples.

The morning got off to an interesting start, before we left. I woke up, and once again, spotted the behemoth of a spider that’s been inhabiting my room for a while now. I ran downstairs to tell my dad—“Bon tope khnyom mein bing beyung tom!!”—who armed himself with a kroma and came up to help. My mom came with him too, and when, to my dismay, I discovered the spider was not in the same spot it was when I’d gone downstairs, they started creeping around, swatting at the wall and my desk. My dad spotted it behind the desk and they both went for it—my dad inching his kroma in the space between the desk and the wall and my mom using a duster to poke at it. But this spider is apparently cleverer than us and scrambled through a crack in the wall to Waitchicka’s (a girl who lives at my house and works at the health center with my dad) room.

This is not the first time he’s escaped. I first spotted him hanging out on my wall, near my world map one day and ran screaming to my dad to kill him. He got away, but not before scuttling into a reusable bag and befouling my peanut butter and oatmeal with one to eight of his disgusting hairy legs. Another time I once again spotted him, in one of the drawers of my desk, body fully splayed to about the size of your outstretched hand over one of my EFC books. This time I thought maybe I’d try to trap him myself so I could later brag about it to my family, but alas, he eluded me once more.

I really, really dislike spiders. If they’re small, I can tolerate them, but once they get to be sand dollar sized and bigger, I turn into a small child. My family thinks this is pretty funny, and my mom never fails to ridicule me when I whine about them, since to her the ones I find predatory and terrifying are mere child’s play. And really, they probably are here in Cambodia, considering I once saw one of my student’s little brothers dragging around a dead crab on a string for enjoyment. Not knowing where the spider is has put me on edge, though. Every ruffle of the bed sheet in the wind or move of a gecko on the wall is enough to send me jumping up to grab the nearest makeshift weapon I can find.

Look at its eyes!! Pure evil!

Anyway, back to our daytrip to Prey Veng. We got there around 8:30 or so and stopped at the TELA (air-conditioned gas station that sells Western food stuffs) so I could get soymilk, and my dad could get ketchup, which they ended up not having. He recently discovered he loves ketchup, when I made eggs, potatoes with cumin and paprika, and toasted baguettes for dinner one night and shared my stash which, thus far, I've just used when I cook at my friend Ohn's house. My dad pounded on the back of the bottle until what amounted to a serving size of meat pooled onto his plate and basically ate ketchup with a dash of eggs and a couple of dice sized potatoes for dinner, declaring ketchup a “most delicious” condiment (I couldn't agree more and will encourage this to no end. I'm hoping we'll soon be eating our white rice with ketchup).

Going to the TELA with my family was pretty funny and I had fun watching my mom ogle all of the products, intrigued by the Pringles and checking out all the soft drinks.

After TELA, we separated—me going to the bank and then the post office and my mom and Waitchicka going to the market. I wandered over to the market after running my other errands (post office was closed), and let the chaos of it wash over me. After only frequenting my small market for a while, anything comes as a shock (and Phnom Penh is another world entirely), so the busyness of it was stimulating. Ripe mangoes (have I mentioned it’s not even mango season yet?!), fried bananas, freshly plucked and de-entrailed chickens being prodded by customers, eels squirming in a nearby tub, people haggling over prices, impatient children tugging at their moms’ sarongs and the smell of fish and car exhaust hanging heavily in the air.

One last stop for tuk bang baw ("tomato water," aka ketchup) where I’d spotted it in a stall in the market earlier and we were off, our short day trip coming to a close over noodles and coffee in a small restaurant. The drive back was uneventful, but we were all contented with our purchases and our morning outing that provided a needed break from the ordinary.

**UPDATE: Monster spider is no more! Death by Raid! Waitchicka found him in her room and proudly  displayed him to me, shriveled up on the tip of a knife. Yay!