Local Food

We have found flour! And lentils! We’ve been buying flour from the big supermarkets but it’s a long drive and you invariably end up buying other stuff you don’t really need to make it feel the journey was worthwhile. We’re currently on an austerity drive to recoup all the money we’ve spent trying to get the air-con working, so local-bought is best.

The snag with buying from the market is no-one advertises what they’re selling – bread is hidden in lidded baskets, lentils live under the table, and flour sacks are stacked at the back of the stall. Of course, WE don’t even know which KINDS of stalls & shops might sell which kinds of things, and it’s not always obvious. Cambodians are very rigid about who can sell what – the guy who fixes moto punctures doesn’t do mechanical work, the person who sells 7 kinds of rice doesn’t sell flour. But, it turns out, the woman who sells lentils and noodles DOES have flour! Hidden of course, but we located the correct stall by the usual process of Googling a photo of the thing we want to buy on the phone (lentils), then playing ‘hotter or colder’ round the market.

“No have”, they say. I point up and down the row, they look confused then point in the direction of someone selling the item. Probably – it’s not an exact science.

We’ve also managed to get bread delivered to our door. There’s a chap who rides round every morning with a bread basket on the back of his bike, calling “Num pan, num pan” but it’s always after we’ve left for school, so we caught him one Saturday and explained (miming, no language barrier) that we would put out money in an envelope with a picture of a baguette on it and a bag underneath; if he comes by and sees the envelope, he counts the money, divides by 700riel (about 20c, or 15p) an leaves that many baguettes. It took a few days to nail it, but now we have a steady supply, as long as we remember to put out the ‘bread trap’ each morning.

Even better than finding cheap local food, God has been blessing us with FREE food! Our neighbour visited family in Siem Riep and brought us some yellow mangoes, our other neighbour came back from the provinces and gave us bananas, green mangoes, white sweet corn, and some strange sticky rice parcels beautifully wrapped in banana leaves. Tom said the bean filling reminded him of bran flakes. And weirdly, he was right.