This is why i don't do christmas.

"All are punish-ed." - Romeo and Juliet. Act IV, Scene iii.

I don't get to tell you about watching the sun rise over Angkor Wat, that that was how I began my December. I don't get to discuss my musings from the back of a moto outside Battambang or sailing down the Tonle Sap to Siem Reap while listening to "The End" by The Doors. Not yet. Because first I'm forced to talk about trying to do the right thing and looking like an idiot in the process.

I woke up at 3:45 AM to get to Angkor Wat in time for sunrise. For the next eleven and a half hours I wandered throughout the most gorgeous thousand-year-old buildings on Earth, spread out over a 26-kilometer area. I took over twelve hundred photos. That's more in a single day than my first three weeks on the road. I bought my bus ticket for tomorrow afternoon after shopping around for the best deal, found the Cambodian history book I've been searching everywhere for at an equally cheap price, and completed all the other errands I set for myself today. Felt like I'd accomplished a good deal, so I figured I'd treat myself to some ice cream at a place my friend Whitney had recommended to visit while I was in town. I was lazily strolling along the riverside from the Old Market back to my hostel, enjoying a scoop of ginger and black sesame, about a third of the way back when a girl of maybe five ran up to me. She begged and pleaded for two blocks for a dollar, which broke my heart not to give her. Then she asked for the rest of my ice cream cone, which I gave her immediately, but felt a little guilty that it was such a quirky flavor, one that a child definitely would not enjoy, and even if she did there wasn't much left of it anyway. I don't really know why, but after I left her, I turned back around, walked back to her and, crouching down so she was almost as tall as me, I told her that I still couldn't give her a dollar, but I would buy her a real ice cream cone, not my seconds, in any flavor she wanted. There was another place just 20 meters back and I walked out with a blueberry cobbler cone for me to replace the less-than-satisfying one I'd given away, and a large chocolate peanut butter one for her (she didn't understand when I tried to ask her what she wanted, so that was my best guess that any kid would like). It still cost me a dollar, but this way it felt a little more personable than empty charity, that in giving one to her I was saying thank you to the hundreds of beaming Cambodian children that had waved as my boat, or tuk-tuk, or moto passed them. It took all of two minutes to get the cones, but when I came back outside she was gone. I walked a good distance in both directions and couldn't find her. Asked the tuk-tuk driver she was sitting with when I met her but to no avail.

And there I was. Lugging a shopping bag around my wrist, craning my weather-beaten and sunburnt face in all directions with a defeated look upon it, and holding an ice cream cone in each hand. Not even one two-scoop cone, that would have been somewhat socially acceptable, but double-fisting fattening dairy like it was about to be outlawed. I looked like the fat German kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And I don't even think there was a fat German kid in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but you'd pretty much have to invent a simile to describe how stupid I looked. Walking again towards my hostel, I didn't see another Cambodian child that I could give her cone to, but I did pass a tourist bus stop full of backpackers who looked from one of my hands to the other, then at my face with an almost insulted look of disgust.

That's it. No deeper moral lesson. No waxing poetic on what this says about me, or my trip, or the world around me. Not even going back over this one to proofread it. Too embarassed. Just me looking stupid. And gluttonous. And feeling like no good deed goes unpunished.

And not wanting to eat ice cream again in the forseeable future.

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(post-script) For those that read my last post about not giving money to the probable Khmer Rouge victim outside S-21, here in Siem Reap I found another victim of their torture. The Khmer Rouge cleaved off both his hands at the mid-forearm, but he still manages to operate a steet cart selling bootlegged Xerox copies of books and Lonely Planet guides, so I bought one that I didn't really need for Laos. Still nothing to assuage the pain he has suffered, but it's reassuring that there are alternative ways to be constructive than simple handouts.

The ruins of Angkor:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115132&id=35804394&l=123eb2365f