All descending from the Chinese mother recipe, congee, rice porridge (also known by the off-putting Dickensian word, gruel) in Asia is a comforting breakfast food primarily given to sick people. In Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia, rice was heavily rationed and so the people made it go further by turning it into a soup. Today's versions are more nutritious than these meager meals and typically include a host of additions to spice up the bland base.
My version was based on shiitake mushroom stock with wholegrain rice and pak choi. The whole grain means that the rice does not disintegrate into a starchy, gloopy soup. I floated half a boiled egg and served it with accompaniments of bean sprouts, fresh herbs, sliced ginger, dried chillies and fried tofu. Pretty good, but not up to the standard of Vitking's.
In the afternoon, we joined the regular Khmer lesson at the peace café. We arrived late but the lesson 'plan' is loose with no fixed end-point, and so it segues easily between language and culture tips to plans for tomorrow and beyond. Besides picking up a few phrases for our remaining days in Cambodia, our main purpose was to meet up to go to a photography exhibition.
The Angkor Photo festival is now in its tenth year and takes place each year in Siem Reap. We visited the opening of two special exhibitions at the McDermott gallery.
One of these comprised some beautiful photos of cityscapes by Gabriele Croppi. These black-and-white images have been precisely shot, using high contrast, to achieve an effect close to graphic design. They could be pen-and-ink illustrations. They contain large blocks of negative space - often swathes of black shadow - which are given a tactile dimension through the Hahnemühle cotton paper on which they are printed. The final result appeals to my aesthetic.
Following the exhibition opening, we moved to the FCC (whose Phnom Penh branch we visited while in the capital), where an outdoor slideshow of work by Asian photographers was being shown. The selection of photographs from 24 different artists was mostly excellent. Two in particular caught my attention.
Munem Wasif lives in Old Dhaka and has caught images of everyday life. His ability to intrigue the viewer is uncanny. Each photo hides a story. A knife is held to a boy's throat by a group of other boys. He is smiling. Is he being threatened or shaved? A picture of a Bangladeshi street reveals a mass of overhead cables. Silhouetted at the top of the frame is a monkey making its way carefully on the urban vines. A photograph of ladies laughing. What's so funny? We want to share in the joke.
Another sequence of images by Ronny Sen brought to my attention a phenomenon of which I was completely unaware. In Jharia, India, an underground fire has raged in the city's coalmines for nearly a century. The longevity of this natural disaster has rendered it normal. People still live in the town. The collieries burned long before the current crop of residents were born and will probably continue to burn during their children's and grandchildren's lifetimes, as all efforts to extinguish the flames have proven ineffective.
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