Category: Culture

Just like aspirin used to be the one-size-fits-all medicine for the United States so an intravenous injection is the cure-all in Cambodia.  If a person goes to a doctor or a clinic and doesn’t get an IV, he/she feels like he’s wasted his money.  Need it or not, you’re SUPPOSED to get an IV!  People will go to a pharmacy and get an IV and administer it to themselves at home.  Here a family returns from a doctor visit for a (not visible) infant the mother is holding and like good parents they make sure the baby gets his IV on the way home!

Here’s a truck loaded with about a gazillion straws.  It’s part of the culture here—probably because of an assumption that nothing you drink from is hygienic–that every drink is served with a straw.  You buy a Coke in a bottle, you get a straw.  You get an iced tea in a restaurant, you get a straw.  You order a glass of milk, a straw comes with it.  You buy a canned soft drink, a straw.  You buy a fresh coconut on the street, you get a straw.  This same truck loads up at the same shop 3, 4, 5 times a week.  They would put more on the truck but notice they are just now under the mass of wires above the load.

Today is the last of the three days of official celebration according to Chinese tradition–although there are NO official public holidays in Cambodia for the lunar new year.  Many families either relaxed at home today behind the closed shutters of their shops or continued visiting relatives and friends.  Click here to see these last new year photos.

 

 

Today was the second day of the new year, and again much of the action was indoors.  Driving along the streets, one saw more shuttered shops than people.   Click here to see them.

Today was the first day of the new year, a day for visiting parents and elder relatives so much of the action was indoors.  To show a more interesting side of the celebrations, here are more pictures from yesterday, New Year’s Eve.  Click here to see them.

 

Today the new year celebrations began with the evening reunion dinner but before that there was time for offerings for the spirits of the ancestors and to purchase a roasted pig for the family dinner.  Click here to see how it happened.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and the big reunion dinner to bring all the family together.  Today families are scurrying to accomplish last-minute preparations.  Click here to see what they are doing.

Most of the time most Cambodian men wear sandals rather than shoes.  When they do wear shoes, though, it’s not unusual to see them in long, pointy-toed styles that may have come from A Thousand and One Nights.