Hearts and Flowers and Troubling Traditions: Valentine’s Day in Cambodia

When my husband and I planned our vacation to Laos and Cambodia for the first couple weeks of February, we weren’t thinking about Valentine’s Day. We barely celebrate it when we’re at home and weren’t expecting to think much about it while traveling. Vacation is special enough, who needs to plan a special night?

But as we spent our last days in Laos, in advance of moving on to Cambodia, the holiday crept into my inbox. I received a special invitation to a Valentine’s Dinner at our hotel in Siem Reap. I was sure they were catering to us as tourists and that it would be the only place I’d see any mention of the holiday while we were there.

I was wrong. As we walked down Pub Street, Siem Reap’s bar and restaurant hub, we came upon an explosion of hearts. At the bar we stopped for a drink, they offered my husband a rose to present to me.

Another rose was waiting on our bed with a glass cookie jar full of heart-shaped cookies. And yet another rose perched in the towel trunks of the elephants tied on our bed the next day. A few days later if we wanted we could have posed in front of frosted pink Valentine’s…