Prior to a cooking class in Battambang...

The next morning, we're in the market- Noel, Leslie, and I- and it's ten in the morning and there's blood everywhere. To my right there's a woman with purple painted nails and diamond ring and she's taking the scales off a fish, and gutting a fish, and there's blood on her manicure and her ring. Behind me there are white frogs, their skin pulled off prior to their market arrival. I can't keep my eyes off the frogs (that look absolutely similar to the ones we dissected in my biology class) and the bucket of live turtles and the catfish flopping in a centimeter of water and the fish already dead and dried and pried apart and hung up for shoppers to ogle. Everywhere there are people and they laugh at me, a white girl with blue eyes, who's maybe never seen a fish being gutted (though I have) or chunks of red meat being squeezed like a fat baby cheek. I stare at the foods, and they stare at me, but there is a kindness in their eyes, too, and I don't feel embarrassed. It reminds me of being a little kid, when my parents would take my sisters and me to Chinatown in New York. I would be terrifed at the strange foods and smells: the black snails in barrel, the pork buns, the Chinese characters I couldn't being to decipher. Then, I couldn't wait to get back in the car and drive home to what was familiar to me. Here, now, in Cambodia, there isn't another place I'd rather be than this market, with the noisy bursts of Khmer, the putrid smells, and the blood of somebody's dinner underfoot.