Soups in Phnom Penh

The major urban mode of transportation in Cambodia is the motor-scooter (typically a 100 ~ 300 cc engine)... which is a vast improvement on the major rural mode of transportation-- your legs... I have nothing against walking, but the fact that the country is so littered with landmines makes rural promenades something to think twice about. The motor-scooter is at once a soccor-mom car, a minivan, an SUV, a bank-robbery-gettaway vehicle, a taxi. You'll see incredible quantities of stuff loaded up on a tiny scooter seat in pretty hair-raising physical arrangements, which combined with gravity and traffic make for a bet. I literally saw this one guy haul a 100cm Samsung flatscreen TV on the back of a scooter and slide off into the street without a thought. After recovering from the initial shock of finding a Samsung flatscreen TV in a country where the per capita GDP is literally half the price of his new entertainment console, I was simply dazzled at how the box was balanced on the seat with a rope. I would have put the thing flat on the seat, not perpendicular, to expose it to the full resistance of the arid, dusty Phonm Penh air and the traffic... Anyway, as a tourist, my main use for the scooter was as a taxi, to lug my luggage and my ass over from market to market in search of food.
Now, being Japanese, my general prejudice (one of the few I admit I have) is AGAINST fresh-water fish. I'll take snapper over carp any day. Being in Cambodia, the major body of water is this muddy, murky, river that you'd imagine Gollum lurks around -- the Great Mekong River, with its gray soupy majesty. Surprisingly, there is a fresh water dolphin that resides in the Mekong... which is one confused species of dolphin. I mean, living in the Mekong when there's the Great Barrier Reef is like being homeless in Chicago, when you can (after some effort) just make it down to San Diego and live a better lifestyle on the same economics.
So the Mekong is the major source of all this funky fish. In Cambodia, the main thing to eat is soup. Like soup. Like varieties of soup that they cook in those little tin donut-with-a-chimney-in-the-middle asian soup containers. And being that the Mekong is the body of water (and there's a large lake called Tonle Sap which is the most abundant fresh-water fishing ground in the world), you basically get varieties of soup with fresh water fish. Mud Fish. Cat Fish. Other scary-looking fish.
The good thing is that they are careful to rub it all with a lot of salt to get the dirt out, and then they stew it with a lot of the local vegetables which are the usual mild herbs found in SE Asia (chives, garlic stalks, cilantro) ... which takes all the stink away, and then they often flavor it with the fermented fish sauce which smells a bit like the airplane bathroom, but has the richly textured amino-acid flavors of fermented protein. The resulting fish soups are AWESOME, and the fact that the Cambodians go crazy with the lime (which is a basic condiment strategy I support in the absence of other things), it makes for a tangy, surprisingly light and aromatic soup, where the fish-based stock is charged with an occasional chili, to be smoothed by the fresh leafy vegetables. The bones are a bit annoying to pick, but hey... it's fish. The meat in general is white and flaky and bite-sized. The kicker is, that the whole saga only costs about a dollar... and we're talking a a family-sized soup -- and I'm talking not the anemic Japanese family-size, but full-on third-world demographic-explosion-family-with-ten-kids. With the rice (a bit dry, but obviously a happy rice -- you can tell that the rice grew up native and naturally delicious and abundant in this monsoony country) and a cold (okay usually it wasn't that cold) jug of Angkor Beer (a malty, reddish lager), you've got yourself a full-on Cambodian Feast.
The other great thing about the place is the sweets... but I gotta run to the airport again (I'm in Taiwan), so that'll be next time...