Phnom Penh

I hadn't been in Chinatown much in recent years. A lot of Vancouver's East Asian population has resettled in Richmond, in fact, and I had the impression that Chinatown was run down and desolate. Silly me. On a Sunday at lunchtime, it was lively, and the many shops spilled out intriguing wares and customers onto the sidewalks.

Conrad and I met Steven and Jenny and their children for lunch at a Cambodian restaurant on Georgia called Phnom Penh.

We should have realized that we were in for quite a feast given how abundantly Steven ordered for us the first time we met up with him for lunch at a Chinese restaurant on Broadway. Oh my.

None of us went hungry, in other words. And while a couple of things, like Conrad's shrimp(or was it crab?) on a sugar cane were a little bland, there were some terrific things. Absolutely! The pork broth was clean and light. The chicken wings alone were super, and the crispy bits of garlic left behind when the wings were devoured would have livened up most anything else. I liked my pork chop flavoured with lemon grass, though I admit I'm not a big fan of fried eggs (though a fried egg sandwich is a curiously kick-butt lunch!). And while the coffee for iced coffee took some time to drip through onto the condensed milk, the end result was mighty good!

Fun to try new things, and we'll make a point of not writing off Chinatown, venturing in there to try a variety of foods we don't often have.

A photo for Jeph as well: we were out driving later that day, and I caught a photo of a monkey tree in a yard. Wouldn't that look cool in the yard of your new place?