Blind as a Bat

“Did you take the blind moto driver to work?”

“Yes?”

“Did you notice that he was blind?” asks the assignment editor, who has just arrived at the office off his own motorcycle. It’s morning and I’m sitting at my desk next to a Chinese-Cambodian reporter with whom I swap mango-flavored milk candy for sour young mango slices dipped in a chili mixture.

I did notice. To be fair, I’m fairly certain that he has at least one functional eye, and there was nothing about his driving that suggested he was unaware of the other motobikes rocketing across our path at intersections. As the other intern and I sped with him on his motorcycle to work we were less concerned about his one obviously ruined eye than we were with the unusually small size of his bike’s seat, on which we were cramped and uncomfortable.

“Tall intern, don’t take the blind driver to work.”

It’s my day off from work today and a moto driver with two functioning eyes takes me to the National Library. The ride takes me past the Anti-Corruption Institution and a stove-sized metal box attached to its gates, which I noticed for the first time today, that reads “Complaint Box.”

The National Library, a yellow and white French colonial building, sits at the northern most end of Phnom Penh across from the US embassy with its enormous grey gates (but not as big as the forbidding gates that would surprise even Harry Potter fortressing the much-loathed Thai embassy). A dusty courtyard, where patrons park their motorcycles and vendors set up under scrawny trees sell sandwiches on French baguettes to students in blue or white button-up shirts, accesses the library. A red truck parked out front is crammed with crates filled with glass bottles of coca cola.

Inside, the library is one large room with pale yellow walls, a high ceiling, and whirring ceiling fans. Random books – Charles Baudelaire, Cleopatra-themed romance novels, UNESCO documents– in Khmer, French, English, and German that seem to be organized in no discernable order sit on tall wooden shelves in the back of the room. I pick up a book of collected National Geographic articles, which, for whatever reason, the library has over ten copies of, and slip into a chair at one of the long wooden tables that run horizontally across the room.

A student in a white button down is sitting to my left with her boyfriend and a pile of notes. She has thick lips and looks like a Cambodian Angelina Jolie, the much-beloved actress who glowers at me from a supersized photo advertising haircuts at a beauty salon near the Daily office. An orange kitten, with the tall, pointy ears that all cats in Cambodian seem to have, surprises me by curling around my legs.

At around eleven most of the students trickle out of the library and I follow, determined to use my extremely underdeveloped navigation skills to get to Lucky supermarket in Sorya mall. I wander south, first down a road that seems to be under-construction (note: the stereotype about construction workers is true everywhere). As I walk, I occasionally stop to take pictures of the whir of the hot, afternoon streets. I think that I’m being super stealthy with my camera, but when I return to the Daily house and click through my pictures I realize that everyone in them is starring at me. It looks as if I stood on the sidewalk and yelled into traffic for everyone to stop and smile for my camera.

Lucky Supermarket looks every bit like an American supermarket, except instead of selling raspberry yogurt it sells yogurt with nata de coco or lychee. Both Cambodian and expat families carrying red shopping baskets stroll down its bright aisles, reading the ingredient list on the backs of instant Chinese noodles and investigating bins of mangosteens (a fat, fairly ugly, purple fruit).

While most of what you can buy in Cambodia is priced lower than it is in the United States, brands imported from the United States run expensive. Post’s Great Grains cereal costs roughly $10 (Phnom Penh uses both Cambodia riels and US dollars). British Vogue costs $20. Which is why I’ve become a fan of cheap German cornflakes and Cambodian women’s magazines (for the pictures - I know less than 10 words in Khmer). Just outside the supermarket, pretty women in black uniforms that say “Revlon: Photo ready” sell “Revlon: New York” makeup that’s kept behind glass cases.

It’s late now, and I’ve just opened my door find a bat hanging by its feet from a ceiling light in the hallway. Its little ears twitch as is ducks its head behind webby wings that draw closed like curtains over its body. I start to tiptoe out of my room, clutching a glass that I want to fill up at the water cooler downstairs, and it abruptly swivels towards the faint sound, spreading its black wings and wiggling its ears. It has vampire fangs.

No it doesn’t.

But maybe I’m not actually that thirsty.