Andrew Turco - A year in Cambodia

With the start of April, I’ve decided to take a different tact in catching up on my blog. Rather than being constantly behind as I type up my journal notes from a few months back but lose writing about the contemporary events in the process, I’m going to go back to simply typing and posting as I go. I’ll fill in the missing links of the end of December to March period whenever I have free time to break open my journal and do a little extra writing, so look back every once in a while for “new” past posts.

I’ll start these back-to-real-time updates by saying that I’m back to normal, feeling healthy again, and on my way back from Bangkok to Phnom Penh. It’s been a while, and although I was unpleasantly sick at the beginning and really just bummed that the horrible timing meant that we had to cancel our family trip to Hawaii, I did end up getting to spend a week in Bangkok and feel as though I’ve gotten a feel for the city over the course of my time there, especially during the last few days when I was pretty much just resting and recuperating but able to tour around a bit.

Two Fridays ago was definitely one of the worst days of my seven month Phnom Penh life, as I felt awful both as a result of being sick and also as a result of realizing that it really didn’t make sense to make the 36ish hour trip to Hawaii for our planned week-long vacation with a 104 fever. The timing couldn’t have been worse, though, since my fever started literally the night before I was supposed to leave. I had already come to the amusing realization that I wouldn’t need a passport photo for a visa to enter the United States. How strange. I was planning what I would pack and exchange for things from home. I was excited to spend a week relaxing and was excited to see Em, who was coming in from Palo Alto for her spring break, and my parents, who were flying in from New York.

But anyway, instead, I saw the doctors in Phnom Penh and ended up deciding to head to Bangkok in order to have more confidence in the diagnosis and the facilities. It’s funny how much my perspective of the world has changed since being here. I got an email from a friend from home saying how awesome and crazy he had heard Bangkok is. Since I’m right next-door all the time, though, I don’t think of the city as much in that way anymore. Instead, Bangkok is either the link to the outside world through its airport or a place you get taken if you’re feeling sick enough that Phnom Penh can no longer cut it. I don’t think of it so much as a destination in itself as a link to other destinations or helpful for higher quality facilities (like medical clinics).

But anyway, I’m feeling completely better, and I did get to experience a little bit of Bangkok as a destination. The clinic/hospital that I went to was huge. It’s one of the big Asian destination hospitals where people go to get surgery and then partake in a week of spa treatments during their recovery. The downstairs felt like a hotel (I stayed at the actual hotel affiliated with the clinic). In the mall-like first two floors, there was a Starbucks, an Au Bon Pain, and a McDonalds (which seemed a little ironic for a hospital to have). I figured, when in Rome…, or Thailand as the case may be, and had a satisfying dish for my first lunch that I believe the Thais call “bagel, lox, and cream cheese kop.”

The hospital was like a factory. I’ve never seen so many people at a medical facility at once, and it really is international scope. I’ve also never seen so many burked women and men wearing white dishdashas. Fancy cars pulled up front, uniformed doormen pointed patients in the right direction, and there was a huge cross section of people from all over the world.

It turns out that the hospital is right in Bangkok’s Little Arabia neighborhood. Phnom Penh’s not quite large enough to sustain ethnic neighborhoods, other than perhaps the area around Central Market, which is filled with Chinese immigrants, businessmen, and restaurants, but it doesn’t go by a Chinatown name or anything.

Bangkok, on the other hand, is a “real city,” and walking around the small back streets just below Soi 3, the road along which the clinic and my hotel were on, was like entering into the Middle East. I don’t think I saw a single ethnically Thai person in the area for the nearly week I was in Bangkok, and I went for to the neighborhood for food regularly.

The neighborhood is made up completely of ethnically Middle Eastern and African men and women. Kebabs roast on grills, shawarma meats rotate on their skewer, and Arabic letters fill all the signs in the area. At night after dinner, I’ve only smelled as much flavored smoke coming from hookahs as when I was in Israel, Turkey, or a Princeton dorm. The smell, as well as the hummus and cucumber salads, was a great change from Asian food. In Phnom Penh, there’s plenty of Asian food, a good number of places to get Western food like sandwiches and pastas, and even a number of Indian and Pakistani restaurants, which Brendan and I have been going to a lot in the past couple of months as we’ve tired of Khmer food. But I hadn’t had Mediterranean influenced Middle Eastern food in a long time, and it was more of a comfort food than I ever would have expected.

The Bangkok PiAers took great care of me while I was in their city, inviting me to join them for dinner and in their social plans. On Saturday morning, Kendall invited me to join her for brunch at her favorite place in the neighborhood, Petra restaurant. When we went, she was definitely the only female customer, and the food hit the spot so much that I went back for dinner the next night.

Petra Restaurant became my default, and I think it brought back memories of my childhood in Lebanon that I never had because there was something so comforting about it. Everyone spoke Arabic, which I obviously didn’t understand, yet it was somehow refreshing not to hear an Asian language, simply as a change. The décor could have just as easily been from a kosher deli in New York. It was a small place with only eight tables sitting on a granite-tiled floor. The walls were covered in wood paneling and mirrors, with the requisite frosted logo and name of the restaurant on each one. The nan was a huge fluffy affair brought out on an elevated, silver tray. When I went back for dinner, I had just gotten a fresh supply of magazines, but I couldn’t bring myself to take a single one out. It just didn’t seem appropriate. The owner was sitting at the table across from me, asking for additional food sporadically between his yelling Arabic into his cell phone. Most who came in went over to say hello to him before they sat down. All around me, men dressed in either soccer jerseys or white robes shoveled meat and hummus and nan into their mouths.

Outside, the small streets that make up this area fit my preconceived notion of Bangkok, even if it had an unexpectedly Middle Eastern bent. It was rowdy, there were glittering silver railings, serving trays, and hookahs reflecting all the light emanating from the back lit signs on the buildings. People spilled out of the restaurants, waiters tried to encourage passerbyers to come take seats at their tables, and tuk-tuks burbled by, weaving through the mostly pedestrian walkways. The tuk-tuks in Bangkok are more legitimately tuk-tuks than the motorbikes pulling carriages that we call tuk-tuks in Cambodia. In Bangkok, they’re single, three-wheeled entities that come screeching down roads. Even the sound is different. If Cambodia’s tuk-tuks sound like regular, noisy motorbikes, then Laos’s three wheeled but modified motorbike tuk-tuks sound clanking and Thailand’s sound burbling, as if they’re all racing with aftermarket mufflers.

When I spent a single night in Bangkok with my Mom on our way back from Phuket in January, I there for just long enough to feel intimidated by the city but not long enough to get my bearings. In Bangkok, there are legitimate highways and high-rises. It’s a far way from my more provincial Phnom Penh.

After nearly a week there, though, I now feel like I know the city and even know my way around. It was great to be in a city with public transportation. The Skytrain, essentially an elevated subway, is reliable and clean, and to be honest, even if it’s a minor interaction, it was so refreshing to be able to go places without having to interact with anyone and without having to be calculating how much you would negotiate the price to be at the end. Instead, on the BTS, I just slipped my coins into the ticket machine and went to the appropriate stop, without any surprises.

Bangkok is not the motorbike city that Phnom Penh or Hanoi is. There are few on the road in comparison to other nearby capitals, and neon-colored pink and green, metered taxis fill the roadways. Unlike in Phnom Penh, where you can only get a taxi by arranging ahead of time, it was also a nice change to be able to simply hail an automobile taxi. Everyone talks about the cabbies in Bangkok as being obnoxious and not using the meters that all of them advertise on their roofs, but I only had one incident when the driver refused to turn on the meter, and otherwise, again, I didn’t even have to think of how much I would pay at the end. I simply looked at the meter and even gave tips, just like in New York.

Other things that make Bangkok great are the newsstands and selection of magazines. I crave magazines here in Phnom Penh, but they’re everywhere there. Stands at the Skytrain stops even sold Travel and Leisure and The Economist. I was in heaven, and I am so unused to the availability that I think I stopped in every single book or magazine shop I passed, of which there are actually quite a lot in Bangkok. I also purchased a lot of magazines, and I was so excited that I didn’t even really notice until later that, when you convert the Thai Baht to US dollars, these plentiful magazines are nearly double, if not more, their usual price in the United States. But they were still so wonderfully available.

During the last few days that I was in the city, I didn’t have any more doctors’ appointments and was feeling infinitely more recovered, so I got to do some sightseeing. I saw the impressive and sparkly Grand Palace (which I accidentally called the Royal Palace in a taxi, much to the absolute complete confusion of the driver - it’s not that different). Inside, I thought the Jade Buddha, which has been traded among various seats of power in Thailand and Laos for centuries, was, in fact, all it was cracked up to be. I went to Wat Pho to see the Reclining Buddha. I took a ferry up the river and saw the sites along the way, already reminiscing about when I was here with my mom, specifically when I passed the stop right in front of the hotel we stayed at.

I checked out Khao San Road, which is an example of one of those things that I have to sometimes try to figure out whether it was something I knew about before I arrived. Just as someone telling where they live as being right near Chiang Rai is now an extremely clear description, I know I would have been clueless as to where in the world that was last year. Anyway, Khao San is one of those places that has the reputation of epitomizing both the backpacker and somewhat shady aspects of Bangkok like, elements that gave the city its edgy image. It was also the launching point for the main character in the book The Beach, which I read and loved back in January.

Magazines and people have said that a lot of the sketchiness of the area has been cleaned up and that there are now some worthwhile boutiques and restaurants. Well, the sketchiness probably has been cleaned up, but I can’t imagine it’s gotten much more upscale. There are more foreigners than I’ve ever seen in my life (obviously not really true, but relative to this part of the world, yes). The whole place was like a caricature of itself. Everyone was probably between 20 and 30 years old, with correspondingly inappropriately short booty shorts or brightly colored board shorts. There were stands along the curb where people could get their hair dreaded. Bar street stalls set up along the street instead of typical noodle stands. The knock-offs being hawked weren’t Polo shirts or Lacostes but Billabong shorts and Quicksilver shirts. I, of course, got some, but I was also amused that people would come all the way around the world for this.

That said, it was a fun scene, especially since I feel like I’m in this part of the world enough that I don’t always have to feel cultural. After a bit of browsing along the stands pushing out into the street under all of the overhanging guesthouses and bars, I met up with a few Bangkok PiAers, one of whom said that she actually asked some random people when she was walking up the street if something was wrong because she thought that it was strange that there were so many foreigners milling around.

The next night, for my final night in the city, I completed the Bangkok scene and now feel like I’ve really seen everything there is to see in the city. I went out with two other PiAers to a Thai noodle stand and then joined them for their evening out. After passing the famous elephants that have resorted to begging in the street and for which Bangkok has developed a (negative) reputation for, we passed by one of the main red light district. Then, it was on to Bangkok’s girly bar area. The night didn’t end before we had received lude invitations for activities later that night from a few of the bartenders.

My trip to Bangkok was fulfilled, and there was nothing else I needed to do, so I could leave today. To parallel the amusement everyone had last time I went through the Bangkok airport, when I was bringing my motorbike helmet with me carry-on, today, everyone was amused by and nodded approvingly at the woven soccer balls I was carrying. They’re made of basket-like materials and are about the size of size 3 soccer ball, and everyone in at least Thailand and Cambodia kicks them around in the parks. I had picked up a number of them to bring home (home-home I mean, not just to Phnom Penh) and was carrying them in a shopping bag through the airport so they wouldn’t get crunched in my bag. Each time a security or airline person figured what was in my plastic bag, they would smile, point, say in a slightly questioning voice the same Thai word, which I assume was the name of these kinds of balls, and await a response.

Well then, yes, they are.