Oh no...

As you can imagine, when traveling in an emerging third world country, one is always a little nervous about the food and food borne illness. We have been taking precautions, drinking bottled water, sticking to cooked food, avoiding raw vegetables and keeping the Pepto Bismol handy, nevertheless, Monday night people started getting sick.  Of the eight of us, five were stricken with  nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, some more severely than others.  We cannot figure out what the cause was even after much speculation and I guess it doesn’t matter at this point.  Trish, Alyssa and I escaped and spent the day quietly trying to look after the others and catching up on our reading and writing. In the afternoon when Mike felt he was past the worst of it and could be left alone, we did go back to the Central Market to get some things Trish had asked her vendors to bring.  And Tyler felt well enough so we went to the Russian market again to have his suit fitting. 



on the street



moto riders



For our evening meal we decided pizza would be an easy choice, especially on buy one get one free night, and Narin, our host at Samaritan House volunteered to go get it. He was going with his very young son so I decided to go along to carry the pizza boxes.  They do not use a car seat so little Dennis was on the front seat between us.  This was at rush hour in Phnom Penh.  See picture for the 10 minute total standstill at one intersection (no stoplight).  At one point Narin got a call and answered it so he had only one hand free to drive.  I looked away for a second and when I looked back Dennis had crawled up on his lap and was playing with the turn signal.  Narin raised his arm for me to take Dennis away and I lifted him back, however, he is a very shy boy and didn’t like Auntie moving him away from Papa at all.  It was one of those cries that starts out totally silent while they are drawing breath for the scream and then of course you have a lot of noise.  We did make it to Pizza World, thanks to Narin’s skill at multitasking and got back with our pizzas which were well received by those of us able to eat.



traffic jam intersection



rush hour Phnom Penh



I have been struggling with a relapse of my cough and sore throat, and my voice is on it’s way out but I am thankful not to have the other problem and hope that the next three days are days of recovery for all of us.