Fish Food

I returned from a 5-day jaunt through Malaysia and Cambodia this morning, and with many a happy tale to tell of it. I saw thousand-year-old ruins and the second-tallest towers in the world. I squeezed into a compact pick-up truck with eighteen Cambodians and was guest at the family birthday dinner of a dozen Kuala Lumpurians. I attended mass on a giant raft, and walked through the cabins of a Portuguese warship. I did and saw and met so many wonderful things and places and people...and at the end of it, what I think of the most was getting a fish foot massage.

What, you may ask, is a fish foot massage? The easiest way to understand is to walk around Pub Street in Siem Reap, Cambodia for five minutes, during which time you're guaranteed to pass by at least three fish parlors. The concept is straightforward. Big fish tanks, filled with schools of sardine-sized fish, are brought out in front of the parlor. A board extend across the top of the tank, for customers to sit upon. As you approach the tank, the fish start to swirl and mass toward you. "They know, they know!" says the man taking your money.

You take off your shoes and hop onto the board. Then comes the second-hardest part: you lower your bare feet into the school of fishes. As you do, you can see their little red mouths and dumb eyes gaping at your heels and toes. And then, when your feet hit the water, they go to work.

I said that lowering your feet into the fish was the second-hardest part. That's because the first-hardest part is keeping them there. At first, there's the tickle, which is hard enough to endure. Then, once the initial shock is over, the whole concept of the thing begins to prey upon your mind. The fish, you see, are eating you. With each little bump from their lips, they take away a tiny piece of your outer skin layer. They call this "exfoliation." I call it a half-click too far past creepy.

I didn't last long, probably only a quarter of my twenty minutes. Even so, when I pulled out my feet, I could tell that they were suppler and shinier than they'd been, probably since birth. As I left, I saw that another man--a friend of the man taking the money, it seemed--had come and was leaning over the side of the tank. His hand was trolling listfullly through the water, while the fish nibbled at the morsels around his knuckles.