Author: Charles Dittmeier

This is a combination shop you wouldn’t see much in the US.  On the left is a small eatery, selling pre-cooked foods selected by the customer from large pots hopefully covered with lids to keep out the dust.  Muslim customers (this is near a Muslin neighborhood) can eat with no qualms because the sign assures all the food is halal.  On the right, in the contraption on wheels made from chicken wire and shelves, the proprietors are selling all sorts of metal hand tools and utensils–machetes, axes, shovels, hoes, scythes, etc.  To protect their merchandise and their customers, they are hanging a tarpaulin to block the sun and rain.  They are tieing it to the telephone lines, probably figuring it won’t bother anyone–and probably figuring that half of them are non-functioning anyway.

When I was a kid, the Tastee Bread company trucks—emblazoned with the slogan “Baked while you sleep”—rumbled around early-morning Louisville delivering bread to the grocery stores.   This woman’s bread is also probably baked while everyone is sleeping, but she doesn’t have any truck with a logo and has to be content with singing out “Num bung,” the Khmer word for bread, to alert her customers.

Different fruits can mark the change of seasons in Cambodia but not coconuts.  They’re available all year round and just about everywhere.  There are cheap, nutritious, and delicious so they are a favorite with much of the population.  Here are three coconut vendors along Street 63 in Phnom Penh.

From the vendors’ point of view, the downside of coconuts is that they are big, heavy, and bulky and you can’t stack them like you can cases of beer.  The white coconuts have had the green outer hull cut off, mainly for a better-looking product although cutting off the hull also helps the coconuts to chill faster when you throw them into the ubiquitous orange coolers.