tiny horses, ancient temples, and no it doesn't taste like chicken

As our readers are now well aware, Senora Cocinera y yo, have just spent a week in celebration of Jed's wedding. Not the whole week was wedding specific, but for our purposes it kinda was. This includes the traditional night of debauchery known the world over "the stag party". I can imagine the more lacivious of you out there drueling at the imagined carnal spectacular that is a Cambodian bachelor party, especially when I use the term tiny horses in the title. But rest assured to our prurient readers only good clean fun was had and no recently passed laws in Washington state were violated.

The day long extravaganza started in the late morning with around fifty of us gathering at The Warehouse to pass out the tshirts and then take tuk-tuks over to the Foreign Correspondents Club (fcc) for lunch. The FCC is a semi-swanky place catering to the more well to do tourists, the Phnom Penh branch is famous as being the place where reporters sat on the balcony and watched the bombing across the river. Now already we were attracting some attention by being a large group of westerners in matching tshirts bearing the likeness of Jed on them. But after lunch we all loaded up in horse drawn wagons or on horse back for the groom and a couple of the more equine savvy of the group and then proceeded to parade around Siem Reap in what amounts to a horse driven pub crawl. It should be noted here that Cambodian horses are bred from a Mongol breed that while very sturdy is also only about 5feet tall. I was worried that our riders were going to drag their feet.

After about four hours of various bars, including one with a swimming pool that has big pool fun on sundays, we all tuk-tuked or galloped off to a temple to the south of town not part of the Angkor complex but actually older and had a bbq. In typical Cambodian fashion the guy with the cooking utensils didn't know where this temple was and I was forced to cook with chop sticks and by candle light. The stuff eventually arrived and everyone enjoyed their chicken and ribs although I believe it more a testament to hunger rather then quality of food. Now around half way through this part of the event I noticed some rather official looking types milling about. Never a goood sign. It turns out that although we had permission from the monks and the police to do this the park service wasn't informed and decided that we ought to pay for our picnic site. Thank god we had Karl, a long time resident here, with us. Because he managed to bargain the bribe down from 1000 dollars to 5o dollars. You don't f#$% with Karl.

Then it was back to town for more bars with the night ending back at the warehouse. Those of you who know Senor Cocinero the best will recognize that this seems like an impossible amount of social interaction and fun for me. It was I bagged out early and only imbibed a little. But I can say that it was a pretty cool day.

But none of that addresses the final part of my title. What, you must all be screaming to the screen, does not taste like chicken. Well after my crippling social anxiety, what is my now most well known fear? That is correct you guessed it, SPIDERS, on our bus down to PP for the wedding we stopped in the town of Skuon that is renowned in Cambodia for its deep fried spiders. I confess that I did indeed try a piece. Just a small piece of leg and I can only say it tasted like spider, with teriyaki sauce. It wasn't even empowering, they are still creepy.