In search of Bon Chow 2

So the Hanoi airport is pretty dead. We buy some "fruit chips" (fruit apparently includes yam and taro, as well as banana, pineapple, and some less recognizable things). Straightforward flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Oddly, Vietnamese Airlines (the only ones that do this flight, and WAY overpriced) serves meals and free beer even on this 1.5 hour flight, and then gives us survey forms to fill out, rating their service, courtesy, and....attractiveness of flight attendants? What? Hair and makeup, to be rated poor to excellent? This would TOTALLY not be kosher in the US.

Siem Reap (the town near the Angkor Wat temple area) is booming, and looks a little bit like Las Vegas. We're in the middle of jungle, with cows grazing freely along the roadsides and rice paddies, and these enormous, brand new hotels start rising out of nowhere. And there seem to be hundreds of them. We, of course, are not staying in one of those. We're at the Mandalay Inn, whose motto is "Looks expensive, but not!" For $18/night, we get A/C, but breakfast is not included. Very nice and helpful Burmese owners.

We go to one of the recommended traditional Khmer restaurants, and after perusing the menu, I ask our young waiter for "bon chow and naim" (actually probably more like baan chaaeuw, but these are traditional Cambodian foods that I remember from our days of living in Long Beach with all the Cambodian refugees, and I want to share them with Scott.)

Our (15-year-old?) waiter cracks up. He finally cannot restrain his giggles, and passes us off to another teenage girl. I don't know if it's my terrible accent, or if I inadverdently said something scandalous, or what. She says they don't have bon chow, so I order something else. The food is all great, but our evening is overshadowed by the five or six waitstaff (all teenage) who spend the rest of the night giggling and saying "bon chooooowwwww" in various exaggerated accents. I still don't know what was so funny.

Finally, our waitress explains that our waiter is from Thailand (or his parents are or something) and he doesn't really speak Khmer well. But then it seems like she's just teasing him because he LOOKS Thai (to her, not to me), or maybe he has a Thai accent - she says my accent is much better than his, which even I know is rubbish. Later, the woman at our hotel said that they were probably just astonished that a tourist would ask for something like that - it's street-market food, and it's very odd that we would know that it exists, let alone the name.

Anyway, the next day I do find my bon chow and naim...at the street market. For 50 cents. And it's even better than I remember.