Everyone goes to Seim Reap for Angkor Park. I assumed this
would be a saturated touristy town like Hoi an or Bagan, but I was pleasantly
surprised by the culture and atmosphere of Siem Reap. The town itself should be
an attraction, and I certainly wish I had more time to stay and explore it. In
my short 2-day stay in Seim Reap, I visited 6 great cafes.
The Hive
A favorite among Western tourists and expats. This is a
small café that boasts an eclectic menu of food and juices. I ordered a Rotti
and banana honey milkshake.
Common Grounds
Common Grounds is a coffee joint that seems to be a popular
place for NGO meetings. The coffee is good and cheap. They were the most
spacious of the cafes I visited.
Essodrip
Essodrip opened the day I arrived in Siem Reap. I believe
this café is run by a Korean ex-pat. The atmosphere is both quaint and
contemporary. Not only do they make good lattes, but they even have an
interesting selection of non-coffee lattes, such as Blueberry and Sweet Potato.
Where else can you get a Sweet Potato latte?
Sister Srey
One of the most popular places in Siem Reap. It’s more of a
lunch/brunch place than a proper café to work from. I saw people with their
laptops out, but I would feel bad staying for more than an hour, as the place
is always full and often with a wait.The burger is definitely the thing to order.
New Leaf Book Café
An atmospheric, open air café with both sophistication and
culture. On Monday nights they show foreign films, such as The Seawall, which
was adapted from the Marguerite Duras novel. I enjoyed my Khmer iced coffee.
Blue Pumpkin
A local success story. This ice-cream chain started in Siem
Reap and has several locations in Phnom Penh as well. I consider it an
expensive place, but is worth a visit for the sofa bed seats.
Distinctive feature: giant spung trees growing over crumbling buildings and a distinctiveentrance. Conservatory Body: World Monuments Fund
Visitor's
note: Ta Som is the lesser cousin of the infinitely more famous Ta Prohm. Just asbeautiful, but not on the beat for most tour buses, it is surprisingly quiet. When I visited in the mid-morning, I was one of only a few people there.
Recently I met up with an old friend, who insisted that my
trip to LA not conclude without a visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
He raved about the place, but wouldn’t tell me anything about it. “Don’t look
anything up online,” he said, “Just go.”
I trusted his recommendation enough to take a chance, and a
$10 uber ride from Koreatown to the un-glamorous Culver City.
From the outside the museum is unassuming, even disappointing.
It looks like it could barely be bigger than an apartment. I had no
expectations, but was suspecting that it might be a gag or hoax museum. Upon
entering, I was saddened to find that no photography was prohibited. I respect
the rules so I didn’t take any pictures, instead I doodled and furiously scribbled notes
into a book so that I could describe all the details of this strange place.
When walking in one is greeted by a miniature replica of
Noah’s arch. Ah, I thought, a religious/creationist/biblical literalist museum.
But then things got stranger. Visitors are soon greeted by what look like fetus
in jars of formaldehyde, but fear not, they are actually globes of water with
floating wax figures that are supposed to predict the future depending on the
direction the ax figure points after being shaken. Like a magic 8 ball.
Few things are more terrifying than being alone in the room
with the Bell Wheel. A room so dark, I could not even see what I was writing as
I furiously scribbled notes on a notepad. The loud cacophony of chimes ringing
above me, in a room in which only the plants in each of the four corners were
illuminated by light.
In that room, one can find such exhibits like. “Why the
tower could not reach the moon” which explains that the tower of Babel would
have needed to be 178,672 miles long to reach the room, which would have been
so disproportionate to the size of the earth that “the uneven distribution of
the earth’s mass would tip the balance of the planet and move it from it’s
position in the center of the universe.”
The text was accompanied by a visual of a Styrofoam planet
with what appeared to be a unicorn horn affixed to it.
Artist's rendition of "Why the tower couldn't reach the moon"
The same room also offers dioramas form the lives of saints,
in which holographic images of saints are juxtaposed form clouds made of cotton
balls. At first the diorama appears empty, and only when looking through a
lens does the cartoonish figure appear
in the scene. A miracle.
Another scene portrays “the first century C.R. Roman general
and his conversion while hunting via a miraculous vision of the crucifix
between the antlers of a stag.”
Artist's rendition of "the miraculous vision between the antlers of a stag"
Videos housed in podiums with uncomfortable seats are
obnoxiously cliché and almost impossible to watch. If the video is about a
person in Scotland, Scottish bagpipes will play. In a video about the life of
Hagop Sandadjian, a micro miniature sculptor who was born in Egypt, middle
eastern music can be heard in the room “Eye of the Needle” which is dedicated
to his word.
Another room displays unremarkable dishwear, dresses, and
lace dollies that look as if there were thrown out by Goodwill. All items are
awkwardly arranged in glass coffins, while the walls tell of the history of
trailer home manufactures. At this point, my view shifted from that of a
religious museum to a collection of oddities, that is, until, I entered the
room of old remedies, none of which, I'm sure, ever actually existed. A
sculpture of a duck’s bill inserted into a child’s mouth is supposed to
illustrate that breathing a duck’s breath will heal mouth and throat illnesses.
A toast with two dead mice on it claims to help cure bed wetting if eaten.
Mouse pie was also supposedly given to children who stammer. Other absurd
ideas, likely the product of the imagination of the curator, can all be viewed
to the tune of Mozart’s requiem, played over a recording of a storm. Is that
supposed to be ominous.
Other rooms pretend to display pseudo-scientific charts and
instructions, neither of which is possible to understand.
Artist's rendition of a bunch of bullshit
Artist's rendition of more bullshit
One wall offers a collection on tobacco pipes juxtaposed
against quotes from famous people, about, guess what? Tobacco pipes. When
walking up stairs there are portraits on the wall of, guess what? Stairs. The
first room on the right is dedicated solely to the Cat’s Cradle. The most
useless pastime in the history of the earth, which involves twisting rope
between the fingers in a variety of ways. The very fact that there existed a
real person, by the name of Honor Maude, who devoted her entire life to
documenting all the possibilities of Oceanic String Figures – as they are
called – hopelessly depresses me. After 6 weeks in Nauru she gathered methods of 107 string figures. And amassed over 1,00 figures in the course of her
lifetime. The result of her life’s work: apparently there are many ways to ties
strings which differ all over the world. Who would have thought? The rooms
dedicated to her show at least 17 different versions of Cats Cradle with
instructional videos.
And just as I was getting annoyed and frustrated by this
obnoxious museum and its bullshit displays, we entered a room with oil
portraits of dogs and a small teahouse, apparently a scaled down version of the
czar’s tea house in his winter mansion in St. Petersburg. After being
offered tea and cookies (they were
technically free but I paid for them with my sanity and time wasted) we
followed the sound of what I thought was a violin and wandered into a beautiful
rooftop garden, where we saw a man playing a stringed instrument with keys like
an accordion. It’s called a nyckelharpa.
Since I could take no videos or photos of the scene I witnessed, I am
inserting a youtube link of a random person playing the nyckelharpa.
Listening to the nyckelharpa on a rooftop garden at twilight
was the perfect time and atmosphere to ponder the question I had since walking
into the museum. “What is this place?”
There are no answers, but a lot of interpretations. My
partner thinks it is a satire of all museums. The curator is presenting a critique
of the authoritative tone of museums, and the gullibility of the audience. The
museum wants us to question why we trust museums, and what leads us to accept,
without question, their installations and inscriptions as facts. My partner
loved the museum. Me, not so much. I understand the interpretation, but I think
that could be archived in one small installation, not an entire two-story
building. I found the museum annoying and crazy-making. It provokes too much
confusion, requires too much guessing. A friend of my once wisely said, “I can´t see any charm or
poetry in guessing; life is complicated enough.”
Distinctive feature: surrounded by a large lake, the temple is built on a tiny artificial island
Visitor's
note: this temple is on the main route and is well traveled. Although busy, there is a long narrow bridge that leads to the temple, so the crowds are dispersed
From July of 2005 to February of 2006, the Los Angeles
Public Library was my only refuge. I was eighteen years old, insecure, single,
and friendless in an unfamiliar city, and one that proves difficult to adapt to
for even for the most mature and seasoned individuals. This was an era in which
I didn’t meet people in clubs, I met them in books. My mentors weren’t
teachers, or friends, or family, they were Murakami and Morison and
Garcia-Marquez. I was too busy ready the Well of Loneliness or 1984 to go out and explore LA. Eventually
I moved far away from any public library, and eventually I had to make
real-life friends and mentors. But the Los Angeles public library will always
hold a special place in my heart.
"Books invite all, they constrain none"
My walk to the library
was five blocks up Hope street, fro Olympic to 6th. In those days downtown LA had yet to be
cleaned up and my walks were more like a tour of the city’s homeless. When I
was frequently harassed I would clutch a copy of Joan Nestle’s The Persistent
Desire like a weapon, thinking it could protect me. I bought a yellow tote bag
in the gift shop and carried home ten books – the maximum number I could take –
at every visit.
Beautiful art deco interior
old file cards used as decoration in the elevator
The best view in the library
Though
I would move on to become an obsessive reader and visit libraries all over the
world, ten years would pass before I would return to the beautiful 1926 art
deco building that first spawned my love of literature.
