Cambodia: bai [rice/food].

Kampong Thom: my first real food in Cambodia. I only had a leg off the tarantula - it mostly just tasted like fried something.

Siem Reap: eel soup and delicious sweet/salty corn at Green Star, a restaurant whose profits go to Green Gecko, a fantastic non-profit that I'll profile in another post.

And if you don't care about keeping kids off the street, at least go for the tower of beer.

Kratie: Samnang and Vireak took us to the market, where we got shrimp pancakes, I think rice pancakes, and fried bananas.

Ban Lung: the market. They don't sell just food here - clothes, shoes, toys, toiletries, anything you need you can find there.

Somewhere out in the country: for one night, we did a home stay in one of the traditional houses on stilts [more on that later, too]. Included in the price was food cooked by the wife [pictured here] of the village chief at another house. It was all delicious, but there was one close call. I was eating some kind of chicken dish and found something that looked like some kind of organ. I asked whether anyone knew what it was, and Brian said it might be the gizzard, which his dad apparently thinks is delicious. So I decided to go for it and was psyching myself up for it when Vireak noticed and said, "Oh, don't eat that, throw that away. That's...chicken man egg." [In Cambodian, like in German, Spanish, and more, they say "eggs" instead of "balls."] I knew testicles are a delicacy in some places, and I might try them at some point, but...right then was not that point, especially when even a Cambodian was telling me not to eat it - and they eat pretty much everything off an animal.

I tried the infamous durian, although I didn't actually notice any smell, and it tasted pretty good. Even better, though, was the mangosteen [or, as I call it, the Jewish mango] - so completely delicious. If you ever get a chance to sink your teeth into one of these puppies, DO IT.

Other dishes that I saw around but didn't actually eat this time are chicken oviducts and forming eggs [as in, eggs that they actually took out of the chicken before they even formed shells] and crickets, which you can get in large numbers and just eat like popcorn.