I flew into Siem Reap, Cambodia this morning after spending a few nights in the Laos capital of Vientiane. Laos was beautiful, if a little on the dusty end of things. But I arrived in the home of Angkor Wat this morning, even though Laos Airlines isn't exactly known for publicly sharing it's flight record.
After arriving, I was sitting and waiting for MK to get ready to head out for lunch and I picked up a binder in the common area of the hostel we're in. As I flipped through the hodgepodge of information, I came to the back sheet which had the title, "The Best Food I've eaten in Siem Reap!"
Well, I don't need much encouragement to test out a fantastic new restaurant. Actually, just the other day in Vientiane, I'd googled a place called the KongKhao which was supposed to have amazing food in Vientiane, and I wasn't disappointed. The restauranteur was an Italian guy and (I'm gonna assume a lot here) his likewise Italian girlfriend who ran the place with a Lao business partner. Earlier in the day, I stopped by to check out the menu and got talking to him and had a good chat about the food in Vientiane and where I'd heard about his place, which only opened in December. I took a card and planned to bring my travel mates back here and definitely wasn't disappointed. The food was fresh, delicious, and followed many traditional Laos recipes, minus the MSG normally found in restaurant cooking in much of Asia. It was fantastic.
Anywho, that was a big digression.
After reading about this awesome place, I'd noticed that there was a little blurb about it being connected to the Green Gecko Project, a non-profit which works to get Siem Reap kids off the street and involved positively in the hospitality industry. I'd read about Green Gecko and was planning to check it out to already, so I thought it'd be an awesome opportunity to see what the food was like. And I was starving. Enough said.
Well, MK and I wandered the 4 minutes from our hostel and grabbed a seat on the unassuming patio down a small, graveled street. We sat down and perused the menu. I settled on stir fried veggies and the fried frog. Ya. Frog. "Delicious!" I thought. And again, I wasn't disappointed. The food was awesome and the drinks were icy cold, perfect for the crazy heat here in SR.
As we were eating, we started chatting with a girl from Oz who'd just spent 6 months volunteering in Jakarta, Indonesia with, I think, the national science education centre (something akin to Science World back home in Canada). We had a really interesting conversation about life overseas, her journalist prospects back home (she'd quit her job as a science and technology writer in Australia before she left) and what Indonesia was like while I indulged in my amazing frogs legs.
Just as we were getting ready to take off, another Aussie gent pulled up on his motorbike and had a quick chat with the three of us. It turned out that he was one of the guys involved with the restaurant and with the Green Gecko Project, so we spent the next 20 minutes talking about the project, about traveling and about his daughters adventures. Sooo much fun.
It's seems like it's only when you're traveling and keeping your eyes open to life that these sorts of experiences happen. Can't wait for the next one.
T
No comments:
Post a Comment