How to loose 4 kgs

Each time a new volunteer arrived, we needed to brief him about how to eat here. The idea is to put plenty of different meals in the middle of the table in order to share them. You first put a lot of white rice in the middle of your plate and it’s polite to take a bit of one dish in your plate. You eat this little piece of meat with your rice and then you can take an other piece of an other dish. To be clear, it’s not really polite to do your own plate with a bit of everything in your plate.

The dishes are not big and you usually eat more rice than meat because you are too shy to go again with your spoon on the expensive dish.

You will always find in the middle of the table, a pot with spoons in hot water, paper napkins, spicy sauce and toothpicks. In Pursat, you can order easily beef with green lemon and pepper, morning glory soup, fried rice and noodles. Because we were not very rich, we asked always the same cheap meal : white rice with an egg on the top ! It was so funny to order in khmer and to try to describe the ingredients with hands. Egg was the funniest to ask ! But shopstick was good also.

Sometimes, when we wanted to test better local food, we asked Chenra, the cleaner of the guesthouse, to cook for us. She prepared wonderful dishes like currys and the best soups I ‘ve ever had. She liked to put pineapple and fish in the soup. The test was so good, with a little bit of  morning glory, a local plant.

But other times, I prefered to go to the market which has so many vegetables and fruits. For nothing, you can get rice, eggplants, tomatoes, cuncumbers, mangoes or pineapple. The fruits were pretty similar as the tahitien ones but I discovered the Jack fruit...very special ! It’s sweet but so smelly that it’s forbidden to carry one this fruit in a public transportation. I discovered also the beautifulest fruit of the earth : the dragon fruit. The larg skin is pink-purple and the meet is white with black seeds ! But it’s not very tasty, it’s like watermelon but less sweety. I am definitely fan of mangoes and bought one for each day. I am sure that this fruit is full of good energy and so soft. I was able to eat one for myself each lunch. A day without mango is like a birthday without friends !

There is no shop with western food in Pursat. No butter, no jam, no peanut butter, no milk, no cheese, no cakes, no sweet, no pasta...the little chineese shops on the road were selling all the same products : oil, cigarettes, crips, eggs, washing powder, whitening cream and coffee.

Because you eat less and more balanced, it’s easy to loose some weight but it’s easy to get a little belly also because of the quantity of white rice eaten ! What are the weirdest think I eat in Cambodia ? The fertilized duck eggs, it means that you eat the chick ! Some snakes and grilled crickets. They like insects and it’s considered like a snack in Cambodia. The weirdest think I drank was sugar can juice, they take the juice directly from the can and serve it with lemon and ice. It’s delicious, sweet but it looks like a little bag of pee...the first time it’s weird !