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When you buy your shoes on the street like this, you choose by size, not by style. For any given style, there may be only two or three sizes offered–maybe only one, so you try on the different styles that fit and then pick the pair that you like best. These places do a lot of business.
Actually that headline’s not true–it’s not the sky that is the limit but the wires hanging low over Phnom Penh streets that puts a limit on the height of this load of snack foods like potato chips
Recently I posted a picture of a deep pothole near my house. Or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a sinkhole. It opened up in a hole several feet deep. Today I ran across another one. The local populace is really good about trying to mark such disasters-in-waiting but the question is why they keep appearing on roads that have relatively recently been paved? This is the third hole within a mile of my house. Does anyone in officialdom notice these? Do they actual do anything about them, as in requiring the contractor to come and repair it? Or telling the street department to do it? There’s no sign of such initiative.
It’s laundry day for the guard at our house in Phnom Penh. He’s lucky because he can use our washing machine although he still has to line dry his clothes because I have never seen a dryer in the kingdom. Washing clothes is a typical scene, here and around the world. Peculiar to Cambodia would be the spirit house for those ethereal beings displaced when our house was built and the helmet at the base of the spirit house, turned sunward to kill the lice.
Yesterday’s post showed one aspect of the Cambodian economy–working on the floor–and here is another. This is in front of Thai Huot supermarket, the second largest supermarket group in Cambodia and a woman is unloading from her SUV a carload of white bread. She and her family probably bake it in a small bakery in their home and then drive it around to the two or three Thai Huot outlets in Phnom Penh. It exemplifies the small scale operations that characterize Cambodia business.
This woman working in a curtain shop illustrates a cultural aspect of life in Cambodia: much of life here is lived on the floor. Poor rural families could not afford tables, chairs, etc.—and didn’t have houses that would support furniture (remember most of the houses were bamboo slat floors on frames up on stilts)—and so the people cooked, ate, slept, played, and worked on the floor. Those people moved to the city and continued the same life style so that it is common to see people sitting on the floor doing any number of different jobs.
Going across town to mass early one morning I caught this picture of a little boy playing on the back of a truck. He was looking at me as I took the picture, and down in the lower left corner you can see me (in the rearview mirror) looking at him. I was shooting the pictures from chest level so you can’t see the camera.
WANTED: CHICKENS (Dead or Alive)
We got ’em both….
This is a motorcycle loaded up right across the street from the Maryknoll office where I live. Probably most families run some kind of small business on the side, and every morning the man who owns this motorcycle loads it up with boxes of snack foods that he stores in his house and delivers them somewhere. It’s just part of the culture. As you can see there’s not much room for the driver to sit.
Overtaking this woman from behind, at first I thought it was a Muslim woman with a hijab since the head covering was under her helmet as a hijab would be. But then when I got beside her to take this picture, I saw that (I think) it is just a light veil or shawl that she is using to block the sun, protecting even her face, and it is thin enough that it would fit under the helmet. For many Cambodian women, keeping their skin lighter in color is just about as demanding a principle as following Islam for the true believers. Notice this woman makes sure that not even her hands are exposed to the sun.