Battambang is the
second largest city in Cambodia
and my new home for the rest two months. I’ve been here for two weeks already
but it feels like eternality. BB is located in the northwest part of the
country and is mostly known as the rice bowl due to the many rice fields and
the huge production of rice in the area. Speaking about rice, I eat it for breakfast,
lunch, dinner and even for snack. In
khmer the words for different meal times is not used, instead they say eat rice
for every meal. My favorite rice snack is sticky rice on bamboo stick and warm
banana with sticky rice covered with banana leaf. I love rice, when I was
younger my brother Huguito used to sing a song about me that goes Arros arros a
Monica and then you start over from the beginning. A hit song of course. Arros is the Spanish word for rice, that is
how much I liked rice, I even had a song about it. So far I have no problem
eating so much rice as I do now, I even have tried different variations of
rice, for example is new rice (newly harvested rice) so much tastier than “old”
rice. I do wonder if I will get tired of it? Anyways, that was a lot of talk
about rice, such an interesting subject though. However I wanted to write about
Battambang. The name means the Stick King and refers to an old king that lost
his stick. BB is great, it has a nice
park where a lot of people hang out in the afternoons and evenings. It has
become some sort of hanging out place for us to, and we usually by mango, sugar
cane juice and look at the people that do exercise. It’s the funniest thing
ever. I and Rat joined the first time but I couldn’t stop laughing. Imagine
Friskis och Svettis! Also I love the river that runs through the city. The
waters that my house use for cooking and showering comes from that river. I’m a
little uncertain about the cleanness level of the water, but everybody uses it
and so far no problem.
The second day in Battambang me, Rat my allied, Jonna the
Swedish participant and her counterpartner Rothanak bought bicycles to easily
move around. We named the bikes Red dragon, Buffalo soldier, Loverboy and Unicorn. The
Red Dragon, which is my bike, got a flat tire after five minutes. The first weekend we biked over 50 km visiting
a nearby temple and the rice fields. The traffic here is not as intense as
Phnom Phen but it still seemed crazy at a first glance and I thought it would
be difficult to ride a bike. It turns out that it’s not hard at all. It’s like
an organized chaos and once you learn a few basic things, for example that it’s
better to go very slow while turning instead of stopping, all you have to do is
go with the flow.
