Traditional Cambodian Dance

For our last evening in Siem Reap we again went to dinner with Rat, who’s fast becoming a great friend that we’re going to miss when we leave.

We went to a dinner theater.

Well, not exactly. It wasn’t quite the Dixie Stampede at Myrtle Beach, and it was obviously set up for the entertainment of tourists, but it was still pretty cool.

Incidentally, we had cut the day a little short and were back at the hotel by about 2:00 in the afternoon, having had all the walking and climbing that Eddie could stand for the day. Even getting in and out of the car was painful and took all of us to maneuver.

Back at the hotel, he opted for a spa treatment (stone massage), where the lady gave it her level best to get him back in alignment. He was some better, and a long, hot bath helped even more.

He was feeling well enough to go to dinner when Rath (as I learned his name is spelled, not Rat as I'd done earlier) arrived to pick us up at 7:00, and we went just a couple of blocks up the road to one of the hotels.

Siem Reap is a small town, especially in the tourist industry. It was obvious that lots of people in the different places we knew were familiar with Rath and greeted him like a friend. As a result, we got great seats.

The restaurant was a huge buffet, again the best opportunity to sample the local cuisine. It was open air, although it was “indoors”; it would continue operating in the rainy season without any problem.

This was a pretty high end, large buffet --  Cambodian style, but without chicken fingers or french fries anywhere on the menu.  Cambodian food seems very similar to what we think of in the US as "Chinese" food -- which, of course, isn't very Chinese in reality.  There's not the spice that Thai food has got, lots of stir fried things, good use of veggies in with the meat, primarily fish, chicken or pork.

Desert was interesting, and pretty good once it was explained to us how you did it. The base was a kind of thin yogurt with black beans in it.

Yeah, the same ones we think about with Mexican food.

You put some of that in your bowl, then you went down the row putting “add ins” with it – most of which we didn’t recognize, but which were all pretty good. You could adjust the individual sweetness to your liking, and you included ice cubes as well. In the end, it tasted a lot like snow cream, but with more lumps in it.

Rath is a great guide. Maybe it’s the age difference and the respect for elders thing, but we have asked him about the most mundane aspects of his life and he’s quick to give us the full inside scoop. Arranged marriages (his was), toilet facilities, internet access, bribery by lawyers and judges, inadequate healthcare, as well as historical things that we don’t understand all were topics of dinner conversation.

The other thing that we couldn’t help but notice – despite his diminutive size – about 5’5 and maybe 125 pounds by our guess, NOBODY attacks a buffet like he does. In fact, only a person who has truly known hunger in his life could put that much food in that small of a body. It was great to watch, though, and we loved sharing our meals with him through the trip.

The show was traditional Cambodian dance. The performers acted out the stories that Rath had told us earlier in the day in part of them, and then they performed social dances for the rest. If you didn’t know the stories, you could kind of tell by the costumes and it helped put more of it in perspective for us.

We learned that all of the performers come from a local orphanage, and that a part of what we paid for dinner went to support their efforts. I can’t say that the stories stuck with us, other than the most rudimentary aspects of them, but the explanations were great.