Even as individuals maintain their comfortable consumerist isolation, they can choose a form of constant …. bonding that encourages remarkable hostility, insults, abuse, defamation and verbal violence destructive of others, and this with a lack of restraint that could not exist in physical contact without tearing us all apart. Social aggression has found unparalleled room for expansion through computers and mobile devices.
[From Fratelli Tutti, #44, by Pope Francis]
Category: Culture
New Year’s Eve
Tuesday, 17 February 2026, is the first day of the Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year or Tet [Vietnam]) so today is New Year’s Eve. May the Year of the Horse be a good year for you!
Cambodia-Thailand Conflict
Bishop Olivier of Phnom Penh is a very active player in the life of the kingdom and always reaches out to the Buddhists to address issues, celebrate events, etc. In the current conflict between the kingdoms of Cambodia and Thailand, Bishop Olivier has gone to the front lines with a Buddhist delegation and has engaged with Buddhist leadership in praying for peace.
The joint prayer events take on a form not so familiar to Christian groups. Literally hundreds of Buddhist monks came together for this joint prayer service.
A Little Girl’s Dream
In the United States, many girls’ dream is to be a cheerleader for their school’s sports teams. In Cambodian culture, where there are no school sports teams, the girls want to be apsara dancers.
Every Sunday adult volunteers work with really young girls to get them started in the classical dancing.
The roof leaks…
Today I went to Russian Market to buy a few gifts for people I will see in Taiwan and Hong Kong and Macau later this week. The market is quite an experience as you might surmise from this photo.
Then it started raining–really raining–outside and water started coming across the floor from different directions.
The vendors don’t pay much attention to the rain coming through the ceiling except when it drips on their merchandise and then they have plastic sheets to cover the counters.
The rain certainly cuts down on the number of tourists, though, so all in all, it was probably not a good afternoon for the marketers.
Monk on the street
A Buddhist monk walking a Phnom Penh street.
What’s in a name…
One of the interesting parts of living in another country, another culture is seeing how English words are used in a different way and with different meanings. Notice that this building is a medical clinic and MATERNITY. In US English, maternity is the condition of being pregnant, being a mother. Here the word designates a specific type of medical facility, a building.
Right-to-Left???
Writing in Cambodia is distinctive in several ways. For one, just writing anything in an alphabet that has 77 letters can be rather daunting.
But written Khmer is written left to right, like English. So it’s a curiosity why so many businesses and establishments number the sections of their security fences from right to left. It’s not a one-off phenomenon. Most places with fences with numbering do that. (The fence sections are put up every evening to protect the building and then taken down and put away in the morning; but that’s a whole other story.)
Khmer New Year–Day 3
Most of the people leave the city for the rural provinces during the new year festival but before they go many groups and business set up a traditional display that showcases Cambodia’s rural roots and parts of the culture that still exist, like fish traps, straw hats, woven baskets, etc. They mark the holiday while all the people are gone!
Khmer New Year–Day 2
