cambodia--phnom penh

We looooooved Cambodia, so I found that I wanted to post so many illustrative pictures that this would be better divided into two posts. We started our Cambodia leg of the trip in Phnom Penh, the capital city, so that's what this post will cover. In terms of the vegan eats, everything we had was good, but two experiences really stand out. The first is Friends Cafe, the restaurant aspect of a charity devoted to training street youths in business skills. The restaurant is a bright, clean, colorful space just around the corner from the Royal Palace. Once you're seated, about 3 different young waiters approach your table: one person who is actually going to take your order, one person who is in training to become the person who will take orders, and one person who is an experienced server supervising the whole thing. The restaurant is tapas-style, so you order several little things each, and there's a large, separate vegetarian section to choose from. The prices are a little bit spendier than you might pay elsewhere in Phnom Penh, but it's for a good cause, and the food is EXCELLENT, so it seemed worth it--we went back twice!


Since I was doing the semi-careful traveler thing of no raw vegetables at most restaurants, I hadn't had a salad for a while by the time we got here, so I couldn't resist the siren song of this beauty...

I forget what this was called, but it was nice...

OOH, this was SO GOOD. I ordered it twice. The most crazy delicious spread I've ever tasted on a lovely sliced baguette. I think the spread was eggplant-based. Holy cow was it good.

Grilled veggies...

A glass of chilled white wine on this hot day? I don't mind if I do.

Anyway, you get the idea. They also had incredible fresh juices that were also right up my alley. We loved Friends Restaurant, so if you're in Phnom Penh, I highly recommend a visit... or three. The second lovely dining experience I'm going to post about was totally different. We went to have dinner at the home of a man who drove a taxi but ran an English school for children in the neighborhood at night. The plan was to meet some of the students and then have dinner with them, with the price of our dinner going to help support the school. Unfortunately it POURED rain that evening, so by the time we got there, the surrounding streets, and the school room itself, were all flooded with about a foot of water. So, the students stayed home and instead we ate dinner upstairs with the teacher and some of his family, while the teacher told us a bit about what it's like to be a Cambodian today, 16 years since the country began holding democratic elections again--the financial struggle most citizens face, the lack of free speech or political freedoms, the corruption... it was a really sad dinner, in some ways, but amazingly important in terms of getting a sense of what life's like in Cambodia outside the tourist bubble. The dinner would have been a fantastic experience no matter what the food was like, since eating was a little bit beside the point, but it was fantastic. They made vegan versions of everything for my husband and me, and there was so much more food than we could eat... vegetables, noodles, a curried potato dish... there were also fried tarantulas, a Cambodian specialty, which you can see in the second picture. We didn't partake of these, for obvious reasons, but they were interesting to see...



The last Phnom Penh dining establishment we visited that was remarkable enough to note here was the FCC, or Foreign Correspondent's Club. We never ate here, unless you count french fries, but we seemed to stop in for a beer or two pretty much every day we were in Phnom Penh, just because it was a pleasant place to take a load off:


So much for our delicious vegan eats. I'll leave you with pictures of a few of the sites from Phnom Penh...

Monkeys on power lines:

Don't eat that, baby monkey!

Offerings at the pretty wat (temple) on the hill:

Orchids at the Royal Palace:

You could always tell when I had the camera by the pictures of animals...

Coming soon: Siem Reap, Cambodia!