Charles Dittmeier – Page 57 – Welcome to Cambodia, and…..

It’s a BIG machine!

In the last ten or fifteen years I have every year spent more time in B747s and B777s than I have in automobiles. (In Phnom Penh I ride a bicycle or tuk-tuk for long distances.) I have a good sense of the big wide-body aircraft but seeing the image of President Biden descending from Air Force One really impressed me large a 747 is! I

An interesting Saturday…

Yesterday turned out to be a very interesting Saturday. President Biden flew in on Air Force One in the morning for the ASEAN summit meeting held in Phnom Penh this weekend. He is Catholic and I had read that he tries to go to mass on Sundays wherever he is, so I was not too surprised when the US Embassy here asked me to have mass with him yesterday. The time for the mass changed three times during the week but finally we had a morning mass at the Raffles Hotel where the United States delegation was staying.

President Biden is a very warm and personable person, a good human being guided by gospel values. We had a group of ten people for mass, staff from the White House and the Phnom Penh U.S. Embassy. At the end of mass, noting that it was lunch time, President Biden invited me to eat with them!

This is The Beast, the vehicle used to transport President Biden on the ground. It rated its own separate enclosure on the grounds of the Raffles Hotel. I was hoping they would offer me a ride home in The Beast but I had to settle for the usual tuk-tuk.

The U.S. delegation took over the entire Raffles Hotel and made many adjustments. Here the main lobby and reception desk is blocked off by partitions erected to move people like me through security. Secret Service personnel were everywhere!

Quite an interesting day!

Bank Hours

Today I had to meet a St. Vincent de Paul Society client to talk about his needs and I suggested an easy-to-find site in a Phnom Penh mall. While waiting, I noticed that the bank hours for this branch extended to 8:00 PM in the evening! Is that something common in the US? It certainly didn’t happen when I was spending my time there!

Helmet at hand…???

“If I’m going to have an accident, I’ll just reach back and grab it!”

Water Festival 2022

Today is the first day of the annual three-day Water Festival. It is held in November, at the end of the rainy season, when the Tonle Sap River reverses its flow and starts to empty water out of the Tonle Sap Lake at Siem Reap. There are normally boat races in Phnom Penh with hundreds of boats and tens of thousands of paddlers.

This year, though, the boat races have been canceled because ASEAN is having its annual summit meeting in Phnom Penh and the government decided it would not be wise to try and organize high-level government delegations (President Biden is coming) and a million-plus Water Festival revelers at the same time. We still have the three days off but there are no boat races to watch.

Mission Sunday

This year Bishop Olivier invited the lay missioners working in Phnom Penh to attend mass with him on Mission Sunday. There are not nearly the numbers of lay missioners we had before.