The Moving Image

I sliced up a bowlful of mango, pineapple and banana this morning for breakfast. This was the healthiest thing we ate all day.

The day seemed to pass in a series of good intentions. We promised ourselves that, once we had completed one small task, we would do something. Without necessarily meaning it, I stumbled from one thing to the next without getting on with anything in particular.

Breaking from my procrastination for a moment, I answered my rumbling tummy with noodles, tofu and pak choi in ginger, chilli and soy sauce.

After this, we took a walk into town to blow off the cobwebs and get the blood circulating. The route to the centre takes us along National Highway 6 (the road to and from Phnom Penh). It is busy and dusty at the best of times and the pavement, such as it is, caters mostly to parked cars, motorbikes, duck rotisserie stands, and all the visitors to the Phsar Leu market. It's a busy, crazy, vibrant and sometimes dangerous stretch of road, but today these characteristics were amplified. Diggers were tearing up the pavement, kicking up more sand to add to the vast dunes that already occupy the space between road and shop frontage. The volume of traffic was doubled - louder and more congested than we had ever seen it. We crawled along with the other road users towards the crossroads marking the middle of Siem Reap.

We were in search of, literally, a haven from the chaos. Haven is a training café and has a good reputation for the food and atmosphere. Sadly, we found it between its lunch and dinner service and were greeted by a closed gate.

We changed course to Sister Srei on the riverside, where we indulged in late afternoon cake - mine cheese, K's chocolate. Neither hit the high watermark that is Blossom Café's cupcakes.

Continuing the trend of the day, we returned home to eat dinner. Picking up some oyster mushrooms and small green-and-white, perfectly spherical Thai aubergines, I had in mind a coconut soup. This we ate with some cassava bread, as we had depleted our stocks of noodles and rice. I must confess that I am less a fan of the Thai aubergine, which is mostly seed, than I am of the succulent purple variety.

In the evening, we watched The Missing Picture (L'image manquante) by Rithy Panh. The film focuses on the director's experience as a young boy in Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. With foreign correspondents banned from the country, the only images captured on film of that time were controlled by Pol Pot and other cadres. Panh uses this propaganda - full of smiling faces and cheering for the Party - but fills in the blanks - the real experience of the people away from the cameras - with scenes crafted from clay. The earthen figurines stand in for the director's friends and loved ones as he tells a very personal story in the context of a human holocaust.