After arriving in Phnom Penh and getting some sleep, I had a conversation with someone I know from church who came from Cambodia and who still has family living in the city. Knowing that I had to fast until 5:45PM or so, we arrange to meet at the bakery which the family runs. I had thought at first that they would come and pick me up when we had exchanged addresses but that would not prove to be the case, and after chatting with them in the evening I arranged a ride with a tuk-tuk driver outside the hotel and showed the address I wanted to on his Google Earth app (more on that later) and off we went. The weather had been rainy throughout much of the day and many of the streets were flooded with simply appalling traffic, including a sizable truck that did not belong on the small roads we were traveling on to get to the neighborhood where the family lived.

Once we did get there, I paid the taxi driver and I was off again, trying to find the address of the Best Donuts and Backery (sic), which proved to be a problem because of the ambiguity between the pin location and the address–the pin was located on one street, 36 Sony, while the address was listed on the neighboring street, 45 Sony, and while I was dropped off very close to what ended up being the correct location I did not see the family before turning around and walking to the wrong road where the address was listed and having to be guided in the right direction by a friendly local on 45 Sony who had wifi and was able to communicate with the family about their location.

Once I got there I was greeted by a man whose wife looked very much like her sister (whom I happen to know), and their two children, who both spoke pretty good English, one of whom was in the 11th grade and the other his younger sister, who was in the 6th grade. Before too long, the younger sister went back into the house after having interrupted her brother when he did not think of words fast enough for her liking to converse to me, and the older brother of the woman I know and his wife arrived as well. We talked and ate for the next few hours, as is often the case, some of the conversation being among them in Khmer, along with questions directed to me about travels and America and politics and the like, along with plenty of questions being asked by me.

The food itself was somewhat of an endurance test. There was a tasty chicken curry with vegetables, some beef, one of them with a broth that softened the hard french bread that came with it, and the other with some fried egg on top. Following this was a variety of fruits, including persimmon (sweet), oranges (rather like Florida oranges except for having far less fruit), and dragonfruit, which was relatively bland as I remember it from Thailand. There were also some sort of rice cakes and banana chips as well. There was much to compare about the broad similarities between many aspects of the alphabet and diet that are shared between Central Thai and Cambodia–likely from the influence of Angkor on the late-coming Thais–and the influence of the Chinese, which seems to be a major concern for the Cambodians I have spoken to in the country.

With conversation ranging from the age of people to be welcome in chatting with the adults (fifteen, depending on maturity level) to the family’s plans to serve as middlemen in the export of cashews from their native village region near Vietnam (presumably through that country, where the older brother has traveled for business), I found the evening very enjoyable even though I started to get tired near the end because I am still a bit jet lagged and had filled my belly with 2.5 liters along with plenty of food, and by the time it was 11PM or so, it was time to get back to the hotel. After thanking the hosts and expressing my desire to see them again in the future, we were off to get to the hotel where I am staying near the airport, which is (perhaps unsurprisingly) in a heavily Chinese part of the town. Getting there involved being foolishly routed by Google Maps through some narrow alleys and when I arrived some women’s team from Mongolia was checking in. It was time, though, for me to rest soon after that.